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.

theDawning

Just another quick update, considering that these days I’m just trying to expand my programming experience.  I’ve been looking at the Flex 3 framework and more specifically two pieces of it; the InfoWindowRenderer, styling/CSS functionality.

We’re looking at the infowindowrenderer, which is actually part of the ArcGIS API, because the conceptual design that I developed for the University called for when a user queries the map for a building a ‘popup’ window was supposed to show.  What we ideally want(ed) is a panel to fade in on the screen that calls links to all the department sites within the building, an image of the building, and a basic floor plan — this is for the general public — for the internal user we wanted the ability to access any and all utility and project information, as well as the asset management and work orders for the building.  However, as of now, what we have is a bubble window, which is fine when we pass a small amount of information in a small bubble, but it isn’t exactly the best fit when you start to serve out other web applications.  So it looks like I’m going to be building my own, wholly custom infowindow here in the near future.

As we’ve been developing, we have been utilizing the standard Halo theme that is included in the Flex Framework, and although I personally find it aesthetically pleasing, I think that it would be advantageous if I could demonstrate some ability to alter that for other applications/environments.

So that’s the update.  These are a couple of the things that I’ve been working on during my first week as an unemployed GIS Analyst/Developer/Programmer.  They’re really exciting, honestly they are, and they’ve been keeping me busy while I hunt for an actual position and do the interview circut.