Hard to believe Spatially Adjusted gets it’s driver learners permit next year, but it’s true. Hard for me to believe that I was sitting on a ranch outside Brownwood, TX (on AOL dialup no less) thinking about how to learn more about open source GIS software. For reasons I cannot remember, I thought why not blog about it. This blog has been in my life for so long I really can’t recall what I did before I had it. But hey, I’m so happy to have written all these blog posts, even the bad ones, because I have learned so much.
Me taking the time to post only the best ideas…
I can’t even imagine what the next 15 years will be like, but we’ll leave that up to the future. While I don’t post here as much as I used to, feel free to subscribe to my weekly newsletter, where I attempt to keep up with my off base opinions.
If there is one book I’d recommend anyone to get in our industry this is it. Way back in 2009 I wrote about the first edition:
Looking at the table of contents reveals that this should be the book for learning how to use PostGIS in your GIS applications. I’m really intersted in Chapter 13, “First look at WKT raster”.
Of course that book was on my desk for years and eventually it was updated in 2013. But that was over 7 years ago, technology changes and so has PostGIS. You can now get the long awaited 3rd Edition in the Early Access Program. I’ve started reviewing it and there is so much in there as this is going to be a significant update. PostGIS 3.x should be a big deal in it as well as PostgreSQL 12.
I’ve been working at cleaning up all the GeoJSON-Ballparks records this past month. While the MLB stadiums and many of the AAA minor league teams have been updated, the international and small market teams have not. Some were out of data by almost 5 years. Long tail baseball stadiums are what they are and I’m working on automating much of this moving forward. The last two leagues that I’m updating are the Italian Baseball League and the German Bundesliga League. I hope to finish Germany tonight but I did post Italy yesterday.
Ballparks of the Italian Baseball League in GeoJSON
While Italy can’t go out and enjoy baseball just yet, at least their top tier baseball league has been mapped. If you’re looking for some live baseball, check out streaming Korean KBO League league (I’ve been watching the Giants of course). The next live stream will be on March 25th at approximately 7:40pm PDT.
So the doctor said my boot can come off my foot. Things are looking really good which I can’t tell you how happy that makes me.
So I’m not clomping around all over the place which should make my wife much happier.
No, this wasn’t me exactly, but imagine the sound and you’ve got it. Those hardwood floors I put have an amazing echo…
Well I’m not out of the woods yet, I still can’t do much beyond walk and even that still hurts. But at least I don’t wake the baby girl as I walk around the house. I see the doctor in 3 more weeks (assuming the world doesn’t come to an end) and then maybe I start therapy.
Update (03/23/2020): It looks like Microsoft has made some good changes. They now tell you when the data was updated and the news links work much better. I can see myself using this over other maps because it is so simple. Simple is quick.
There are no shortage of COVID-19 maps online. EVERYONE has one so why even bother posting one? Well I looked back on my blog posts and the last time I posted anything about a Microsoft map was back in 2006 and that was when it was called Virtual Earth. Well here it goes, the Bing COVID Tracker.
According to the info section, the data is from the CDC, WHO, ECDC and Wikipedia. It is a pretty bare map and if you didn’t see the Bing logo in the upper left or the Microsoft credits in the lower right, you might not even think it was a Microsoft product. There is no notification as to how often the data is updated but it appears that when I’m checking at the time of this post, it is current for the past hour. If you click on a state you get information about the cases and links to news articles about COVID-19 in that state. Pretty basic as you can see from the Arizona view below. COVID and Biden…
This feels more like a mashup than a multi billion dollar companies attempt to education the public to the threat of COVID-19. A real shame as events such as this usually bring out the best in technology, this attempt by Microsoft feels so very dated. At least I got to post my first Bing map….
I’ve spent the last week cleaning up old blog posts. You won’t see them live just yet, I have a dev version of this blog that I’ve been playing around with. What I’ve done is search all posts for any links that don’t go 200 and then either attempt to find a corresponding version in the Way Back Machine or if a source doesn’t exist (using CSS) make a modification to the post indicating that the link is no longer valid.
