Oh hi there!

Man, it's been awhile.

So... yeah... about blogging. Pretty much dead here. Between the great job I have at the Airport, and the better little family I have at home, this little activity has fallen off the rails.

But if you are reading this, thank you. I've never been a good writer, more of a reader. I think I was hoping I'd used this to mull over my geo-related thoughts, but finding the time, if it ever was a priority, hasn't really happened.

What I have found that The Spatial Community on Slack is a fantastic resource, filled with really good people from all sorts of geo companies, groups, positions. As someone juggling an enterprise GIS system, it's a fantastic resource. Maybe better than Twitter now - especially now that the Orange Douchebag has become President and my Twitter stream is filled with rage & despair on the state of affairs south of the border.

Anywhoooo, if you are into anything GIS and geo-related, as a professional, go join the Slack group. You won't regret it.

That and reading up on the latest GeoHipster interviews.

LINK: After the Gold Rush

After the Gold Rush



Nice post from one of my favorite financial bloggers on why he keeps at it.

ESRI UC 2015 Thoughts Part 1

Lots to share, and generally I'll post a bit here about what I took in, if only to make sense of everything I saw and did in San Diego.

In the meantime, you might enjoy this.... ESRI's flickr album of the UC.



And what's a post without a couple of gifs? ;)

How I felt when I got on the plane to San Diego early Sunday.

And when I got back Friday night.

When I read the BC Gov't is joining GitHub...

More info here. (Part of the BCDevExchange Program)

In the spirit of open source projects and development, perhaps a good project might be for a new replacement to the Ministry of Education's BCeSIS program; let's open source the $1.5 million investment the Saanich School District made into the OpenStudent program!

Farewell Templeton

It was nice to have an actual office for once. Back to the cubicles in a brand new building. 

Waiting for ArcMap to display my map

Damn highway dataset of BC was indexed too... <sigh>

Best GIS Career Advice I've Read So Far...

From Thierry Gregorius, via GeoHipster: 

Over the years there has been much discussion and debate about what career a GIS professional should aspire to, or what a GIS career even is. In my opinion you need to have at least one skill that nobody else has. I once called this the “geomatics striptease” — what expertise and value is there exclusively to us geospatial folks? I came to the conclusion that, if I had to strip off my non-exclusive layers, my naked self would be a geodesist and cartographer. No other field does these things, or at least not as well.

There may be a few other exclusive skills in GIS or geomatics, but many so-called geospatial expertise areas also reside in other professions. They’re not unique and this can be a danger area for career development — unless of course you want to become a multi-disciplinary generalist. In which case, sure thing, go ahead and become that ‘architect’ who orchestrates input from different fields. But whatever you do, it needs to be a conscious decision, and it requires focus. If you dilute yourself too much as a professional you’ll become the Swiss army knife that people only use when there’s nothing better at hand.

So to stay relevant, build a unique skill, stay focused, and never grow up. If you do those things, nobody can eat your lunch. 

(bolded emphasis mine)

So true. Find some focus, & make yourself indispensible. Helped my own GIS career over the years.

Also good, along this vein of thinking, Cal Newport's "So Good They Can't Ignore You".

Friday Frustrations.....!

God damn it.

Friday pet peeves.

1. People who don't text back within a resonable amount of time, given the weekend is coming fast.
2. Slow networks at works. Slow editing. Not having a ArcInfo license until January 2015.
3. FME connections to SDE databases that used to work before but now don't. Argh.
4. I haven't played ice hockey in weeks.



As you were.

Friday Mediations

Going to try and write down the best links I can find on a regular basis. Kudos to TM's Recently posts ... And special kudos to this: How to be Polite. Good read.

MAPPING & GIS

Geohipster: Interview with Jonah Atkins

Kottke: The Precision of Lat/long Coordinates. Short answer: the sixth decimal place is worth up to 0.11 m

Via Gordon Price (@pricetags) & VanCityBuzz, a Vancouver link: The beautiful empty homes of Vancouver

When a colleague stops by my cubicle to ask how our internal Web GIS works... (ht: DBA Reactions)


(I'm so new to the job, I barely know the app myself....!)

FUN:

Run, Walter, Run!

WANT:

13 Shoes.
Not all of these, maybe the boots at the end of the list, a couple pairs of brogues, and a set of white Vans for casual Fridays.

Where to Begin...

If you are into SQL server, I highly recommend having a gander at Brent Ozar's DBA training. While most of this is out of my purview, some of the philosophies seem pretty relevant to GIS, expecially if you are maintaining your own system.

As I get entrenched into maintaining YVR's own internal GIS system, which is in it's infancy, this graphic pretty much dictates how I'm going to manage this system.



In between making maps and updating our data, I really have to start from the bottom up (data, users, backups) before diving into anything new like application revamps or Javascript training to figure out those new fangled ESRI API's.

So to my fellow GIS'ers, if you've ever managed your own enterprise system, where do you start? Any tips or tricks I should try? Things you wished you had known back in the day?

Cheers!

(Updated for grammatical reasons...)