Rambling

Working from Home

I told myself this year I was going to just type more and I’ve failed miserably at doing that. I’ve been caught up in projects, marketing, and life.

I work from Home. I know what you’re thinking – “How do you keep this international business running so smoothly from Home?”. It’s a struggle. Lately in the news there’s been a mass of “Don’t shake hands” or “Wash your hands” or “Avoid crowds” going around. So Check, Check, and Check.

Why do I work from Home? It’s just me at the moment. From the day I started this business I’ve had a home office. Sometimes I can close the door. Sometimes I can’t. Occasionally I’ll get fed up and have to leave and go work somewhere remotely be it a coffee shop or a friend’s office or something. Some days you have to get out. Most days I’m here with some music playing the background and working at something…be it a job….or marketing…or just writing.

Over the last 4 yearsÂ probably 90% of my work has become remotely driven. When I first started I was constantly driving to clients to do what was needed and over the last bit it’s been more and more remotely logging in and doing what I need to do. Most of my clients still house everything in house vs the cloud – BUT – the cloud is starting to slowly influence my life as clients move to remote hosting options.

It is hard though. In a past life I was married to a nurse and we dreaded August. Why August? Start of school. Kids would get sick and go to the Hospital and she would get sick and bring it to me and I’d get sick. For a month it was pretty miserable. After two months we were pretty much walking antibodies and were free from whatever was plaguing the normal world.

I get sick now like two times a year now – maybe less. Even one of my friends said the other day “You never get sick”. Well I’m hardly ever around people. The firstÂ few years or so that was fine…well – it wasn’t fine because I was never really “getting out” except for work. The last 5 I’ve been actively getting out be it hiking or canoeing or taking small trips. Work can wait. My life and health can’t. Which if you’re ever thinking of working from home I would encourage you to monetize what you’re saving and invest in something to make you happy be it gym membership, outdoor something, or tickets to a sporting event.

Also – no kids. So if you just look at me in general I live in a bubble. A self contained germ free bubble. The last few times I’ve actively dated there were kids involved (for I have the brain of an 11 year old at times). I think the entire time that happened I stayed sick because I’m out of my bubble. “Oh My God why are you sick all the time”. I would then explain through my hacking and coughing that I live in this self contained environment. Send me to a conference for a week and by the end of it I’m starting to sniffle.

What does this all have to do with anything? Not much. How does this relate to the Covid 19 outbreak? For me not that big of a life change but for some it will be. So if you find yourself working from home:

Eat something good for you. Plan a meal you need to cook. If you go out to eat go somewhere you enjoy.
Do something – go for a walk/run/hike/bike ride/something that makes use of something other than your brain.
Stop when you get tired of sitting there. Do something else for a bit.
Set hours and stick to them.

So for all of you at home – enjoy something different. Eat your vitamins. Wash your hands. Stretch!

My People

Let’s flash back to 1996. The Olympics were in full swing. I was 2 years out of college and working for the federal government. I had only been to one “conference” and that was only a state level academy of science meeting. I found myself standing at the underused Chattanooga Airport headed to Cincinnati and then to Palm Springs to the 1996 ESRI users Conference. Coolest part was I was so inexperienced in flying when we were delayed leaving Chattanooga because Al Gore was coming to the Olympics – I had no worry. I would make my connecting flight because there was no way they would leave CincinnatiÂ without me on board. In Cincinnati I was standing in front of the near empty gate because the plane had left. So I was then routed to Chicago. I ended up in Palm Springs at nearly midnight. No rental car because somehow that had gotten cancelled. I stumbled into my room and sat there hungry and hating life with no luggage. The Luggage eventually turned up a little worse for wear. I think it went somewhere far away and was driven in….

The next day I found myself at registration at the Conference center in Palm Springs. I registered and went for a walk. I dragged my giant bag of stuff around with me. The Palm Springs convention center was big – but not terribly large. You could draw a dot on a map on “where are you from” and surprise there was only a few TN dots there. There were special interest groups. There were developers walking around. There were users. There was Bob Hope’s house down the street. There was golf. There was a lot of wind.

Two things happened that week.

