ben's spatial (un)awareness

Huddle House

2008-10-17T07:20:00.000-04:00

NY Times: My Long War

2008-08-23T13:52:00.000-04:00

This New York Times Magazine article about the Iraq War by Dexter Filkins is extremely well written. When it showed up in my reader today I read it from beginning to end. It gave me a taste of what daily life is like for not only a journalist, but for the Iraqi people and our soldiers. I thought I would share it because it gave me a renewed appreciation for the fact that our country is in a war.

Regardless of how I or anyone feels about the motivation behind the war, there are men and women my age and your age who are fighting in our stead. I need reminders like this since I find it much too easy for me to go about my everyday life without remembering our troops.

Please be warned, some of the article is graphic in nature.

Fair And Balanced

2008-06-13T09:39:00.003-04:00

fair and balanced

Trsly, or, will I stop signing up for extraneous web services anytime soon?

2008-06-11T10:02:00.006-04:00

I have been eying this service for awhile, ever since I saw it on a fellow geog's blog that I follow. It's a pretty simple idea. Just a place to post interesting and thoughtful quotations gathered from the web. The site design is clean and focused on the quotations. No social networking component or browser buttons. I think I'm going to enjoy it a lot. So go and check mine out and sign up for your own account if you have some quotes to share. Let me know in the comments if you get your own Trsly account. Hopefully I'll find things to post to there and make it more than just the one comment on the economic stimulus package.

Active early summer storm season

2008-06-05T11:27:00.001-04:00

Its been an exciting season for storms this spring.

Mento.info - a new tool for social bookmarking

2008-05-13T10:06:00.016-04:00

EDIT: I was thinking that possibly some of you who are reading this may not be familiar with social bookmarking as a concept and how it basically works and why it is a good thing. Common Craft made this great youtube video that describes this idea in plain english. Scroll to the bottom of the post to check it out!

I have been using the social bookmarking site del.icio.us for almost 2 years now ever since my good friend and sometimes boss Jeremy introduced me to it it. It has been extremely useful to me over the years. Now, I barely use browser bookmarks anymore and leave my links to be indexed by my [semi-anal :-)] tagging system. Very frequently I use it to dig up sites that I sort of remember but can't think of the address, to click a hard-to-remember URL, or to find material that I have tagged on a certain subject like thoughtful or photography or PostGIS.

Del.icio.us didn't do everything for me that I wanted though. Unless you have an account, I cannot share my bookmarks with you (and even then, it is a little clunky... you have to log in to see if there are any links for you). I used to share a lot of links with Carrie through the share feature in Google Reader, but there were sometimes when I wanted to share links with only her and not all of my contacts who use Reader (Dear Google, I think that should be an option... private sharing). So what I have been doing is just composing an email each day I have some links to share, but that isn't very easy to do... Well I guess it's not that hard, but I want it to be easier.

Recently, I saw in Leo Laporte's twitter that he is using a new service called Mento.info. I have just started using it and I love it! Here are some of what sets it apart from the crowd.

Mento makes it incredibly easy and fast to send a quick link to a friend. They do not have to sign up for an account as it just sends them an email. Whenever I send a link to someone, I can decide whether it is public or private. If it is public, it will automatically post on my shared links page for anyone to see. If it is private, only me and the recipient will be able to view it.
I can also see when the recipient has clicked on the link and there is some lightweight feedback (they can give it a plus or a minus... but I haven't explored that feature yet).
Mento can be configured to automatically cross post its items to other social bookmarking sites (I have my del.icio.us configured) as well as post your finds to Facebook.
My FAVORITE and very unexpected feature though is that Mento has a firefox add-on that allows the user to take optional screenshots of the page to be bookmarked. It is extremely user friendly and really adds so much to the process.

While I will continue to use del.icio.us for my technical bookmarks, I will probably use Mento.info to post items that are more creative/visual and to share links with others easily. I can think of so many situations where people could use this service such as if you were redecorating a room. Instead of trying to remember which bookmark you saw the orange/brown color combination by reading all of the 30 text bookmark titles, you could breeze down easily through your snippets and visually find what you were looking for. If you were shopping for a car or an apartment, instead of having a huge list of links, you could visually find the apartment with hardwood floors that you were thinking of or the yellow VW GTI with the sunroof.

This is a great little app and I am completely sold on it. If this has been done before, let me know in the comments and I'll check that one out too, but I believe this is a new idea. Mento.info is still in beta right now so you cannot just sign up. You can either contact me and I will send you an invite or if you are a little shy, you can go to the mento.info main page and sign up to receive an invitation (it will take a few days).