Touching 2400 blog posts is dangerous stuff…
I’m also cleaning up the categories and tags which I think have little value anymore. I think at one point people subscribed to tags/categories in a blog, but search really has taken that over. So the complexity of tagging or categorizing posts really doesn’t make sense. I mean I like to think someone is coming to my blog and saying, “Hey look there, he’s got a category for Virtual Earth” but I seriously doubt it.
I’m also playing around with AWS Lightsail. I’ve been using it for this dev version of the blog and I might try it with production. Linode seems to be cheaper, but I like having more of my things on AWS rather than a little bit all over the place.
I hope to push up the changes to the blog here this week. I really feel that given I have almost 2400 blog entries with over 400,000 words. Checking old blog posts has really shown me how much we’ve lost. So many people, blogs and information has been lost forever. This is a shame because I learned so much by reading what others had written. I hope that while not every one of those 400,000 words has value, the majority of this blog helps people and in turn, preserving what I’ve written will always be a priority.
I had to have written something at some point worth saving…
It’s hard not to read about all the doom and gloom (rightly so) that is about to head down on this great country. I’m expecting next week to make last week look boring. I’m still stuck in the house with my foot but the weather finally cleared today and I’ve been sitting on the patio look at the golfers on the 9th green. Whatever madness is going on elsewhere, right here the world is normal and beautiful. Boy do I hope it stays that way.
So what a week, am I right? I’m trying to put everything into perspective but I can’t. I just went down to the Safeway to get some beer and it was like end of days. Apparently I should be stocking up on beans and tuna fish by looking at the isles. Top it all off, we’ve had more rain in this past week than I can recall, thanks California.
Since there is nothing to do anymore and I probably don’t want to be around people right now, I think I’m going to work on cleaning up my old blog entries and fix deal Google links this weekend. I’ve moved this blog so many times and so many different blogging engines, that many entries go 404. I think I’m also going to try and relink dead links using Archive.org so the context of what I was linking to still works. This is a daunting task of course, I have almost 2400 blog posts to go through.
I felt sorry for myself with my achilles surgery. That I couldn’t go out, see spring training games, have brunch in crowded restaurants with all the spring tourists.
No, I picked the best time to get my foot operated on. I’m able to give it the rest it needs because there is no where to go. I feel lucky that I was able to time this so perfectly for myself and my family.
If you search my blog you’ll find an interesting post titled earthgoogle. Well it really isn’t that interesting, it just has a link to download Google Earth and a link to my blog. So what is this thing and why does it have such a weird title?
For those that might not remember, 2005 was a crazy time for GIS blogs. Katrina brought satellite imagery to everyone and people searched the internet for ways to find out more. Google Earth was probably the easiest and best way for the average person to learn more about satellite imagery and get some really helpful tools to mark up the area.
This was about as amazing as anything anyone had seen outside of our industry.
About this time in September 2005, I noticed a lot of people arriving to my blog due to the search term “earthgoogle”. So as most people who blogged back then, I loved to talk about blogging. I created a simple blog post asking what was this all about.
To all those reaching this site using MSN search with the term “earthgoogle” hello. You’ve been filling up my server logs with this request. I’m curious why you’ve typed this in to only MSN search and not Google/Yahoo/other search engines.
So obvious, right? MSN users, not typing a URL correctly? Anyway, what this blog post of mine actually did was make this page the number one result in Google for the search term “earthgoogle”. I got so much traffic by being the way most people, who didn’t understand how URLs work, find Google Earth. Eventually I changed the page to what you see now.
I put Google AdSense on that page too. I mean everywhere (really wished I took a screen shot because it was so tacky). The result from that tacky was that I was making over $1,000 a month in ad revenue from that blog post alone. People who wanted to find “earthgoogle” apparently also like to click on ads.
Eventually the page died down, people stopped being directed to my blog via search for “earthgoogle”. I probably pulled ads off the blog in 2006 and couldn’t care less. But the page remains, a reminder of how crazy Google Earth was back in 2005.
