For a long time now, I have tried to take a holistic approach to my day. I long ago seized upon the idea that time is the primary resource to manage and that all others, including money, are secondary. Show me a person who says “Time is money” and I will show you someone who…
Vignettes From a Month
16 hours in Denver and a drive-by catch-up with some of the geo-people I miss so much. Reminding myself that my anger might make me feel better in the short term, but it’s not worth the wreckage I’d leave in my wake. Taking down a poster for an old sales campaign at HQ from the…
A Programming Life
To say that programming saved my life would be overly dramatic. Given that I started programming at an age where most of us are prone to drama based on the ebbs and flows of hormones, a dramatic reading of my first forays into programming would be forgivable. But, while programming didn’t save my life, it…
In Praise of Process
“Ops” is all the rage these days – DevOps, RevOps, FinOps, PeopleOps. I’m surprised I haven’t seen a mention of “GeoOps” yet, given the propensity of our corner of the world to attach the “geo” prefix to what ever the current hotness may be. “Ops” is, of course, short for “operations” and “operations” is a…
SaaS, IPaaS, and Interoperability
I started this blog back in 2006 during a time when I wasn’t doing much geospatial work at all. I was working on building a human resources system for a federal government customer who was falling under the then-new and now-defunct National Security Personnel System. Because it was new and sufficiently different from the GS…
On Meetings
Since everyone works from home now, I hear a lot of the same complaint about the proliferation of online meetings. A lot of people I know seem to have their calendars overwhelmed by one kind of meeting or another. This situation is invariably described as preventing them from getting work done. Let’s be clear about…
Geography, Geospatial, and GIS
I was participating in a Clubhouse discussion today when someone asked the about the distinction between GIS and geospatial. Since Clubhouse is audio-only, I am paraphrasing by contribution to that particular discussion here. I think the boundaries and definitions of these concepts are pretty blurry and I am reticent to create hard distinctions between them….
So Long, 2021
The year 2021 ends tomorrow. Like many, I started the year with great hope as vaccines were around the corner. I never expected them to be a miracle cure that would make the pandemic go poof, but I hoped that people would get them in quantities that would put it in check. To say I…
Reconsidering the Spreadsheet
I’m a CIO. That means a typical day can involve a range of activities: responding to data calls for security audits, reviewing SOC2 reports of prospective platform vendors, managing subscriptions of existing vendors, handling GDPR requests, ensuring data from corporate systems is meaningful and relevant for our internal stakeholders, attending meetings of various sorts. Somewhere…
Return on Non-Investment
Yesterday evening, I had the pleasure of participating in a panel discussion on Clubhouse, hosted by Todd Barr and Jordan Cullen, and including Will Cadell of SparkGeo. Clubhouse seems to be a really convenient venue for setting up such a forum with low barriers to entry, so that was enjoyable. The topic of the discussion…