North River Geographic Systems Inc

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Do it this way

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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.

Knoxville FOSS4G 2018 – August 13th 2018

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It’s on.

Website: https://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/20180813-knoxville-foss4g

Date: August 13th 2018

Location:
Plant Biotech Building
UT Ag Campus
2505 EJ Chapman Dr
Knoxville, TN 37996

I guess it might be safe to call this the Second Annual FOSS4G meeting in TN. We’re headed back to Knoxville on August 13th 2018 for another day of Free and Open Source excitement for GIS. Last year we had about 50 people turn up to hear talks ranging from OSM to LIDAR to Image Classification.

We’re also looking for Sponsors. Right now we have 3 and some money has already been promised. Most likely this even will cost $10 this year to offload some of the headache I got to experience last year as “Money Juggler”.  Depending on sponsors this $10 may drop. Registration will be open soon – that’s on my list for next week once I get a few more things settled.

Good people – if you are in the area turn up and come to this. It’s a good time. Good Discussion. Come see how you can benefit from FOSS4G in your world.

Last Year’s Hurricane Season in the USVI

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So I’ll talk about this finally. I usually don’t talk about “work” unless it’s in generalities about software and processes. I probably should talk about work more.

I’ve never been in a hurricane. I think so far I’ve been in about a handful of earthquakes, stood on one volcano, and I think I’ve seen one tornado. Not that I’m looking to be in a natural disaster – I just don’t have a frame of reference for what happens during a hurricane or a tornado.

If you flash back to early September 2017 the Caribbean was gearing up for a hurricane and. Turns out two hit close together. I had the chance to work in the US Virgin Islands on an addressing project with AppGeo and Spatial Focus several years ago. It’s been a “wait and see” type of deal. We did a little and watch as red tape and things slow it down. I called a few friends down there before the hurricanes hit and wished them well. Overall – there wasn’t a ton of fear but a lot of concern. I was concerned because the 911 system isn’t great as the addressing isn’t wonderful in the USVI.

My memory is getting fuzzy – but it seems like both hurricanes hit and it was a while before anyone could call/email me. Maybe it was late September or October before the phone rang. They needed help to figure out where the tarps needed to go.  FEMA/USACE was headed down to bring tarps and supplies – maybe they were already there. A sneaker net of GIS data had cranked itself up on the island as thumb drives were passed around. I started trying to figure out “what made sense with the base data I had available”. I started digging into what USACE and What FEMA would do if your roof was damaged. More or less if you had 50% of the structure of the roof left they could put a tarp on it. I came up with a plan and contacted AppGeo and they tossed a person my way.

Structures were categorized:

  • 1 – 25% Roof Damage
  • 26 to 50% Roof Damage
  • 51 to 75% Roof Damage
  • 76 to 100% Roof Damage
  • Structure Destroyed
  • No Damage
  • No Imagery

NOAA flew imagery of the area. The imagery was a bit rough around the edges but it worked. Actually – let me back up – for what it was it was awesome. Granted it didn’t lend itself to any sort of automatic classification as there was a lot of building lean and some missing imagery. It worked though. That was a great free resource by NOAA.

Hey that’s a lot of points. Yes – 48380 points covering three islands. Granted I didn’t get every house as I had nothing much to start out with except OSM and some USDA NAIP imagery. I would guess I’m within 10% of an accurate building count. Some people have offices/live in shipping containers down there. WHICH – when I was there made me go “awesome” but when looking at the imagery at a shipping container blowing a half mile across a field – not so awesome.

It did give me flash backs to my old remote sensing days with the government. Although this was less refined – it was a game in the afternoons to see how many points I could collect in an hour. Some neighborhoods were easy. Some not so much as there wasn’t much left. The other nice thing that happened was sometime around December I switched over to QGIS 3.0 and started seeing what I could/couldn’t do with this almost released software. Several bug reports were filed so more good came out of this.

The data started making it’s way out to one agency after another. My big fear then was “what if someone uses this beyond ‘roofs'”. I wasn’t doing a full blow damage assessment because I was seeing some evidence that maybe the roof survived but the bottom floors didn’t. Plus I wasn’t on location.

