I guess I’ll sign off till later and start enjoying the long week-end… a little cook-out, fire up the grill, put some cold New Belgium ales on ice and maybe a little apple pie (Rachel has a great recipe ;0) Have a fun and safe week-end all – you guys up in Victoria have a blast this Swiftsure week-end.. always my favorite week-end of the year up north as well! Ok… I confess… I’m a big HGTV fan (30 minute meals etc… hey, you gotta eat!)
Archives for May 25, 2007
Happy Memorial Day Week-end y’all
I guess I’ll sign off till later and start enjoying the long week-end… a little cook-out, fire up the grill, put some cold New Belgium ales on ice and maybe a little apple pie (Rachel has a great recipe ;0) Have a fun and safe week-end all – you guys up in Victoria have a blast this Swiftsure week-end.. always my favorite week-end of the year up north as well! Ok… I confess… I’m a big HGTV fan (30 minute meals etc… hey, you gotta eat!)
Another immigration employment resource useful for tech companies and employees
Here’s a tip for a useful resource for anyone involved in hiring or with a corporate HR department, particularly those that hire foreign nationals and in particular, sponsor applicants for TN or H1B visas – See the grasmick newsgroup http://groups.yahoo.com/group/jgrasmick/, the Grasmick website http://www.grasmick.com and be sure to get his monthly newsletter, its very informative and full of useful tips and the latest news. His handbook is great (I bought it) although if you contact Joe directly all he wants to know is how much $$ you make (weird!)
Landsat Data Available Through USGS Website – June 4
Heads-up… USGS Pilot Project Makes High-Quality Landsat Data Available Through Web – As of June 4, 2007, the USGS will be releasing selected Landsat 7 image data of the United States through the Web (glovis.usgs.gov or earthexplorer.usgs.gov). These data are of high quality with limited cloud cover.
GIS 2.0 remember the good old days when a map had a scale bar and a north arrow
An email from a GISuser.com reader prompted me to ponder this one and “toss it out there” for thought. From the reader… With all the hoopla over Google Maps, and other online maps, I am wondering if the definition of what a map is has changed? Should the online “maps” be called maps or should they really be called “graphics”?
In my definition of maps, a map has a title, legend, scalebar, and of course the mapped area. A graphic does not need to have the title, legend, and scale bar. It’s just a graphic of an area… Indeed some valid thoughts, particularly when you look at the news, headlines, articles, and discussion taking place via online discussion boards, web forums, geoblogs, and even in GIS newsletters. It makes me wonder.. what ever happened to the topics of discussion from “back in the day” like map projections, datums, principles of cartography, symbology, data formats and translation … remember the pen plotter, the digitizer, the Unix workstation. Remember the software platforms of the past that we heard about on a daily basis.. GRASS, PCI, PAMAP, Genamap, ArcView, heck, even AutoCAD with the ever popular command line which still draws applause when mentioned at AU!
In the world of GIS 2.0 (ala Web 2.0) are we consumed with topics like mashups, flash, RSS, KML, GML, Open GIS (what exactly is “open”). I can’t recall the last time I attended a conference and sat in on a high-level session that didn’t mention Google Earth, Google Maps, or mashups… man I feel old… remember the 90s! What a difference a decade makes. How do you feel about GIS 2.0… are you hyped? It’s interesting when you look at the lineup at events like Where 2.0. The event’s main focus is “location” – I recall last year headliners and presenters were from companies like Platial, Second Life, and even a company that tracks gum spots of all things – social networking was the buzz. It’s interesting to see that after just one year the headlining names include ESRI, Autodesk, Tele Atlas, Leica Geosystems, Autodesk, Garmin, Digital Globe as well as “the new kids on the block” Mapquest, Yahoo!, Microsoft, and Google.
Maybe someone will come out with an innovative mashup that will incorporate a north arrow and a scale bar… maybe even reference a map projection or datum… how cool would that be?
Google + Feedburner = $100,000,000
You may have already seen this, maybe not.. Google is scooping up yet another content provider and complementary resource to bolster its advertising revenues.. this time its feedburner. Recall Feedburner is a cool app that creates an RSS feed for content publishers. It’s quite a handy app really, enabling publishers to get more eyes on their feeds. I find it really handy as a means of establishing a permanent home for my RSS feed. An example.. over at GISuser our CMS creates an RSS feed (see http://www.gisuser.com/index2.php?option=com_rss&no_html=1) but what happens if we jump to a new CMS, move domains or ??? if we move our feed then all the efforts we put into promoting it and getting it indexed etc.. are for not. Using feedburner we create a permanent home for our feed at http://feeds.feedburner.com/GisUsercom it actually uses our source to build the feedburn. Of note, according to speculation the deal is worth a whopping $100 mill! kaching… betcha wished you would thought of that one! See http://www.feedburner.com/
Has the date of the ESRI UC affected your plans?
I see that James can’t atten this year’s ESRI UC because he has too much going on this June. It made me wonder if many others have this same issue – recall the annual ESRI UC is typically in July or even August.