Perverse pleasure?

Why do I love it so when they take the creepy people out in handcuffs? Is it a confirmation of their creepiness? Is it re-affirming my instinct of who is creepy and who isn't?

(In tonight's installment, the creepy person was sitting next to an older gentleman reading a story called 'Naughty encounter at the mall,' who I didn't find creepy at all. Indeed: he just passed me, smiled, and said 'How are ya?')

Growin' in winter

We're in the depths of winter, with flooding rivers, nightly rains, and frequent windstorms. Yet as if to prove we're really in the Northwest, our crocuses (croci?) are up. Not as vigourous as last year, but I did thin them and move them around a bit.

There's a bunch of other stuff making an appearance as well: daffodil blooms are starting to form on top of their foliage, oregano is breaking through the surface, the patch of dirt containing the new chives I bought in the fall has a little green stubble, the third year of garlic (selected for size from last year's batch) is six inches tall. But still, it's the depth of winter.

Bad news for the neighbor: a huge street tree had a big white X painted on it recently. Lydia's a bit depressed because it means even more sun for our yard. I was torn, as it means more sun for my tomatoes.

Google blog search?

I've really got to start paying attention. How'd I miss this?

iSchool media empire

My alma mater now as a podcast.

<sarcasm>Dear God, when will the insanity stop. Is there nothing they won't do for attention?</sarcasm>

(glancing at the photos of those involved, I thought to myself 'gee, I don't know any of them, I guess I've been out of school for a while.' Then I realized that one of them is a former student of mine at DuckU. I knew he'd go far.)

Stack bat

That's sort of a nice feminine rhyme isn't it?

My coworker Liesl said that seeing the bat today was the most exciting thing to ever happen in the library. It was pretty cool, and very very cute. It had the prettiest brown fur, and was much more furry looking than other bats I've seen (not that I've seen that many).

If only I had gotten a picture. It was hanging upside down from the spine of a book.

Kitties!

I have a feeling that I should be capturing things like this in my library's collection for posterity.

Security in libraries?

So you really can get canned from a library! It seems that "gross mismanagement" is the winning offense.

I wonder if I would take heat if it turns out that Mr. Smiley has visited my library in the past year? I really doubt it. First of all, I don't have nearly the historic holdings of a Yale. The guy walked about with a half-million dollars worth of maps in a briefcase. You'd need a cargo van to get that much value out of my collection.

Still, I've whined to...er, alerted my superiors about lax circulation procedures, no inventory, and poor oversight in our reading room. Mostly the response has been: 'Well, let's do the best we can.' The $36,000 question remains: is 'the best we can' good enough to keep heads from rolling?

Link dump? No link dump.

I'm always hesitant just to post a bunch of bookmarks. A: that's not why I write this. I'd like to think that if I'm going to refer my loyal reader to something it should either be pretty fantastic or I should at least make some comment on it. B: Isn't that what the stinkin' blogroll is for? C: Or maybe that's what the stinkin' bookmark file is for.

Anyway, I digress. There's a bunch of GIS stuff I want to talk about, but realistically I'm way too ignorant to be coherent. So, if you know what you're talking about: please bear with me.

All Points is afraid that Google will become the default repository of hi-res imagery. I think it misses a subtle point: by default G-Earth only displays one set of data. It actually takes some messing around to get other things to display (the discussion in question revolves around NOAA making Katrina imagery available via .kml ). Was this the only way to get to that data, or just the easiest? I'm betting you can download the tiffs or jpegs somewhere else.......and.....2 minutes on the interweb led me to jpegs. Here's more info on NOAA's imagery, along with some additional information to aid in geo-referencing.

Not too much farther down my result list is a big page of links to agencies that have provided maps and imagery of the disaster. A lot of that's not georeferenced either. Guess where that page is located? In a library.

My point? There's always going to be multiple sources of data. The fact that Google has made it easy to display that data on a map is really cool, but I don't think they geo-referenced the information: I think volunteers did. And here's an important point: Google works because people make content. A lot of content is either personal or a collateral duty of someone's job. If none of us map librarians blogged or created pages of links to data on the web, how well would Google work?

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One little tidbit I've gleaned from all my current reading is that Microsoft is making a play into the virtual globe arena. Unfortunately, the only people who seem impressed enough to blog about it are MS employees. But: this announcement does dovetail nicely with a reference question I got asked this week (not that it helps answer it).

Speaking of reference questions, I think I've now gotten the equivalent of the person walking into the medical library, pulling up their sleeve, and asking 'do you know what this is?' The question? 'I got this map and legend has it my great, great, great uncle buried his gold here before going off to the Civil War.'

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Finally this afternoon, our friend over at the Map Room points us to a Google Earth basics page, which in turn pointed me to these clever, clever people.

40 oz on Sat afternoon

Kickin' back with a 40-ouncer of PBR and doing some reading. Lest you think that's particularly pathetic: more than half of it went into a pot of brats I'm boiling for a party tonight. And you can't just leave the rest of the PBR in the fridge: it would attack the vegetables.

Please stand by for an additional update.

Technology rolls on

GeoRSS? Oh my.

How about combining that with a Yahoo-Flash API? Would that be a Flashy geo-Yahoo or a Yahoo Geo-Flash-up?

GIS blog-a-gaga

So, you've probably noticed the blogroll. The GIS stuff is a large part of what I've been reading on vacation. Now that I'm back, it's time to put it to some good use.

And speaking of good use, here's a scary story of a guy who harvested 250,000 Amazon wishlists and mapped people based on keywords from their lists. Since you can browse wishlists by first name, view last name and hometowns, and then search for home addresses using other interweb based databases, you can map what people are reading (or, at least what people wish to be reading). Clever!

On a more altruistic note, here's the story of folks using GIS in the field to help in tsunami relief efforts.

The library didn't fall apart in my absence. Big surprise there. Officially started fishing around with server-based GIS yesterday. It's the beginning of a really big project.

Globes are afoot.

I guess one impact that Google Earth has already had is that people are starting to think about globes--well, they're starting to call things globes anyway. As I've been reading this break, it seems like Microsoft, ESRI, and company are all calling things 'world' or 'globe'. I'm not sure if there's anything that makes these services all of the same category. Or particularly globe-like. Maybe a world-wide extent?

But anyway, Google seems to be realizing that they can be having an impact geographic education.

And there's been a whole slew of new-stories and features about online mapping. Here's one of them.

Aren't you supposed to be on vacation?

Yes I am, but L made me bring the laptop and I've been catching up on reading. I've finally broken down and subscribed to a feedreader. What broke the camel's back? I've found lists of GIS and map blogs. One of them even has even classified and diagrammed them!

I could do a big link-dump post here, but I'd rather go back to reading. Here's the post that's currently making my brain hurt the most. It describes building hooks between Google Earth, ArcSDE services, and WMS sites. This is obviously a really bright guy. And the potential for data collections is pretty awesome.

(oh yeah: vacation. Went to Taliesen West today. Masterful work, working with local environment, functional community, blah blah blah.)