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.

First there was the shooting star I saw last night. Then, Jack Dangermond for the first time while I was in a resturaunt in Redlands. Then a 3.2 quake a few minutes ago about a mile way and about two miles down.

Something is going down… Soon.

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.

I’ve planned my escape from the ESRI Nunnery to attend the Where 2.0 conference for tomorrow! I’ll be breaking out posing as an ESL student and driving the five or six hours in Jack’s Volvo—with Jack! We’ll talk about 9.4 for awhile. I’ll stroke his hairs to soften him up to talk to him about Google, Microsoft, and the small businesses who are trying to cache in on the use of geography. Then we’ll practice his joint talk for Where. I’ll be John Hanke and he’ll be… Well, Jack. It should be fun!

I’ll of course have to go cold turkey outside of Redlands. Being without the dialysis machine’s steady flow of Kool-Aid to keep me alive will be interesting. I think I’ll pack my bags with instructor-led training manuals to keep me going. Perhaps I could rig a get up like Darth Vader, or one of those liquid breathing rigs from The Abyss to sustain me?

Truth be told, I really have to get crackin’ on finishing my final paper to graduate from the Nunnery’s fortress-like bunker walls. It’s like pulling teeth. No need to pose as an ESL student, I write like one! If you see someone sitting with a bunch of books strewn across a table with a “WWJD: What would Jack do?” t-shirt on. That’s probably me. Stop by. Say hello. Move on. I have work to do.

Oh, and don’t forget! Dave Bouwman is buying drinks with his ESRI Dev Summit earnings for anyone who wears an ESRI t-shirt or looks like James Fee in the Marriott bar.

Here at the ESRI Polytechnic Engineering School for the Blind, we have a weekly colloquium where we (the students) and the ESRI staff meet to hear interesting presentations every Wednesday. Today’s colloquium was a presentation from another resident of The Gulag, Dr. John Kimerling of Oregon State fame, presented Dotting the Dot Map. Beware: there’s a dose of math with funny symbols in this one.

I point this one out because it is rarely in the geoblogosphere we get techniques in cartography, especially with ESRI GIS technology.  Fortunately, there’s the ESRI Mapping Center for those with the ESRI crutch. They even have a blog!  I would reference the site quite often for the power GIS user who makes maps as it is chalk full of goodies (scripts) and tricks to get the most—cartographically—out of ArcGIS. As for the mega-cartographer, I would reference information aesthetics, John Krygier’s Making Maps: DIY Cartography, Tom Patterson’s Shaded Relief, and even Edward Tufte’s Ask E.T for more tips and techniques for cartographic and information visualization.

On the same note, and I don’t know if you feel the same way, but it seems as if there is little “art” in our science these days in the GIS and map services world.  It could be just me? I’m writing more design and project documentation these days.

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.)

Wow! File this one under “crime mapping.”

First there’s the DevSummit this week, then there’s this!

A University of Redlands graduate student could face felony charges after police said he fired gunshots from the steps outside an off-campus student apartment complex.

It wasn’t me.

On Thursday afternoon, police found a discarded .380-caliber semiautomatic handgun near Pioneer Avenue and Judson Street.

Police found more evidence inside [the student's] apartment, Sgt. Travis Martinez said.

Police responded to a call of shots being fired about 11:30 p.m. Wednesday in the 1100 block of Central Avenue.

Witnesses helped police find [the student's] residence near Central and Cook Street, part of a university-owned apartment complex for students, Martinez said.

[The student] was not home when police arrived, but police later found and arrested him, Martinez said.

It was unclear why [the student] fired the gun.

“We don’t believe he was firing at anybody or anything specific,” Martinez said.

[The student] faces either felony or misdemeanor charges, depending on which way county prosecutors lean.

It is a case known in legal terms as a “wobbler,” Martinez said.

[The student], who was working on his master’s degree in geographic information systems, withdrew Friday from the university, said Katie Ismael, university spokeswoman.

Who’d a thunk that I’d be living a life of danger?

For our program director’s sake, I’ll have to say this was an isolated incident and that we’re still a good program. This isn’t the ESRI Summer Camp and Women’s Prison.

So, what can I say about GIS and firearms? Well, let’s say, they don’t mix in most places. Although, we do have a student who works for the Redlands PD. Check out this cool video of him on a ride-along:

No, that’s not Chris Schmidt either.

(Thanks to to Dave Smith for pointing the article out… Who probably found it in his Google News search for “geographic information systems.”)

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.