I was blown away by a conference. I think there was only 3 or 4 thousand there. Maybe less. It was a good group of people. I mean the conference was nice – but I found a lot of like minded people there making maps and worrying over data. So I talked to people. I spent a lot of time just wandering the halls taking notes. The one talk that still sticks with me 23 years later – the guy that wrote ArcPlot gave a demo of “Tricks and Tips for Arcplot” (I think). As I was the guy who was getting hit by a lot of map requests I was pretty overjoyed to know I could edit data from Arcplot (plus copy files and move things around on the network without leaving ArcPlot). I also got a chance to hassle one of the arcpress developers (look it up – I’m not explaining it). The guy (whose name I can’t remember) finished the demo and turned to the near silent crowd and went “TADAAAAAAA” and everyone clapped. I may have stood up and clapped – Printing was a big deal back then.
I was sitting in the audience when Jack (who seemed really irritated at the Conference Center) announced “We are going to San Diego next year”. I think I went back to San Diego in 98 or 99 and once more in 2002.
(Third thing) – Some guy from ESRI Pulled up at a door in a VW bus. He had a keg or three crammed in the back and it was all held in place by some Sun Sparc Servers (look it up). I helped him Unload the beer.Â We didn’t drop a server. Imagine that happening in San Diego…….

The move to San Diego ended up doubling the crowds. To me it was more of a pain to get a room and navigate your way downtown than it was worth. Yeah it is nice to see 10,000 other people who were doing “GIS” things – but I really don’t remember much from those years except for the times I snuck out of the conference and went to the San Diego Zoo and was probably almost eaten by a shark in La Jolla.

I’ve been watching Twitter and the ESRI UC is coming up for 2019.

I won’t be there. Which – no joke if I bought a ticket I doubt I’d be let in the front door….and that’s completely fine. That side of my career isn’t that exciting currently.

If I look back at my entire career in Geo (now at 27 years) it’s always been a never ending pile of new things coming down the pike that were earth shaking getting announced at this conference. Learn Arcview Avenue – hey now we are switching to VBA. You can compile ArcINFO with TK for a better ArcTools Experience. Lemme learn VBA and now we’re at VB. Hey we have MapObjects…no wait ArcObjects…….no wait we’ve got SDE for databases…….and look a map on the web…Hey Python I should learn that now…3D (Which I saw a demo of in 1996) is going to be revolutionary. My social media is exploding with posts and pics and that was me pre-social media on cloud 9 talking to people and learning that:

“HEY WAIT YOU MEAN YOU’VE HAD ARCMAP CRASH TOO…..IN FRANCE….OMG WE ARE SO CONNECTED”. Hah. I joke. Mostly.

Anyway – where was I going with this. I have no idea to be honest. I spent an hour looking for the pics I took in Palm Springs. I took a ton of pics with my fairly new 35 mm camera (look it up) – and they are somewhere in a box.

I did crank up ArcMap 10.2 this week to fix a problem I had that couldn’t be fixed in QGIS. No Joke. I sat there just staring at the screen. I couldn’t remember how to dump a DWG to a file based Geodatabase. Back in 2014 I spent an inordinate amount of time wishing for functionality that wasn’t in QGIS that I had in Arcmap. Friday I spent an inordinate amount of time wishing for functionality that wasn’t in ArcMap that I had in QGIS. Plus I really need to look at Pro at some point. Sigh.

If I could bounce back in time to 1996 Randy and go “Hey in 2019 you can’t remember how to work ESRI products” he would probably laugh and throw something at me. I would also yell for him to enjoy that hair while it lasted which won’t be much longer. Oh yeah – trade the truck sooner. Go ahead and buy a dumpy house in 1997 on the North End of town and don’t worry – it will be fine as you won’t leave your job for another 10+ years.

For all of you out at the ESRI UC – enjoy yourselves. It will be a massive week of demos and things happening within the ESRI Ecosystem of products. What will I do this week? Teach a QGIS Class for a group who just transitioned out of the ecosystem.Â As much crap as I give the ESRI people at times – I do miss it a little (a little).

Anyway – I’m gonna go watch a movie and hope 1996 Van Halen doesn’t Break up.

10 Years What?

I do these small anniversary posts occasionally. I’ve been walking around for like a month with small things picking at me. This last week I lost my check card twice, my keys three times, and drove around one night for an hour not knowing where I wanted to eat. It took me until yesterday morning to go “Ohhhhhhhhh that’s why”.

So 10 years ago this week you had this grouchy (grouchier than I am now) guy working for the Federal Government – Tennessee Valley Authority to be precise. I had been there 16 years at that point. If you flashed back about 7 or 8 I had made a half-hearted attempt to leave my job and that didn’t pan out due to several factors. If you were watching me in 2006 I was getting more and more unhappy with work. As I’ve learned part of it was “just me expecting too much” and part was the job was literally going no where. I wasn’t going to be laid off like so many of my friends had been. There was no incentive for me to do anything better than I was doing. It was misery all the way around and I was taking it out on everyone. I had some hobbies outside of work but there was a general “I hate everything” that permeated my life.

