Thread closed.

Actually, Scott, I hear that they had planned activities just for you, in case you stopped by the conference.

They were going to bring a box of crayons and some paper place mats from a local restaurant that showed a US map you could color in. I hear they figured that was about right to keep you occupied while they had conversations about serious GIS matters, such as leveraging Excel web queries with spatial SQL.

Funny how it is, by the way, that your short comment in just one sentence manages to compress so much damage to your reputation in the eyes of people who know what they are talking about.

The first is your mention of Excel as if it is somehow a slam to either work with Excel or to be able to use data from Excel. You probably also meant this as some would-be stylish way of implying that Microsoft Office types are somehow inferior to an elite GIS guy like you would have us think you are.

That’s phase one of maximum stupidity, to suggest that Microsoft Excel people are somehow dumber than “GIS” people are. In point of fact, Microsoft Office people are no dumber and no smarter than GIS people are. They follow the same bell curve. It’s just that there are about a thousand times more Microsoft Office people out there than legacy GIS people.

So whatever activity you are interested in examining, say, the entry into GIS by Microsoft Office people, the raw numbers are so overwhelmingly larger that whatever sub-cohort catches the eye, say, especially intelligent or especially computer literate people, seems to be immensely larger than in legacy GIS.

It is, of course, larger in absolute terms even though on a percentage basis Office people are like any user population. That’s why people who actually do business with the very large Microsoft Office population come away with the impression that Microsoft Office types are vastly more computer literate than guys like you. In raw numbers, there are indeed many more computer literate people in that cohort than occur in the relatively small number of legacy GIS guys.

Picking Excel was an especially useful way of declaring yourself an insular yob, since, what? 96% ? of the world’s computer population uses Excel for much of its data acquisition and analysis? In experienced computer science circles, working with Excel is taken for granted.

So yes, most people who are at least semi-literate use Excel all the time. You’d have to be an abject dolt not to understand that or to somehow try to slam it.

For that matter, working with Excel is a routine part of any modern GIS package’s core capabilities. It can be seen in Manifold in the example at…

http://www.manifold.net/doc/7x/a_flashy_demo_web_queries_and_kml.htm

…which also has the charming attribute of demonstrating many things the folks at New York know how to do and you don’t.

In fact, I hear that much of what the user community talked about in their sessions was thoroughly adult talk about spatial SQL. (That’s why they were going to bring crayons for you, so you would not be bored by all that).

The above example URL touches on spatial SQL just a bit. I don’t expect that you’d understand any of it, as you appear to be unfamiliar with the power of modern tools like Manifold.

But just in case I misjudged you, here’s a chance for you to show everyone you are at least as smart as the folks at the New York conference. The confines of this blog format don’t really allow the introduction of a massive GIS project as were discussed in NY, but they do allow for a “put up or shut up” example of a few lines that will allow any technical expert to know if the writer is or is not a yob.

Please respond with a posting that contains a gem of spatial SQL written by you. Show us you know how to do something impressive, something that shows the community here your ability to work simultaneously with vectors, rasters and surfaces to do something elegant of practical interest to, say, a town or small county.

Since we do want to give you the benefit of the doubt and since you know so little about Manifold it is unlikely you know anything about doing spatial sql combining vectors and rasters in Manifold, it is OK if you use some other big time spatial product, such as Oracle Spatial.

So there it is Scott… just post a few lines of brilliantly written SQL to show us all you know more than how to accuse other people of using crayons.

In answer to your question – yes we know a fair bit about GIS. Of course I’m biased;-) But no, I wouldn’t consider [us] to be misfits. I wont bother naming names as its not my place to do so, but I’ve been working in the GIS field for almost a decade now and came from the ESRI world. No, we didn’t use MS Excel to colour a map of the US.

Personally, among other things I showed some hydraulic modelling along with how we clean up poor data sets from DWG’s and Excel files (that *others* call databases). I also showed how we have done some rather sophisticated geometric GPS route analysis (both horizontal and vertical) for a major client to identify issues w/ their trucks etc. Others showed some nice IMS stuff and programming. All in all I think it was a good time for both us the those who came to ask questions.

Cheers.

I wish I could have seen what misfits they used for their booth. Did they know anything about GIS or were they a bunch of Microsoft Excel users that colored in maps of the US State boundaries and called it a GIS – LOL!

Manifold was given a free booth at the conference because they provided some Manifold licenses as door prizes. Originally, Manifold was not going to make use of this – however some Manifold users requested to make use of it as a “Manifold Users” booth (to showcase what they have done w/ Manifold etc.). Manifold agreed and provided the stands and some materials, but it was manned by Manifold users and not Manifold employees or sales reps.

Cheers.

http://www.esf.edu/nysgisconf/2006/index.html

KoS

I don’t want anyone to be offended and demand an answer, justice, retraction, or…..

KoS