San Diego GIS fun

At the ESRI User Conference. The opening session of the education conference was this morning, and the international user conference will start Monday.

They gave a very nice brief demo of features for 9.3 this morning in between a few marketing pitches about how great they are and how much they do for us. The highlight though was the keynote and an ESRI manager giving talks about their own work using GIS for historical research. Oddly, I edited a review of Anne Knowle's Placing History just yesterday. Charlie Frye gave a warm up talk about using GIS to trace his own family history research about revolutionary New England.

Erik Steiner, among others, got a nice shout out from Knowles for his work on mapping the Holocaust.

Wrote down a bunch of stuff, so expect more as the week goes by.

On the 'visiting a new city' front. I won on the lunch front. My first instinct was to walk into a schwarma stand. My second was an Irish pub across the street. I started in the pub, but the couple next to me was complaining loudly to their waitress, and to the manager. The people on the other side was their before me and hadn't gotten their drinks yet by the time I started to consider leaving.

I had finished my schwarma before those other folks had gotten their food.