I worked here – not in the 40’s. I’m not that old.

So in 2006 I started moonlighting and taking on contract work. In about a year or so I had become an ESRI business partner and Certified Trainer. All while maintaining my day job. It was a bit nerve wracking. Some people knew what I was doing and had it really become public knowledge I would have been fired on the spot. So one fateful day in 2008 I walked into my boss’s office and went “I gotta go”. Three weeks later I went. I found out some time later my job had “ended” as no one picked it up – they just contracted it out.Â That made me sad but it just re-enforced the notion I wasn’t doing anything worthwhile.

Flash Forward 2 years and things sorta sucked on the consulting front. This isn’t an easy gig by any stretch. Work never appeared with any normalcy. Some days no work and some days it was 18 hours with 6 hours of sleep and more work until it went away.

Working and running a booth at a conference circa 2010

Flash Forward 2 more years and I was gearing up for a swan song in the Caribbean as I had decided “I’m done”.Â I didn’t have a plan but I figured I’d have one when I came back.Â Oh how things changed in the Caribbean. I ended up dropping out of the ESRI BP program as I wasn’t a good fit. I did my last ArcGIS class late in 2013.

Two years after that……. I had grown and shrunk as a business. I gained employee and the employee left due to work being non-existent. I found myself ready to move yet again. Work was more miss than hit for over a year mostly thanks to partnerships that didn’t pan out.Â Having an employee isn’t easy by any stretch. So many things I did wrong during that time period – which in general seems to be how I exist in life most days. Someone made the mistake of asking me “How do you run a small business?” the other day and two days later I finished my rant.

Flash forward to now and it’s a good existence. Not Glamorous – but work is up as clients find me and I dance on the open source side of life. I accidentally looked at my books this weekend and I so far have “broken even” and it appears I’ll end the year in the black. Which is a mighty accomplishment for me. No 100k contracts or limos or clients where money isn’t an issue though – if you are one gimme a shout. I did turn into a raging capitalist with no being my favorite word of the day.

Partnerships have come and gone. I can’t count the number I’ve had…..5 or 6…maybe 8. Everyone wants to “help” and in general help is lacking in a partnership. I’ve one business partnership currently. I’m good with that amount. I’ve relegated myself to FOSS4G conferences as a creative outlet.

On the personal side of life – Oh the things I have learned and continue to learn. The Phrase “It’s not personal – it’s just business” doesn’t exist for me. It’s all personal. I did find that my body doesn’t handle stress well – water is the key. So I drink water constantly. Working from home can be murder on a diet – so I’ve learned to watch what I eat. I rediscovered a love of canoeing. I rediscovered how much I like ridding a bike again. I’m going camping before the end of the year on the coast. Don’t know where yet.

Occasionally I do think “It’s time to do something else” and maybe I will at some point. For right now the work I do is full filling so I’ll keep moving in this direction.Â I do wonder at time “what if I had stayed….” and I have no doubt a heart attack or stroke would have taken me out.

So yeah – 10 years. To all of you I’ve ticked off in the last 10 – I’m sorry. To all of you I’ve tried to help – I hope I did. To all of you who have been a client – thank you. To all that have helped me – the biggest thank you is reserved for you, that person there, the other person over there, and you over in the back.

Do it this way

The nice thing about having a “blog” besides the occasional ridicule that blogging is so 90’s…or was it 2000s….is no one in my family reads it. Heh. We are an internet phobic group with Dad possibly being the more active user besides me.

Anyway – It’s Fathers Day. I’m not a father through a twist of fate…or a twist of my winning personality. Anyway – Yesterday I finally FINALLY got my jeep back on the road. I bought it in 2000. For the last 2 or 3 years it’s not been in great shape so I’ve not went far in it. Yesterday I finished getting new tires and a new soft top and a tuneup. I’ve another small list of things to do but overall I drove it all day yesterday for no other reason than I could. About 10 years ago I put an overhead cargo rack believing that it wold be pretty awesome if I ever got to Africa in it. I could sit up there and take pics of elephants and rhinos and be safely 10 feet off the ground. What that did was prevent me from taking the soft top off….well actually it didn’t. For several years I followed the directions on how to do it. I lost the directions. Then for 7 years I didn’t. That left me needing 4 hands vs 2 yesterday. So I called Dad.

