FANTOM PLANET

Open Source is like Voltron.  Bad ass.

T’was a place for IRC-blocked cubicle gnomes.

I forgot how awesome IRC is. I guess the lack of it in the office has made me forget about it.   Oh, well?  See you in the Frenode #planetgeospatial channel.

Problem with the Universe is you can only do so much at once.  The Birds of a Feather sessions at Where 2.0 this year are the perfect example.

Sean did hint in a blog post that there may be beer at his.  Giving his session a greater weight.  Man, you got to love GeoIQ just for that purpose. 

I was recently faced with a serious dilemma the other day: Choose between a vendor yacht cruise or the Geoblogger Meetup.  (Tuesday 19 June, 8pm, Mr. Tiki)

This. . . was. . . a. . . hard. . . one. . . 

As much as I like going to sea and all, and hammin’ it up with business partners, facetime with geobloggers at the UC is much more important.   I like everyone and it’s hard to turn down free booze from a vendor, but the conversation with you guys is much more lively

It’s too bad the Chuck Norris of geoblogging isn’t going to be there.

By the way. I made a map.  Includes Mr. Tiki, the convention center, and the course of the Yacht Cruise with video.

Just kidding.

I was talking to James in the PlanetGS Meebo Room–now a widget on PlanetGS–about his “likability”issue. James says he gets some serious hate mail and back channel rumors. Not as much as Google Earth, but a fair share.

Now, c’mon people. Who could possibly hate James?

The oddities of branding include this geographic stickler: There are no San Francisco Oven restaurants in San Francisco, let alone California.

I created a Meebo Room for Planet Geospatial readers and bloggers.

Come on in. The water is fine.

It isn’t IRC, but the joint viewing of vids, audio, and webpages could be useful for our peeps.  Plus, you can embed the room into your blog—which James could do, but I’m not going to hold him to it.

Since I live in DC, I’m going to roll into the USGIF Tech Days event tomorrow. It looks like there are some interesting presentations on deck from the U.S. Geospatial Intelligence Community. Just reading through them, the one that I thought was the most interesting—in terms of describing the presentation—was the Geo-Locational Trends and Technologies: Keeping up through Open Sources from the Open Source Center.

The description starts off with, “We can find you anywhere.”

After thinking about what to get my wife for Mother’s Day, the SQL Server 2008 spatial capability announcement really got me thinking this afternoon. And it comes down to a blog post a few weeks ago from Tim O’Reilly who posted, “What We Really Sell Is Control.”

Tim noted in two separate meetings, two CEOs told him control is what they sell. I guess Microsoft can say the same thing when it comes to the Microsoft Photogrammetery (MP) monster that is sticking its head out of the water. They have planes, satellites, vans, servers you hire/buy—and you can control it all from Xbox Live. Almost the whole dang package is built for the Government or Enterprise. Throw in SharePoint, and you have an IT department that’s very capable—if the configuration management mafia allows it.

Plus, I bet you can make some seriously better PowerPoint presentations with it too!

Interesting announcements, reporting, and commentary this past week about Microsoft building spatial capabilities natively into SQL Server 2008.

Ok—great! Since my office uses SQL Server in certain instances, this is a good thing. But, my office also owns Oracle and IBM database servers. We all know they have gone “spatial” too.

So, what happens to our world when all of your databases “go spatial”?

I have this sneaking sensation—at least in my hole in the wall—that it’s going to be like the typical Microsoft Office user. Type, change font, save, and that’s it.