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Those who know me, know that I don’t talk geography on this blog. I talk swag.

As in ESRI conference swag.

I must say, the haul from the DevSummit and Business Partner Conference was pretty good. Two man purses, a water bottle, some notebooks, some pens, and some pocket litter. Yet, what has caught my attention the most, and the something I can’t seem to put down, is the the ESRI Magic Eight-ball Knock-off & Stress Squishy-thingy.

Yeah… You know what I’m talking about…

It’s what ESRI tech support uses to answer questions over the phone:

• Caller: “I can’t seem to export to PDF. Is there something wrong with my install?”
• ESRI Magic Eight-ball Knock-off & Stress Squishy-thingy: “Very likely.”
• Caller: “What could it be?”
• ESRI Magic Eight-ball Knock-off & Stress Squishy-thingy: “Focus and ask again.”
• Caller: “What? Well, I think I need to install a service pack?”
• ESRI Magic Eight-ball Knock-off & Stress Squishy-thingy: “So it shall be.”
• Caller: “Ok, I’ll do that and call you back.”
• ESRI Magic Eight-ball Knock-off & Stress Squishy-thingy: “Consult me later.”

By the way, I was using the ESRI Magic Eight-ball Knock-off & Stress Squishy-thingy’s REST API to call up all those replies as I was writing the above.

So, see. If ESRI can dish out swag like this, you better watch out FOSS4G and Where 2.0, because your swag is toast. ESRI Magic Eight-ball Knock-off & Stress Squishy-thingy says, “Very likely.” If they give out 14,000 of these things at the UC AND release ArcGIS Everything 9.3 by the Users Conference, well then, kiss cancer and climate change goodbye! Because with the ESRI Magic Eight-ball Knock-off & Stress Squishy-thingy and ArcGIS 9.3 working together to form the ultimate Spatial Decision Support System, what everyone is doing or working on will be irrelevant—which the ESRI Magic Eight-ball Knock-off & Stress Squishy-thingy says “there’s no doubt about it.”

Now for the tough questions:

• Will I graduate from the ESRI Institute of Technology? Indications say “yes.”
• Without getting shot? Chances aren’t good.
• Will James Fee ever go to any Where 2.0 conference? The stars say no.
• Should Dave Bouwman have won the ESRI Code Challenge hands-down? Very likely.
• Is Dave now drowning his sorrows in a few thousand dollars worth of Fat Tire? No doubt about it.
• Is the estimated worth of ESRI about the same as the number of people in the world? Yes.
• Will Jack ever sell? No.
• Am I an ArcTard? No doubt about it.
• Will there be an international version of the ESRI Magic Eight-ball Knock-off & Stress Squishy-thingy? ¡La verdad!

So, in conclusion, the ESRI Magic Eight-ball Knock-off & Stress Squishy-thingy is one of the better pieces of swag on the conference circuit this year—because it speaks the truth!

If you don’t already have one, then it sucks to be you—which the ESRI Magic Eight-ball Knock-off & Stress Squishy-thingy says there’s “no doubt about it.“

(Is this the dumbest blog posts ever? So it shall be.)

So, I went back. Back to the Kool-Aid stand that is the ESRI DevSummit. I got smarter, I got excited, I got even more hooked on the Kool-Aid.

First I’d like to note that I’m a geographer, not really a programmer, but… I learned a lot at the DevSummit and I got a lot of crazy ideas for my post-Redlands life. I did realize that to understand the mechanism that is ESRI GIS you can be a dope like me, but to develop the mechanism it’s hard work. I guess any development is really. Putting up with the client/user’s griping and complaining, their clueless ideas and so on. I commend a lot of developers for putting up with that crap, and most other geographers should too.

So, yes, my first DevSummit opened up a new world to me. One that f’in nuts! Still, I like building things, designing things, seeing the happy smiles of users. So, I think I’ll not only keep up with the tech and the processes that are new in buttonology, but also keep up with the tech that makes working with GIS “so fun.”

Bottom line: ArcGIS Server 9.3… F’in rocks. It’s off the hook, fool.

Side notes:

1) Jeremey B. said he should have made a “HTTP Goodness” t-shirt. I mentioned they would probably sell like hot cakes at the UC or next year’s DevSummit. I also recommended that he make “GET” and “POST” shirts too.