I think Dad probably thinks I’m horribly incompetent – but what I’ve found is the one thing we can both get together on is car repair. So when a good friend died and his car decided to stop working on his girlfriend off we went. Turns out it was a starter issue. 3 hours to figure out the starter had been rigged into place vs replaced properly. We replaced it properly…well he did:

When I couldn’t get the jeep top on yesterday:

If you trace back to when I was 18 it was a need – I had to get him involved in any car repair project as most of my cars early on were pretty bad. I don’t have that skill set. I sorta have it now – BUT – it’s fun to get him involved because to watch his problem solving on a bolt that won’t come loose or a “thingamajig” isn’t “clunking right”. So it’s more of a learning experience on watching him at 75 still trouble shoot a problem. It’s not horribly different than watching me work through a Geo problem.

Oh yeah – and the lawnmower died. So I got a 2011 motor on a 1973 Body:

So today if it all works we’re grilling burgers out. Knowing him I’ll show up to do it and he’ll do it to keep me away from the grill. Which will give me more time to go break something on my car to get his advice on fixing it.

Floatsam and Jetsam

Here’s my random Blog post ….

I think I have 4 usable computers in my office. Two are running Ubuntu as a Desktop, one is running Ubuntu server, one is running Windows 10 (and I’m surprised that laptop still runs). My two main machines are running Ubuntu 17.04. I’ve jumped all over the place with desktops. The run has been Gnome 2, XFCE, Mate and I’ve just jumped to Gnome 3. For a few months I was on the fluxbox side of life.

Why Gnome 3?Â I haven’t run “stock Ubuntu” since the Unity desktop. With the announcement that Ubuntu was back to Gnome 3 I decided maybe it was time to give it a another run. I love Mate. I love XFCE – but I needed a change. So – a change. Overall – it’s not half bad. I remember When Gnome 3 first made an appearance I hated it – I’m appreciating the keyboard centric approach now. Unity was keyboard centric – but too locked for my enjoyment. My only hate – the amount of RAM consumed. I need to up the RAM on my workstation. Not solely because of Gnome – but just because I do a lot and I think it’s time for an upgrade.

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I started running Ubuntu full-time in 2013 when I had to work in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Hurricane Irma reminded me of the craziness of working there. After being down there for 4 or 5 months I became somewhat obsessed with portability. That was my first jump into open source with QGIS and PostGIS. There were many days where the internet wasn’t available. I remember one day where two of us were carrying 2 laptops, two power strips, a 50 foot extension cord, and a printer. We made a wrong turn walking from a seaport and wandered aimlessly for about an hour looking for the car rental agency. One night I was sitting on a porch stealing internet from someone almost out of range trying to download/upload data. I became weird about leaving with my laptop for a walk on the island. If I happen to hit “free internet” I stopped and worked. Better yet if I could recharge it.

I’ve wondered for the better part of a week how I would work post hurricane with scarce electricity and almost no internet. On a good day back in 2013 the internet was scarce. I would get a call or email and ask me to download a 4gb file and you might as well have asked me to fly on those days. One of my friends called from St Thomas and he’s working his way through GIS data on a desktop. My laptops usually get about 4.5 hours off a full charge. If I’m working toss that back to three hours. The longest I’ve ever went without electricity was a week back in 2011. I borrowed a friend’s generator to get my desktop running to move data to my laptop and then head to the nearest coffee shop to work.

This week I wondered if I could get a 56K modem back “online” if I had to. Then I realized my current rental doesn’t even have intact phone lines. Hah.

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I was at FOSS4G in Boston over a month ago. It doesn’t feel like a month. Ran into one of the volunteers who is a PhD Candidate at Columbia U. One thing led to another and we start discussing his dissertation. I have threatened over the last bit to do a PostGIS class. I keep backing off because “How well do I actually know this piece of software?”. I get by. I enjoy it. I don’t know if I could teach it. So – I started randomly answering questions on data analysis.

He offered to pay me. I refused. This year I’ve been a “smart” capitalist. I would say raging but that’s not entirely true. I cut all volunteer jobs down to 1. I give consistent estimates. I don’t chase work nor am I getting into “low bid” situations where my throat is getting cut. It is what it is – I will get what you want done as quickly as possible and correct. So – the Q & A on PostGIS and data is sorta nice. I guess I can still yell “it’s still not 100% about the money” a bit as I run this business and look at ways to increase efficiency and work. I’m learning a few things as this person isn’t primarily a GIS guy – it’s a tool. I’m helping him build out his toolbox of data tricks.

Anyway….back to work…..