Crap, James and Steve are tagging people, so here I go. . .
1) I know how to play the tuba.
2) I’m from North Dakota. I can show James around.
3) I’ve been to the North Pole. At it and under it.
4) No Access. OCP Directive.
5) I went to the University of North Dakota for the wind; and it’s where I realized that being a geographer would be easy. I aced my physical geography final wasted after I forgot I had an 8am Saturday final my freshman year.
Ok, just some bullets, but with a name like GeoMullah, you don’t want to give too much up.
Now I’m tagging Jeremy on the ArcGIS Server Team, Sean, Lord King Squirrel, Mapz, and Chris.
That’s right, I went through a AGS 9.2 overview seminar on Friday, and it friggin’ blew me away. Of course, I’m one of those lucky people who can implement AGS 9.2 Advanced Enterprise with all the bells and whistles. . . Come on, “smoke ‘em if you got ‘em!” Right?
What it means is instead of stringing together IMS, SDE, and old versions of Server, I can from my 9.2 desktop suite, manage my data effciently and effectively. I can also build custom applications and task different servers with different capabilities. So, I could have a few servers to manage my database(s), provide visualization services, geodata services, task services, globe services, web maps, analytical geoprocessing services, and even mobile services.
As you can read, I’ve drank the Kool-Aid.
Even though I saw a lot of cool things in action, I’m still cautious about the “what if I do it” factor. What if I implement something and it doesn’t work for me, but it worked for ESRI? Am I up a creek?
I’ll assume the probablities are low of something like that happening, but you never know.
I’m going to try it. I’ll let you know if the Kool-Aid was truth or fiction.
Check this out, and then guess which markups are mine.
Hint: Look for France, Iowa, and Milwaukee.
I was reviewing collaborative atlases tonight when, all of a sudden, the coolest slippy map called out to me:
“Poop here!”
It’s the “Crap, I gotta go!” map on Flagr.
Best quote is from the Borders Bookstore near Union Square in San Francisco:
“Some junky OD’d in one of the stalls during my employment there and I made a point of only using the employee restrooms.”
So, I’ve been trying to work on some ESRI Virtual Campus courses this weekend. Trying in terms of trying to get a friggin’ page to load. My problem is that when I advance to the next page I get an error saying that ESRI’s servers are unable to recover from an error.
Geez?
Anyway, I’m not angry yet. These things happen, but I sent an email to ESRI’s training people to give them a heads up. Plus, I said that I’m not seriously complaining yet. I’m just growing slightly frustrated.
James recently posted something that got me thinking: “Hmm? ArcReader? Who uses it?”
I sure as heck don’t. My company doesn’t. I’m interested how it really gets used by a large or small organization.
It’s not like ArcReader hasn’t been around for, oh say, about six years now. So, why didn’t it catch on like Google Earth has to view geographic data? I mean, no one’s clammoring to share .pmf’s, right?
So, what gives? And why is ESRI continuing down this path? Wouldn’t it be easier for ESRI to give into Adobe and TerraGo to just publish GeoPDF’s from ArcMap? Intergraph and Bentley do this now with their platforms. (That wasn’t a paid advertisement.)
Of course, I highly recommend that providing web services is much better than becoming a file distributor.
