FANTOM PLANET

It’s MIP, or final paper, season here at Redlands. I’m just taking a break to check in with the crew. I just wanted to point out the courtyard of our building on campus, Lewis Hall, has become a wildlife refuge this past spring. First there was the fox. Then the bird with the broken wing. And now the attack of the ants.

Here are some LOLZ:

How that fox got up there on the hanging slabs in the courtyard? I’ll never know. But srsly. The ants, if you piled them all up, they would be about the mass of those three in the picture.

My classmates here at Redlands are big fans of the Fail! blogs. With a grading scale recently introduced to us in our cartography class we’ve been messing with the idea of a Fail! Scale.

There’s a blog called “MFR” from my hometown that reviews popular unpopular music. I recently made a playlist with songs that had related themes to the year I’ve spent here in Redlands. Some folks may get them, but then again, most of you won’t.

I’m supposed to go with my classmates from the ESRI Polytechnic School for Janitorial Vocations to the University of California at Santa Barbara tomorrow… fer something?

Of course, I have no clue what is going on over there. Info is sparse. All I know is that James Fee has a Gateway 2000 Pentium II server with a bunch of ZIP 100MB disks up for grabs and that Jack & Laura are going into a “sphere” with Goodchild and two of my classmates.

Totally sounds like something out of the movie Event Horizon… But worse.

Good thing I’m in ESRI training this week.

With the precision accuracy of the ESRI Magic Eight-ball Knock-off & Stress Squishy-thingy 9.3 Beta acurately predicting that James Fee would never go to a Where 2.0 Conference, the ESRI Magic Eight-ball Knock-off & Stress Squishy-thingy 9.3 finally has a release candidate!

Looks like it will ship with the rest of the 9.3 suite in four weeks. An added bonus to the ESRI Magic Eight-ball Knock-off & Stress Squishy-thingy 9.3 is that Google will be able to index your answers. That way, the ESRI Magic Eight-ball Knock-off & Stress Squishy-thingy 9.3 can tell your friends how wrong you were along with the when and where.

You’ll also be able to put your ESRI Magic Eight-ball Knock-off & Stress Squishy-thingy’s answer on Google Maps.

The future is looking awesome!

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.)

I just got home from Palm Springs. No. I live in Redlands these days and I wasn’t kicked out. I was low on Kool-Aid.

I was at the ESRI DevSummit and Business Partners Conference, mostly hanging with Bill Dobbins and James Fee, and made it to the geoblogger meetup. It was a good time and there were some great people there—with James being the exception. Other than your typical blogger-types, Don Cooke from TeleAtlas made a visit, as did Scott Morehouse and a number of the ArcGIS Server Team members. As one could expect, we ended up talking mostly about the Server and the REST and JavaScript APIs.

James gave me crap for being remotely interested in the Flex API. He said something about ColdFusion being dead, VGI is a scam, and that Wikipedia is broken too. It was just James being, well, James.

What may have been the best story of the night though, is the story Don Cooke told James, Bill, Ed Katibah, and myself. I’m not sure if I should print it, but it has to do with the title of this blog post and an event at the first UC. James says he won’t look at the person who I’ve quoted in the same light again. Somehow, I think I could see that person being in that situation and having a little fun.

Still, the best part of the story was when the valet got the driver’s golf clubs out of the trunk.

Since it is that time of year and since everyone is doing it. I might as well list my top ten dumbest predictions about our world for 2008. If they become true, I’m heading to Vegas with Dave Bouwman’s profits this time next year.

10) Election Maps. It’s election year in the States and once again we’ll be hosed with “red vs. blue” thematic maps. These maps will polarize the country early on with predicted areas of support for candidates and bringing out the nastiness of who’s right, wrong, left, up, and down.There will also be a few mashups of election supporters with breakdowns of where obese folks, intelligent designers, and Oprah/NASCAR moms are.

9) OSHA. OSHA will step in to ban the Wii and GIS. Especially after James Fee has his Wii Bowling accident before Where 2.0 and becomes unable to spell GIS anymore, let alone blog about it. GIS is banned because is causes blindness and hairy palms.

8) Maps is bad. Once the non-western world melts down during the spring thaw, a number of baddies use [Google] maps for no good. Causing knee-jerk reaction by a number of governments to ban or highly regulate mapping. Especially China, who takes out WorldView-2 right after launch.

7) WorldView-2 Stuns GeoEye’s New Bird. Months after China whacks WV-2, WV-2 parts whack GeoEye’s new bird by having it’s debris scratch GE-1’s lens. Bill Gates secretly de-orbits GE-1 onto Sergey’s secret island Googleplex.

