I return from ESRI User Conference, alternately titled "18,000 Introverts in Cargo Shorts". But in a good way.
I get to go to this conference about once every other year. I learn a lot. It's exhausting. It's a pleasant change to not have to explain what I do to people using only little words.
Dear Blog,
I have a confession. You may have noticed that I haven't been around much. The truth is, I've been spending time with this other blog. No, it's not like that; I swear. It's a work thing.
My son came home from school several weeks ago brandishing a permission slip to join an after-school geography club, which I thought was pretty cool. (I'm a geographer by trade myself.) He thought it was pretty cool too, so I signed the form.
The first day he came home from geography club, I asked him what he'd learned that day, and he said something like, "We learned the capitals of the states."
"Huh. Okay." I'll admit I was a little puzzled, but I do remember being forced to do that myself at about his age.
So I'm back from outer space. Back in my home with my family and my cat. And now that I'm not in the midst of a long day at the airport, I can tell you about the conference and how cool it was.
I'm still conferencing. It's strange, but bouncing around in a building with 15,000 people can be surprisingly lonely. I'm not one of those folks that easily makes friends with whoever I'm sitting next to in a Python presentation. I'm a little jealous of the folks who are here with 20 people from their office. They have someone to have lunch with.
Not that I have time for lunch. My days are packed full of so much information I'm worried about the maximum capacity of my brain.
It must be a strange thing working in a business right next to large conference center.
I'm in San Diego this week, for the ESRI User Conference. Translation: a bunch of map geeks have descended upon downtown San Diego, overrunning the ten blocks or so immediately surrounding the conference center, wearing our badges, matching ESRI saddle bags, and all wearing polo shirts and buttons that say things like "We are GIS."
"Why do you have two computers?"
The end of the school year and the beginning of summer camp have left a half day gap in the middle which has landed my 5-year-old next to me, dangling off the arm of my office chair like a monkey.
"It's one computer, little fish. See down there under the desk? I have two monitors." He examines the blue glowing light on the CPU for a bit.
He pops back up. "Everyone here has two monitors," he notes, turning in a circle in the middle of my small workgroup. "Why?"
"Because we're that cool."
On my iPhone, I'm looking at a map with a dot on a road in a foreign country. The dot says 2480 miles. That's here to there. As crow flies, I imagine.
That's a long way.
I’ve been getting a lot of responses off my last entry – calls from friends with coffee and cautious emails from family. I guess I don’t know my own strength. I didn’t mean to enstill a panic. It’s just a comment on life, the universe, and everything... the state of the union... life in these Unites States... so please you. I comment. It’s what I do here. Fear not, faithful followers. I’m not trapped in a dank, dark depression.
I’m just a touch... lost.. for the moment.
I've had a major victory at work. The GIS staff (all two of us) have spent the last few months going 10 rounds with the management about elevation inconsistencies in our GPS gear. The earth isn't round, as it turns out, which is a minor inconvenience to one or two of my fellow office-mates, who subsequently demanded that I make it that way, in addition to solidifying the magma and halting all gravitational interference from other stellar bodies. I'll get right on that. As soon as I become a Q.
