A geospatial career journey
I am currently reading the book “Fierce Conversations” by Susan Scott. I am on hiatus from teaching my leadership course this year, so I am taking the opportunity to refresh my content and my perspectives. The basis of the book is fairly simple: Our work, our relationships, and our lives succeed or fail one conversation … Continue reading Open – Beyond Technology
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who … Continue reading Ron Lake – The Man In the Arena
It seems that I tend to revisit the state of desktop GIS every so often. With the continued advancement of “web GIS,” as well as the increased power of mobile platforms, proliferation of spatial analysis techniques into non-traditional environments, the ubiquity of spatial databases, and a host of other factors, it’s tempting to speculate on … Continue reading Desktop GIS – The Evergreen Topic
The Fall meeting of the Southern Maryland GIS User Group happened on 5 October 2016. I’ve been involved with the organizing committee for two years, now. It’s been a learning experience trying to build a consistent community in a rural area. In addition to my colleagues of the organizing committee, I’ve met a lot of … Continue reading Quick Takes From the Southern Maryland GIS User Group
The 10-year anniversary of this blog is rapidly approaching and it is not lost on me that it has been laying rather fallow of late. I know others with long-running geospatial blogs have experienced similar situations at around the decade mark, and that only seems natural. If you are living your life well, the motivations … Continue reading Directions
Recently, I had the occasion to attempt to generate an OGC GeoPackage from QGIS and publish it using GeoServer. The use case was fairly straightforward. I had been given data in GML format and needed to publish it. For many valid reasons (such as lack of spatial indexing), GeoServer does not natively support publishing GML … Continue reading Publishing GeoPackage to GeoServer Using QGIS
Back in the dark old days of ArcSDE, when it first started to support PostgreSQL/PostGIS as a back-end data store, I did a series of posts about how to work with it. Of course, working with PostGIS in ArcGIS was a theme of the early days of this blog, through my association with zigGIS. Although it’s … Continue reading Revisiting Two Old Friends: ArcGIS and PostGIS
Among the many things I did at the Esri Federal GIS Conference was that I attended the Homeland Infrastructure Foundation-Level Data (HIFLD) community meeting. HIFLD is now an FGDC Subcommittee, being led my Mr. David Alexander, head of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Geospatial Management Office (GMO). Now that the alphabet soup is out … Continue reading HIFLD Open
TL;DR: This post is long and there is no summary. When you reach a certain stage in your career, you start fielding more and more inquiries from those younger than you about how you got started in your field. In my case, the field is GIS. The short answer, and not a particularly uncommon one, … Continue reading My Path to GIS
With my first post of 2016, I’d like to wish you a happy new year. After a bit of a shutdown for the holidays, I am back at work on some project activities that I had been working in the last quarter of 2015. Specifically, one of our long-standing federal customers has been directed by … Continue reading Migrations