I hope you are enjoying my posts so far. I always appreciate feedback so let me know your comments and criticism! I promise I won't get too upset. ;-)

Social Bookmarking in Plain English by Common Craft

Thoughts on the AAG annual meeting in Boston

2008-04-20T12:39:00.004-04:00

I just returned yesterday from Boston and an amazing AAG meeting there. This was my first AAG annual meeting and I was completely blown away. I heard reports of 8,000 attendees and apparently for the past several meetings they have broken attendance records. This is such an exciting time to be in this field. There were literally thousands of sessions throughout the five day event. They ranged from what you might expect ("Historical Geography", "Topics in Biogeography") to what you might not ("The Happy Yodel and the Sad Sigh: Mobility, Scale, and Globalization"... three papers on yodelling believe it or not. and, "The Geographies of Cycling"). It was a bit overwhelming to have so many choices of sessions to attend. I went to the South East Regional meeting this past fall in Charleston, SC and it was similarly exciting but it could not begin to prepare me for the annual meeting. Some highlights for me included:

Presenting at the AAG - It was humbling to be in the cyberinfrastructure session and although I was extremely nervous, it gave me confidence for the next time I present
Subversive Cartographies - I missed Dennis Wood, but did get to see John Krygier's presentation. Dr. Scott taught us cartography using their book. Krygier had such a refreshing take on presentations and caused me to think more about how maps work. I even got a comic book from him!
Web Mapping/Cartography sessions
Session on coastal vulnerability to sea level rise - These presentations were mostly by USGS and were some of the best research showcases I saw. Very objective, very definitive talks. Very "so-there" research as opposed to "all-about-it" (from SU Geog414 Research and Writing class and another paper which I can't find right now).
Visualization Cartography and Cognition session - Zachary Johnson did a very well done presentation on his research into cartograms and cognition. Sarah Battersby also had a very interesting talk on digital globes where she proposed standards to the interface design. I thought the timing of this was kind of funny since Google Earth has just released an update with yet another grouping of navigation tools. Ha!

I am coming back full of ideas and excitement for my next few years in grad school. The conference was also made so much better for me because I was with my buddies from Maine. I consider myself fortunate to have them as friends and colleagues.

We stayed in a hostel out past Boston University and the train ride to the conference each day was a welcome part of my mornings there. This was my second time in Boston and I could definitely see myself living there in the future. The city (hah, at least our train line and Copley Square) is very hip and young and bike-friendly.

Overall it was an excellent trip and my last big deadline for a little while. I am looking forward to having more free time to post here and to gear up for South Carolina in the fall.

Already Slacking

2008-04-07T19:50:00.006-04:00

Just three posts in and I'm already falling behind! I actually have a good excuse though. Within the recent weeks I have been working on two papers I'm going to present at conferences and hopefully publish. After they are done, I will post them here as well. The first one will be presented this Thursday at the National Council for Undergraduate Research (NCUR) right here at Salisbury University. It is focused on Nvidia's new CUDA technology and its implementation in Manifold GIS. The second paper will be presented next Thursday in Boston at the Annual meeting of the American Association of Geographers (AAG). That paper is a collaboration with some of my friends from my Maine research experience last summer on a data model we used to organize and utilize our massive amounts of data there.

Whew... While it has been (and continues to be) stressful putting these presentations and papers together, but it is definitely good practice for my graduate career.

Cloud Streets

2008-03-18T09:58:00.000-04:00

see and read more here!

How to connect Manifold System 8.0 to PostGIS

2008-03-13T14:41:00.000-04:00

In a class I am currently taking, we are evaluating three spatial databases, PostGIS, Microsoft SQL Server Spatial 2008, and Oracle Spatial. We are roughly halfway into the course and are now fiddling around with loading data different ways into the database. Manifold System 8, a full featured GIS can connect to each one of these databases but not without a little tweaking. Credit to my classmate Kevin Ross and my professor Art Lembo for doing most of the work on getting this running.

* This process is using PostGIS 1.3.2 (w/ Postgres 8.3), Manifold System 8.0.4.2836 Ultimate Edition, Windows XP Professional

Right click on My Computer and select the Advanced Tab. Select Environmental Variables
Scroll down the System Variable list and select the Path variable and click Edit.
In the Variable value, enter the path to the PostgreSQL binaries at the end of the other paths. On my machine it is C:\Program Files\PostgreSQL\8.3\bin, but yours may be different
Restart your computer
Start Manifold and select Tools > Database Console
Click the "..." button, then select the "Add Data Source" button (looks like a star)
In the Connect To pop up window, select the Files of Type drop down and select "PostgreSQL Data Sources()"
The new window that pops up should have something like: Server: localhost, User name: postgres, Password: password, Database: spatialdatabase

That's it! More information will hopefully follow on PostGIS and how to set it up to this point.

Well why not

2008-03-13T13:58:00.000-04:00

Hi everyone, I'm going to start blogging for the (i think) forth time. My goal for this is to be a technical resource for myself and other GIS users. I'd like to document my trials and errors mostly for my own use and maybe some others out there may get some use out of this as well.

Some personal blogging will likely happen occasionally also. I hope you readers find this interesting and useful! Feel free to leave me feedback to let me know how I am doing!