Photog

I have been “hunting” far longer now then I had anticpated or would have imagined, let alone way longer than I want to be after it.  Had we been in a survival situation I probably would have suffered the “Into the Wild” fate ( I’m listening to Eddie Vedder’s Soundtrack for the film).  Since I’m aware of my current mental state I’m going to try and kick start some sense of accomplishment (repairing my parents yard isn’t quite getting it done for me — it looks a great deal better than it had, but all the same) by stretching some of my photography skills.

I recently picked up a copy of Joe McNally’s “The Hot Shoe Diaries”, and even though I’ve been avowed to only work with natural light — something that he even mentions in the introduction of his book — I’m going to start to try and work with a flash.  So this is a warning, soon there will be pictures on this blog again after a far too long hiatus.

The other thing that I picked up out of the book were links to a number of blogs by some really talented pros.  One of those posting reminded me of something that we often fail to do with our geospatial data, namely include the metadata.  So I’ll be working on that as well, even for the images that are already up on this site.

Which brings me back to the hunting.  What has been far different about this go round when compared to all the others, and I’m really going to consider a big victory, is that I’ve been reading just about everything I can get my hands on lately.  Guess that means that I’m going to be rereading the FGDC standards… bedtime reading I guess.

openSource

As a joke we once said that: “the student has become the master”.  In recent history I have had amazing mentors who have helped steer what has almost always been my vision to the point where we are nearing reality.  My most recent mentor is a HUGE proponent of Open Source technology, of which I have never been super fond of, mostly because I am not developer enough yet to leverage the full capabilities of the technology.  However, the reality exists that the world I model is by and large owned by a single proprietary source company and we only get extend their product.  That still offers a number of exciting opportunities, especially with the way that we communicate geospatial information.

I’ve taken way too long to write this entry (going on a week or a little over), and my intent here wasn’t to discuss my developing knowledge of the open source options for geospatial information technologies, there are better individuals to carry that message; my intent is to give a quick thank you to the people that have helped get me to this point.  I can’t discuss this without mentioning how I’d still be contemplating soils research or applicationns of satellite imagery to blah blah blah, if it weren’t for the help of the Research Manager at Akron.  I’m grateful that with his guidance I was able to congeal the randnomness of mycareer and skill sets into a single message/ goal.

Thanks to all of you!

ThatDogllHunt

Job hunting sucks.  News flash for everyone I’m sure.  I’ve been in this boat before, a number of times, so some days I know how difficult it can be and how hard on the brain it can be; other days I forget.  To that end I have real empathy for anyone in this situation right now, without getting to political, I can’t quite get my head around the decision making process of our current leadership.  That being said, I started the day out in one of those down points; just had what I was hoping was yet another solid lead crash through the floor, without any other trails to follow. Which gets me to the metaphor.

I have a fairly wide range of skills to draw upon, I”m currently laying out the foundation for my own consulting firm, I’ve practiced environmental health for years, and I am out in front of my field enough that staying in the academic world is a very serious potential path for me.  Which puts me in a better situation than a lot of my former colleagues who are in our boat, but we’re all still hunting.  Best we can do is to do everything we can do to make sure that the weapons/tools we have at our disposal to work this out are as sharp and well practiced as they possibly can be.    We’re not deer hunting in Ohio after all.

I haven’t posted in a while so I wanted to get a quick note in, and just to show that we really still are serious about holding on to Rich Internet application development I’ll pass along that although the code is still a little sloppy I’ve managed to put together a new Item Renderer for my web mapping applications.  I’m hoping that I can g et it cleaned up and published very soon, because I have a client site that can use some of the technology; which is an added bonus because I’m managing to sidestep the ESRI framework for this.  Yes we’re still working on making this a true platform independent application.

researchInterests

As I drudge through what was supposed to be a quick and painless job hunt, which is turning into anything but, I keep reminding myself that I need to be focused.  We need to be focused on  our goals for one, and I’m convinced that we need to be foucsed on our actual interests.  Years in crappy work environments taught me that we can be capable of doing a great variety of things, especially with degrees in fields as broad as Environmental Science and Geographic Information Science.  But to truly feel rewarded we actually need to be passionate about what we’re doing, need to feel like we have some ownership or control of our deliverable.

That’s what I’ve been trying to pin down into a 500 word or so essay here with this blog.  Some days I feel like I’m accomplishing it better than others.   Today I’m going to try and pull together the two main areas, not into full 500 word essays, but into quick exerpt paragraphs; into the thesis statements for the essays that would follow.  So here goes.

Geographic information Systems (Sciences) serve as a mechanism to communicate information to decision makers, researchers, interested parties, and the general public in a fast, acurate, and easily communciated manner.  However, the challenge is drawing a complete and current picture of the situation when much of the information has historically or practically been housed in different environments or formats.  The goal of my work in this area is to streamline the development of what has become known as ‘GIS -centric’ systems that allow for information about the spatial phenomenon of interest to be stored in navtive structures or environemts developed specifically for the particular entity while still allowing for the rapid decimination of the spatial nature of the data.   To date this has entailed the detailed study and devlopment of spatial database structure within the ESRI ArcSDE environment, and most recently in the communication of that data through the use of ArcGIS Server and Rich Internet Applciations.

The second major research interest that I have been developing is within Landscape Geography.  I began study in this area with the study of Remote Sensing technologies and Land Cover /Land Use change.  I then expanded to include the value systems associated with those land uses.  I began this with a small study of how home is classified in the context of landscape, and presented early data at the Landscape, Space, and Place conference in Bloomington Indiana in March 2009.