6) FOSS4G and the ESRI UC announce plans to combine in 2010. That’s after a prisoner exchange during a TC211 meeting.

5) Jeff Thurston discovers that GLONASS is really a space weapons system. Only because he watched a special on TV, then formed a rescue party that rescued a number of GLONASS engineers from captivity in Siberia. If he would only do that for Manifold users too

4) GooglePhone knows more about you than you do. Google releases the GPhone with its partners and eerily signs you up, books your car, room, and flight to attend Where 2.0 even before you own your GPhone. On a sad note, Glenn is tasered by his N95 when it discovers he decides to think about writing a comparison piece between N95 and GPhone.

3) Acronym soup! VGI, SDI, ESRI, FOSS4G, WTF? 2008 is the year we get acronym’d to death. It starts in DC with the ESRI FedUC and ends when SlashGeo stops with its sloppy seconds.

2) Surveyors reclaim the Earth—only because the lawyers let them. Dusting off the old chains, someone lobbies in DC hard enough to enact licensing for all geo professionals after a rash of high profile court cases that affect senators and representatives and the earmarked buildings, parks, and bridges named after them.

1) Nom de plumes. From me, to the Fake Steve Coast, to Fake Ed Parsons and the soon to be Fake James Fee. The fakes get unmasked; I stop posting b/c too many folks know who I am—and, yes, I will have to kill you; and everyone starts fake <insert name here> blog. On the bright side, in August, the Fake Jack Dangermond hosts the Fake ESRI UC and gives me my fake grad skool diploma.

Didn’t I mention this was a bad list?

The Fake Steve Coast speaks the truth!

Oh, God? That must mean I go to the ARC/Tard Ladies’ Day School & Waffle Hut! 

Hey if millions of people aren’t having an edit war on this, then I might as well be the one who starts it. . .

Wikipedia defines GIS as:

A geographic information system (GIS), also known as a geographical information system or geospatial information system, is a system for capturing, storing, analyzing and managing data and associated attributes which are spatially referenced to the Earth. GIS is referred to as geomatics in Canada.

In the strictest sense, it is an information system capable of integrating, storing, editing, analyzing, sharing, and displaying geographically-referenced information. In a more generic sense, GIS is a tool that allows users to create interactive queries (user created searches), analyze the spatial information, edit data, maps, and present the results of all these operations. Geographic information science is the science underlying the geographic concepts, applications and systems, taught in degree and GIS Certificate programs at many universities.

Geographic information system technology can be used for scientific investigations, resource management, asset management, Environmental Impact Assessment, Urban planning, cartography, criminology, history, sales, marketing, and logistics. For example, GIS might allow emergency planners to easily calculate emergency response times in the event of a natural disaster, GIS might be used to find wetlands that need protection from pollution, or GIS can be used by a company to site a new business to take advantage of a previously underserved market.

It’s not so different than from what is in all of our textbooks. It says nothing about neogeography. Huh?

That doesn’t mean that neogeography isn’t GIS. The definition of GIS itself above is as a system, but can mean a science, or a service. Data in, gospel out. Same would hold true for neogeography applications and knowledge using the systems, the science and the services. I hear often enough from certain people in town that the web mapping applications that neogeographers build aren’t GIS and their data isn’t reliable. It’s all about the right tools for the right job folks, and it’s the right data for the right job too. As Tim O’Reilly once said, “It’s about the data stupid.”

We know our media is changing, but know that some things will remain the same: the geoid as an equipotential “lumpy potato”, Tobler’s First Law of Geography, and people will always say they like maps when you tell them you’re a geographer. I suggest we as GIS and geographer folk understand that change is happening otherwise. If you’re not down with change, get your acetate out and exacto knife and go start a hobby and preserve that lost art.

It has always been about the story of human life. Mine, yours, and the Fake Ed Parsons. (BTW: When the Fake Ed was at OS, he wrote the story of human life.) And we better damn well work together to help us tell it together. It does us no good to dump software packages into the deepest darkest collection of cubicles and say, “This is GIS, this will make your life so much better.” Then leave with no training and no discussion about sustaining a GIS. Employees with spatial info will blow it off, and it’s already been blown off inside the home. That’s why building the canvases of geography around the world are important. Google Earth, Virtual Earth, Yahoo maps, just to name the big guys. The likes of OpenStreetMap and Wikimapia, and Flickr and others where we’re mapping our communities and mapping our lives. Yes, this is great stuff. We need to let it grow and understand it, and not to kick your grandma off of Google Earth while she’s mapping her life’s story because “she’s not a geographer.”

(Written from the ESRI infirmary using Jack’s laptop.)