Surveying, Mapping and GIS

I am planning on attending a few sessions at the Pennsylvania Surveyors' Conference again this year - looking forward to seeing many old friends again.

The USEPA Geospatial Information Officer (GIO) position was posted on USAJobs last week - finally Brenda Smith's shoes will hopefully be filled. Beyond this, from all I have heard, this will indeed be a very high-level position within the agency, which should bode well for the future.

Aside from applications development, much of what I have been doing to date within EPA has been getting a handle on the Geospatial Segment Architecture, identifying alignment with FEA Geospatial Profile and GeoLoB, and other projects, to lay the groundwork for leveraging and harmonizing all of the GIS-related efforts within EPA. This might be a perfect job for me - however, I am thinking I might like to stay in the private sector...

I recently picked up a Holux GPSlim 240 bluetooth unit - it's got the SiRFstarIII chipset, and the whole package is barely the size of my thumb. I have been having some fun with it with various PDA-based and laptop-based software packages for navigation and tracking...

I have thus been overjoyed to see that one of my favorite pieces of software, Google Earth, is now looking at realtime GPS tracking... About time!

The Google Earth Blog provides an overview, along with some good insight on how the functionality works. This will add a whole new layer of fun to Google Earth!

One of the stories circulating in the blogosphere is the Microsoft initiative to circulate some Vista-loaded machines to select bloggers - more here:

I Started Something Blog

It's one thing to give out copies of Vista for evaluation - after all I participated in the beta as well - but another to give out fancy $2000 Acer Ferrarri laptops with it. As one might expect, the response has been mixed, but generally not favorable.

Bribery? Unethical? I won't comment on that, as I think such a blanket condemnation would be premature. What might be more interesting is to look at who they selected, and why. I, in particular, would be more interested if it's pursuit of buy-in by outspoken critics, or reward to those troops who supported Microsoft in the past, neutral honest-broker bloggers or a mix of all of these.