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10 Years What?

rjhale · Oct 30, 2018 ·

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.  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”.  I didn’t have a plan but I figured I’d have one when I came back.  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.

It’s a Pirate’s Life for me 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.  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.

FoSS4G 2017 in Boston

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.  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.

Editing your data in QGIS

rjhale · Oct 24, 2018 ·

It has been a while. I’ve had a running project in PostGIS now that is 4 years old. It ends this month. It spent 3 years as a shapefile and one year as a File Based Geodatabase before I decided to “learn hos this postgis thing works”.  Having a running project last for that long is a bit rare on my end. With that ending other things are starting up which is nice – because I tend to seek out a comfortable routine and don’t push myself.

Flash forward to this month’s fun.  Sixty one columns and 22,000 something points. Not that insane – but editing is a bit of a chore. AS you’ve got 61 columns of stuff. Do they edit all 61 columns? No.

I did the new standard routine of loading QGIS/PostGIS/Geoserver/Fulcrum and we were off and running. As it turns out it had been a while since they had edited and the backlog was filling up.

Part of the fun of a new client is learning their processes. One the first things we did is start editing data. This can be a bit unnerving for new users:

You get all 61 columns in one menu upon adding new data. The cool thing with QGIS is there’s a good way to reduce the choices using the tools you’re provided. If you right click the layer in the Layers Panel and go to Properties and then to Attributes form you’ll notice at the very top you’ve got three choices. The first being just use the default. The second would be the drag and drop designer. You can remove the things you don’t need to edit. So just start clicking that minus button on the form layout.  Yes I just randomly removed a bunch of stuff as an example.

You can now edit things with a little bit less confusion.

So now when you add a point:

BUT…..What if you want a less confusing menu for editing? YOU SAID THREE CHOICES FOR MENUS AND YOU ONLY MENTIONED TWO. Part 2 is coming…..WHY DIDN’T I INCLUDE IT NOW? Well….my posts are too long as is…..

FOSS4G-NA 2019

rjhale · Oct 10, 2018 ·

FOSS4G-NA popped up on my radar this week.

So from just the website and a few twitter noise makers it looks like It’s headed to Mission Beach California (San Diego) April 16-18 2019.  I’ve made the last 3 – so It looks like I’m going to do my best to make this one.  Road Trip? I encourage you to attend and support the FOSS4G North America Community.

20 minutes at the East TN TNGIC Meeting

rjhale · Sep 6, 2018 ·

I went through a year or so of not talking at conferences. For local ones I’d show up and do something. I taught a workshop at FOSS4GNA 2018. I did a workshop at FOSS4G 2017 in Boston (and it sorta sucked).  I need to get out of that mode and talk more – but I’m happier being quiet these days and working with clients.

Anyway – at FOSS4GNA 2018 I discovered something – the OSGEO Suite had disappeared from Boundless’s Website and was replaced with a github repository. It wasn’t long after Don Meltz put up an excellent explanation of the OSGEO Suite. The OSGEO Suite being gone isn’t a problem. It does increase the amount of talking I have to do spend explaining it’s not a problem. I could even compile the suite – but my clients can’t. They are smart people – but the time to compile the boundless suite won’t be happening.

One of the things I keep running into is the idea of an Open Source Server. The OSGEO Suite was well known and I get people asking “Hey – can you set us up a geo server”. They mean the opengeo suite. I then launch into an explanation of what makes up a “geo server” and they go a bit blank and answer me “Yeah – one of those”.

So for the next bit I’m gonna be doing something like this:

I want to explain how this works to people. We’ve gotten a bit deaf by hearing “ArcServer” at every conference in TN as this one monolithic thing you have to install to make a web map…which really don’t need since AGOL appeared but…you want SDE and it’s not called that and you have two people editing but you need SQl Server but you don’t….

Anyway,  QGIS/PostgreSQL/PostGIS I’ve installed multiple times and as of late I’m experimenting with geoserver and what it can/can’t do. I have no grand delusions of creating ‘Randy’s Open Geo Spatial Super Duper Server’.  I want to get to the point where maybe mapserver is an option in this. So much to learn…so little time.

I suck at github – but I’ve been more active as I try to develop a skill set and get over the angst of pushing and pulling things. I’ve built a vagrant box to install PostGIS/PostgreSQL/Geoserver so I can have something to point at plus it gives me a starting point for an upcoming class I’m in the middle of building. The vagrant box isn’t pretty – I expect to change it over the next bit as it’s mostly pieced together from a lot of other people’s work (Coleman McCormick, Dave Smith, etc). It works though and I have everything but pgadmin 4 running in one spot. Which – I don’t think this is anywhere near “install this for a server” because this is mostly just for talking, training, and testing.

So why vagrant? Why not docker? I can gloss over vagrant faster at theses talks than I can docker.  I have 16 minutes to draw diagrams and about 4 minutes to publish one piece of data: QGIS -> PostGIS -> Geoserver -> Leaflet.

Anyway – if you’re up for the possibility of a train wreck of a presentation come by the East Tennessee Meeting in Kingsport next week as I try to explain how this works and hopefully you get excited enough to install some or all of these components and do something cool with your data.

OSGEOLive 12.0

rjhale · Sep 6, 2018 ·

So for those of you going “HEY I WANT TO USE SOME OF THIS OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE?”. Maybe you can’t install it locally…or maybe you have a spare machine laying around – there’s a way for you to do it.

Download the OSGEOLive image and run it as a virtual machine or boot your computer into the Distribution. It’s a Linux operating system with about 50 plus free and open source geospatial applications. 

They put a ton of effort into releasing this as a showcase of the software in the OSGEO realm. So give it a run and test out software you have questions about.

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