Surveying, Mapping and GIS

Just got in from another enjoyable day at the ESRI Conference today, last night's adventure was the GeoBlogger meetup at Mr. Tiki - got to met Daniel from FantomPlanet, Zen Master Dave Bouwman, Jesse, Sue and the rest of the Very Spatial team, and several others, close to 20 or so people turned out at Mr. Tiki. Google Earth graciously footed the bill, and filled us in on a lot of great stuff going on at Google. I did sample some of the "one of everything", but stayed away from the Large Drinks With Fruit And Umbrellas In Them.

I got to get out to several good sessions today. So often, however, I go from one item to the next, and find many gaps and overlaps in the projects that are being presented - many people all independently doing ver similar things in parallel, with little or no coordination between them. But fortunately folks like me spur conversation and put people together.

Still more reams of notes, and as it goes with these things, I start to suffer from mental overload. So what I am posting are not any actual notes, they are just a quick snapshot of the afternoon and evening... But time permitting, I will do a more thorough download as I get more time.

I did get to briefly sit in on the .NET SIG, hosted by Art Haddad, to see some very cool things being demoed as custom tasks for ArcExplorer, such as an animated wind velocity demo, which allowed custom symbology which actually changed to successively more sophisticated vectors as the user zooms in and out of the model. Unfortunately I didn't have my camera at the ready, but I did see that Dave Bouwman snapped a shot of it.

Another great item was the AGS mobile SDK - looks like a rich set of components for .NET, to support connected and disconnected, cached map viewing and editing, as well as GPS connectivity.

I then departed early to meet up with a group of friends to catch the Padres-Orioles game at Petco Park... Unfortunately the Padres were routed 7-1, some brilliant pitching by the Orioles' Guthrie. On the Padres' side, Branyan managed to hit a homer, the sole score of the night. The Orioles' Tejada took an errant pitch to his wrist, looked painful. Another highlight of the evening was definitely the purposeful loping of a random guy across the field, sliding into base as it were, and culminating with a fullblown tackle and cuffing.