Knocked down

Fighting off a bit of a cold that I woke up with the morning after a night of recovery from a bought of insomnia. I haven't had problems sleeping for a while. I remember coping with it better. Perhaps previously I had the ability to take it relatively easy at work the morning after. No such luxuries these days. For the past 2 weeks, I've noticed that I had less than 15 hours of unstructured time scheduled. And of course, even that's not all free: I have to supervise students and get a certain amount of routine crap done on a daily basis.

Poor me. ;)

Vagaries of geoblogging.

Sometimes bloggers say things that sound like they might be really interesting, but then fail to provide any details. James Fee here describes a new feature that is coming in ArcMap 9.2, but doesn't actually say how it might work. T

The point is well taken though: the divide between data and presentation in most GIS is a gaping chasm, leading to a great many ugly maps.

At other times though, my trolling yields real results: I had no idea this open source GIS existed.

Not speaking ill of the dead.

Sometimes I find mistakes that my predecessors have made. Sometimes they're pretty agreegious: yesterday there was a map of the Canadian-US border from the St. Croix River to the Atlantic with a 'Great Lakes Region' call number. I've always considered Maine to be well outside the Great Lakes.

But then I find things that look like mistakes, but upon reflection aren't. It keeps me on my toes, and makes my job interesting.

One of my greatest fears though is that in 15 years, after my first heart attack when I'm kicking back on disability, my successor will cry out from the historic room: "What was he thinking?" like I just did. Sorry Ed: I don't mean to doubt you.

Sunny and busy

It's the February dry spell: we had one last year. (Actually, last year was unusually dry all winter, but there was a beautiful spat in February.) I really wish I could call in sick for a day or devote a chunk of this weekend to clearing out some of the garden but things are WAAAAAYYY too busy for that.

I take back what I said about the blog reorg. I'm going to devote my efforts to setting up my thesis project.

Dafodils!

Not here at the WhatsGrowing ranch, but on campus. However, the early camilia blooms (the ones outside the bedroom window that are protected from the wind and probably get radiant heat coming out of our 80-year-old windows) are going.

I'm contemplating a big blog-rearrangement. So, stand by for things to get really wonky. The impetus? I really need to start up a research blog.

Standing Room Only

The kids trying to save their homes took it to the State Board today. The Mississippi of the West has slightly more than a handful of state-overseen universities. As I learn more about 'shared governance', it's become apparent that the only veto over a campus president is this Board.

They met in Eugene today (they rotate campuses each month), but the agenda was light on business: only pro-forma actions. They cancelled much of their customary ceremonies because they're going on retreat tomorrow so there weren't any presidents' reports or....wait for it....

public comments.

So: the one issue of the year that is likely to ruffle students' feathers, and the one month of the year that they are meeting on our campus, and they've got other plans. (Granted they set their agenda months in advance--I'm sure this wasn't planned out.) The chair actually did apologize for this, which I thought was a very nice thing to do. Amazingly, the people in the room didn't go when the business got really boring. A few read books, the babies didn't fidget too much, mostly folks just sat and politely held their signs. .

And the people who didn't fit in stood outside the windows quietly looking in.

It was a really nice moment.

Oh, the reason there were so many people outside? The room only held 50 people, and 25 of those seats were reserved for local administrators and people with business to present. Oddly, even though they never said anything (because they weren't on the agenda), one row was packed with our own higher ups.

I really feel that some of them should have left so that more of the students could have attended.