I am passionate about metadata and every once in a while I meet someone else who is either also passionate about metadata or has had an interesting interaction with metadata and lived to tell the tale. A very small number of the people will tell me about their metadata mis-adventure while the rest of the people around us will slowly edge away from us as we discuss the necessity of the proper keyword thesaurus or some other metadata minutia. Those “other” people, well, they just don’t know what they’re missing. At the ASPRS / JACIE co-located conference in Louisville, KY in March I was lucky enough to catch the JACIE session on NED. Little did I realize the presenter, who had some great metadata information in the presentation, was someone I had spoke with on the phone about LiDAR metadata. I was extremely lucky as she sat at my table for lunch the next day. We exchanged some great stories. First, I better preface this with a sad warning. If you are all lucky enough not to have nightmares (or dreams) about work related topics in your sleep, you will not be able to relate to the rest of the story. You can, however, laugh with me…at myself…yes, and I suppose you’ll be laughing at me. But I don’t mind since I laugh at myself as well. Once the panic settles down about not doing something major on that dataset I will laugh but anyway, one with the story itself. When the presenter and I were talking at lunch she mentioned one of her coworkers had a metadata nightmare. The coworker said to herself in the nightmare, “I can’t use this apple, it doesn’t have metadata!” So the presenter wrote some metadata for the apple. Bounding coordinates of an orchard and everything. It sounded like an absolutely awesome way to chase away work-related sleep states to me! 
I just love this type of interaction and it is the reason I go to conferences. I have conversations with people who “get” my passion! And, you never know when this type of a connection will help you! I called on them for more metadata advice in late April. So sometimes it is who you know, but it is also who you connect with even if it is on a strange metadata topic!
All JACIE sessions are listed at http://calval.cr.usgs.gov/jacie/jacie-2014/ Read more about ASPRS at http://www.asprs.org and JACIE at http://calval.cr.usgs.gov/jacie/