2) I spent the afternoon in the Microsoft Lounge charging my laptop, doing some homework, and found myself consulting with Ed Katibah and a Redlands alumn from back East. I tell you, that Ed sure is awesome. Always fun to chat with, always a ball of energy. Though I felt kind of bad about holding him up from his FAQ work that he did for the Microsoft SIG. I told him though that he’s lucky he hasn’t suffered from “Adult Onset Internet ADD” like I have. That’s what GIS and blogging will do to you.

3) The Flex API for AGS was “demonstrated today. Slick, slick, slick. In the three weeks that they’ve worked on it, it has some great visualization capabilities in the browser. The interesting thing is that you can not only build web RIAs but you can also export your work to Adobe Air for a light weight desktop app. Licensing? No clue. It’s built to mimic the AGS 9.3 JavaScript API, so any changes to either one, the other should be updated as well. So, a pretty nice presentation layer for the Flex/Flash folks. BTW: The Flex API isn’t in beta yet. Notice I said they worked on it for three weeks? So, Flex and AWX devs/designers will have to wait.

4) Congrats to Dave Bouwman. He won second place in the Code Challenge. Just think if he would have reminded us to vote for him?

It’s late, and I’m flipping channels and I stopped at PBS where Jeff Bezos of Amazon was on Charlie Rose introducing the Amazon Kindle. I became totally intrigued about the device, especially since I’m a grad school student hoofin’ a large amount of books around. I was also interested whether it had texts on GIS and other related topics that I may be reading soon. So, I looked at Amazon’s Kindle site, did a search for “GIS” and came back with a ton of hits for Kindle enabled products. Although, the GIS texts for Kindle look like they’re still the same price as the hardcopy and ESRI Press books are not enabled for Kindle.

Anyway, I think I’d like to try it out. Perhaps I’ll wait for the second edition that has a GPS and someone’s slippy maps rolling across it enabled with MetaCarta OnDemand so I know where I’m reading about.

That’s right. First Law of Geography, from Dr. Waldo Tobler.

Everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things. [Tobler, 1970, p.236]

Not to be confused with my First Law of Cartography.

If you ain’t cheatin’, you ain’t tryin’.

Prior to attending Redlands,Tobler’s First Law wasn’t in any curriculum I experienced. Then again, mixing geography, poly sci, civil engineering, and art together, it could have been lost in there somewhere. Still, I’ve been in the profession for, oh, ten years and it never came up at work.

That’s why I’m writing this post. How many of you know this? A quick survey of my class, half of them hadn’t. I’m curious about the rest of us.

On another note, Dr. Tobler is going to be at ESRI this Wednesday for the U. of Redlands MSGIS Colloquium on the topic of, “Modeling and exploration of spatially continuous potentials and associated cartographic representation via vector fields of the geographic migration of people.”

Whatever that means?

I’ll be willing to ask questions if you want. Just comment. Or, if you’re at ESRI on Wednesday, just show up and ask him yourself.

For the those afflicted with Twitter, I got this tweet from Julian Bond:

http://twitterwhere.mattking.org/ is actually quite neat. RSS of Tweets from N miles around a place.

It’s pretty cool, building off of the concept of Twittervision. This tweet finder builds a RSS feed of notifying you of tweets around an area. Yet, it looks like Julian already nabbed the name ‘TwitterWhere.”

I can’t wait for the TwitterGeoSpam.

Open Source is like Voltron.  Bad ass.

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 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.

On Friday I saw a demonstration by The Carbon Project about CarbonCloud and ((ECHO))MyPlace. Talk about some wickedly cool apps—especially ((ECHO))MyPlace.

“Echo” does exactly just that; it uses peer-to-peer (P2P) technology to share geotags and information across its user’s web. The demo The Carbon Project gave was focused on security at a Carolina Panther’s football game and utilized ultra mobile PC’s (UMPC’s) to connect to everyone in their network using WiFi connections. It was pretty schweet. Now, you don’t have to be on a UMPC or using WiFi to connect, you can also use your land-line Internet connection to be a part of the group too.

So, notes, chats, and tags were flying back ‘n forth. Tracking unruly Pittsburgh fans. Pointing out car accidents and such. A lot of people were impressed.

Anyway, questions came out of the crowd like: “Can you make this for Windows Mobile?” “How about voice and audio?” Finally, “Can I have you UMPC?”

So, a pretty cool app. It’s like having a collaborative atlas like Platial, CommunityWalk, or 43Places, but on a live feed.

Perhaps this could be a Where 2.0 2007 feature?