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.

The Bad Geographer Rides again

I am sitting in the lab on a “snow day” banging my head against a wall trying to understand the differences between Visual Basic 6 and Visual Basic.NET.

This isn’t interesting to anyone, from one side I’m just some NooBcomelatelyCodeHacker and from the other I’m just a pretentious, overachieving GIS analyst/developer.  What may be interesting is that since I’m banging my head against the wall I’ve had some time to contemplate the week so far:

The entertaining event of the week, and the reason for the “rides again” is that I was asked to cover a friends class on Monday… Now think of me as a college professor… you can’t.  But, I was asked to cover a lecture all the same, and on no more of a classic geography topic as Lattitude and Longitude/ as well as map projections.  The bad geographer has never really put a whole lot of stock in worrying about these things as long as I can get my analysis output to report correctly — I don’t drop bombs on unsuspecting terrorists in farflung mountains, so positional accuracy isn’t one of my chief concerns — the things I work on; heavy metal toxicity, groundwater contamination, etc. don’t really exist in very acute spatial instances.  But all the same, I gave the lecture, and when you actually boil it down to non-major undergrads, I may actually have given them what they need — but who knows.

To me this is interesting in a larger context as well, I have spent much of my time trying to NOT become some academic.  I may be loosing this battle in order to win the larger war.  I volunteered to speak at a conference later this semester on my landscape discussions from last semester (you can find how I defined the concept/ spatial scale of landscape here) to which I have to slightly retool a couple of papers, and write the abstract to submit yet this week so writing this is helping me organize my thoughts.  I was also volunteered to give a poster presentation on the Remote Sensing of Lake Ice on Lake Erie — to which I won’t link you to anything (it’s that boring).  So now, with less than 12 weeks until I am released back into the wild, I’m being coopted by the Ivory Tower types…  God help me (we’ll talk about the possibility of continuing on to completely become one of those Ivory Tower Types at a later date).