It took me a bit longer to finish than I wanted – Volunteer projects tend to be the last thing I work on most days.

I did start pulling numbers out of some of the work – this is for St John Island:

Count Classification Percent
1487 1 – 25% Roof Damage 41.42
326 26 to 50% Roof Damage 9.08
131 51 to 75% Roof Damage 3.65
126 76 to 100% Roof Damage 3.51
1007 No Damage 28.05
17 No Imagery 0.47
496 Structure Destroyed 13.82
3590 Total 100

So 25% of the houses had no roof damage. 60% had something happen. More or less 15% were leveled. I’ve heard ancillary stories where almost all houses had water coming in them and in a warm tropical climate you get mold. Mold would make the house unusable for me.

Anyway – I worry about the 2018 Hurricane season that is upon us. Maybe it will be quiet – maybe it won’t be. AppGeo has Mapgeo for the islands. It worked out well. I’m going to try to “build” a database here so in case something happens and I’m not starting from scratch in case I get to help out again. I hope I don’t help as nothing happens.

 

12 years?

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Some posts are way harder to write than others. That’s how I know I’m thinking too much on the subject matter. Thinking too much has given me writers block up to a degree for the last few weeks. I redid this one three times.

I started getting Linkedin Messages last week that were “Congrats on the Anniversary”. So I’ve been “working” at North River Geographic Systems for 12 years now. Technically  It was late April that I finally filed all the paperwork to start a business 12 years ago. I know – what’s a month? It had been a running fantasy since 2001 and it morphed and changed as life happened. So in 2006 I pulled the trigger and in 2008/2009 I transitioned to this being a full time thing.

I was trying to think of a way to sum up the last 12 years. I was trying to think of milestones or noteworthy things that’s I’ve done. Every year about March I start thinking about where I was 12 years ago and where I am now. I was trying to think of one giant phrase to sum up owning a business in 2018.

I’m never bored.

There. Done.

I didn’t have a great plan starting out. Back in 2006 it was enough to own some ESRI Software and look for work. In the By 2012/2013 I ended up leaving the ESRI Business Partners program and started focusing on Open Source. Towards the end of those “middle years” I ended up shifting focus to just about 90% open source. As of right now I’m 100% open source, dealing with data, and have customers calling me as opposed to me having to track them down. You know what – I cranked up a copy of ArcGIS 10.6 last week at a clients office and enjoyed that (weird right).

I’m happy. Mostly. It’s taken me a long time to get to that point. Happy will cover stuff at work and stuff not at work. I’ve adopted more of a “live and let live” attitude about everything. There are things I do well. There are things I don’t do well. I hope it’s all reflected accurately on the website so people know when/why to call me (which reminds me I need to update some stuff on the website). I hope I don’t run down what makes you happy. It may not make me happy but that’s fine. Just don’t hurt anyone in the process. I’ve been pulling back more and more from social media. I don’t want to know everything about you. Just that you are happy or you need help. That’s all.

For a good long while I just sorta existed from month to month. If you’re services oriented (like I am), services can come and go at the drop of a hat. As of right now I’m busy. I’m not looking at starving next month. Hopefully it continues. There is some merit to “spatial is special” still. I know it’s fun for us to scream and go “GEO IS EASY EVERYONE IS DOING IT” but they aren’t. I started in geo accidentally 26 years ago. The software changes but the science remains the same.

Anyway – I thank you all for the good thoughts. Thank you for enjoying my lunatic ramblings up here. There are more coming as life on this end continues.

 

 

 

FOSS4GNA 2018

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I love a good road trip. FOSS4GNA was in St Louis Missouri this year. Close enough for me to get in the car and tune out for 5 to 6 hours.

First thing on the Agenda – QGIS.  I did the 4 hour “Intro to QGIS” for about 60 something people. You had people who had worked around gis for a good while and were curious about this Open Source desktop. You had some people who had been using it and had questions. Overall it was a bit much with that many people – but worth the effort. I hope everyone walked out with something new they didn’t know. I was inspired – 4 years ago you’d scream “QGIS” and there were a few who knew. I think this year I’ve taught the 4 hour class to about 100 people. This is going well – watch for QGIS Part II coming shortly. I’m hopeful to do the 8 hour one at some point. Seriously – I know you people love 3.5 hours of me talking but the 8 hours of me talking is magnificent (it’s actually not).

