The Return of the "Geographer"

splitting off

Luke — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 02:27:07 +0000

So, I’ve been saying that I’m going to post more often, and I keep meaning too. But I’m splitting fatguyclimbs off from the Geography/GIS. Those(that) topic will be covered by Burning River. I expect I’m going to try and keep the landscape geography and photography here.

Rock and Roll

from the firehose

Luke — Wed, 04 May 2011 11:48:01 +0000

Just a quick update. I’m going to try and get to one a week as soon as we finish futbol up, but for now just a word that we’re working on some really interesting stuff behind the scenes (some of which I doubt I should/can discuss in a public forum — that remains to be seen) but we’re also still planning some hopefully really cool stuff that I can fully document.

But a question to think about. Historically, geographers had to learn foreign languages, study distant reaches and sandy beaches to gain true credibility in the field. Is the internet distant enough, and are the languages used to drive the web foreign enough?

Many Happy Returns

Luke — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 23:29:33 +0000

Way back when, maybe post one or it might have been post two, I relayed the advice that I should have been touching this blog every day or so, like an actual daily log or a journal. Obviously that hasn’t panned out, part of me is somewhat upset about that, part of me is really working to minimize my web presence. So why a random post? It’s a new year, so why not?

We started climbing, well, bouldering, which IS climbing, but that’s a digression. Getting into yet another gym, and finally finding a coffee house has stirred up the “cultural geographer” in me again. This will be nice, I may get to roll everything back into one big happy academic career. For the moment though, think of it as the spatial distribution and deviation of a unified social subgroup across an arbitrary geographic extent… I like trying to find big academic ways to describe the question “why is the climbing community in Cincinnati SO different from the climbing community in Akron? How do other socio -cultural influences impact the differences seen in the communities?”

But the side step really comes back to the fact that I’m finally pulling down again, and for as minimal of a time as I’ve been back I feel really good. I’m not in the greatest of shape, and it’s leading to a few strains in the fingertips, but that could also be another of those differences between communities; we are climbing on much steeper stuff here than we did back home in Akron.

and the adventure continues…

oh. Happy New Year.

update?

Luke — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 22:56:03 +0000

I’m still here sort of… or rather I’m on and off of here. So I thought I’d just pop in give a quick update of sorts. We called a job hunt to a close and started our third career, as it were (Environmental Health Professional, Academic, and now GIS Professional), so that meant a new city and actually working private sector as a full employee (I’d done contract work before). That also meant closing up Burning River Geospatial for the time being…

… it’s been an intimidating, humbling, and exciting couple of months full of a lot of changes. At some point when I start to feel like I’m getting my legs back under me I’ll try and pull together a full and complete update for everyone, but until then, well, you can swing from vine to vine as well as I can…

Photog

Luke — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 22:08:06 +0000

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

Luke — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 17:52:10 +0000

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

Luke — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 20:07:03 +0000

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

Luke — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 15:44:11 +0000

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.

Water

Luke — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 21:26:42 +0000

I have lived in a region that adheres to what is commonly referred to as Eastern Water Law my entire life. Recently, I have lived within the watershed of the Great Lakes. I have traveled to regions in drought, and spent time in some of the most arid regions of North America. These days I am facing some fairly challenging decisions and as I face these I keep coming back to water.

I am realizing that the resource that we at a level take for granted is something that I want to keep close. We’ll see how the decisions pan out in the coming days and/ or weeks…

update

Luke — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 13:36:37 +0000

I wish I could go on and on here, but I can’t and won’t. About the only thing I can say I’ve managed to get accomplished since I left the NE part of Ohio is raise my average pace on my bike by 2 mph. It’s hard to get an uninterupted look at my computer right now, even to update here. Sory, I’ll get more put together after I spend some time getting something done today.