I did a really technical “Copy and paste” of the paper abstracts as listed on the website and filtered out a few words that were throwing everything off.  You could pick and poke and over analyze this very happy looking word cloud a bunch – I wouldn’t. Do notice the giant work “DATA” in the middle of it though. There is a very small word: GIS. So I’ve gotten the question several times over the last bit “Why go to this one?”. My consulting life has taken a very data centric turn and to deal with that data I use open source tools. So I spend a lot of time talking to people at the conference. I spend time talking to the developers who make the software I like…at this conference. This one scratches an itch for me. There are a lot of smart people. It’s a good thing. if I go to an event and have all the answers what’s the point in going. So what I walked out with is this following:

  • I never heard “Big Data” – it was just data. The implication was there for it to be big. Hence you hear a lot of Machine Learning. I have only used machine learning in terrible Terminator Jokes and being snarky. It’s time to give it a look. It’s also time for all this machine learning to do a proper reboot of the Terminator franchise..
  • Python is my nemesis. I need to spend more time with it. If I heard that one word once I heard it half a dozen times. Which – no big deal it’s a tech conference but for me it stuck out more than usual. Maybe I’m more self conscience about it these days. If I count every programming thing I’ve ever done that has stuck – so far it’s been bash shell scripting from 26 years ago (that’s not even programming so much). I’ve just got to force myself into more cases where I have to use python.
  • All this machine learning is turning it’s collective head towards imagery. In a conference where I don’t hear a ton of “Raster” or just ignore it – suddenly raster was in my face everywhere.
  • Geopackage    – I feel like I’ve spent over a year going “PLEASE DON’T LET ME BE WRONG ABOUT GEOPACKAGE”. After this conference – I found it mentioned multiple times and the over arching theme seemed to be “it’s a thing now so deal with it”. With QGIS switching to geopackage as the default data format – I expect this grow over the rest of 2018.
  • I found myself walking in and out of conversations constantly. Sometimes I meant to stick my head in – sometimes the conversation found me. I missed several talks just for the fun of talking to other users/developers.
  • The nice thing with this open source software – there are smart people working on it. So what happens when you need improvements to the software? GDAL Barn Raising.   How much hay did they raise? 140k worth. So there are much needed improvements coming to gdal. It’s noteworthy looking at the companies that contributed. Yes ESRI is in there. So if you ever wondered – they see the value of the improvements. Open source GIS touches a lot of software.

Other noteworthy things:

  • Someone said “there’s a line at the women’s restroom”. If you stopped and took a look around – there were more women at this conference. I don’t have a number. There were more. There were about 527 total humans registered at the conference. I will guess higher than 35% for women. No numbers to back me up so deal with it.
  • The second thing I do is go look at a mirror and walk out and look at the crowd. I’m tired of seeing white middle aged balding bearded glasses wearing people at conferences. There were people of color at this conference. The colors varied. Not everyone was like me and that was a good thing.

If there was a keynote that stuck out – it was the final one.

Chris Holmes brought the conference to an end with a discussion…of….well….Deep Learning…Machine learning….imagery……..the idea of a queryable earth.  In other words there’s enough imagery being taken you should be able to “ask” it questions. Planet Labs it pulling down something like 10 terrabytes of imagery a day. One snapshot of the earth. A DAY. So train the computers to classify the imagery and start asking questions.

There was a lot more that happened. Walking across St Louis at night. Food. City Park. Talking to total strangers. Meeting random people I bump into over the interwebs and hassling them. I stuck my foot in the Mississippi River. I got to play Geohipster for a day and tweet random insanity.  Having served on multiple conference committees – I find I’m happier not on them.  This was a good event. I enjoyed it. I walked away feeling overwhelmed and hopeful for the path I’m barely scratching after 26 years. So where is FOSS4GNA in 2019? Stay Tuned.

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