Twin Falls State Park

On the third day of my trip I woke up at Twin Falls State Park. The day before had been one of those exciting travel days when my eyes and head get so full of exciting things I have seen and done. This trip being during the long days of Summer, I had stretched the previous day very long and rolled into the Twin Falls campground in the drizzly dark. I saw no park personnel at the campground, and no campers. So I did the self register thing after finally figuring out which site of the many available I wanted. It was a little spooky being the only one there. I've been to this park before and it always seems under-utilized. It's kind of in the middle of nowhere in southern West Virginia, with miles of 2 lane roads isolating it from those who rarely leave the Interstate. I think it is very nice though.

The morning was a little cloudy and threatening rain. I decided to take a bike ride before enjoying the unpopulated shower facilities. The "Cliffside Trail" departed right from the campground, so it was my natural choice. I took my GPS with me and made the map below with the GPS Visualizer website. If you click it you can see it bigger. GPS Visualizer color coded my route based on the elevation.

The trail started out as fairly level riding on an old road. On the topo map it is labeled as "jeep road." Early on I saw a big flying thing which turned out to be a barn owl. It wanted nothing to do with me and flew off on big silent wings. The trail then started down steeply and I was thinking that I would not like the coming back up part. I almost fell down once. I was going down a steep section and tried to put my feet down and they just slid on the ground. So I crashed down on the crossbar and the pain was enough to make a shy bald Buddhist reflect and plan a mass murder. Actually it wasn't that bad because of my special padded bike shorts.

I reached the "cliffside" part of the trail and the scenery made the quick jump from rolling wooded terrain to much more vertical and dramatic as it seems prone to do in that part of WV. Above is an attempt at a panorama photo done with the tinycam. The weather remained changeable with occasional sun and light rain and low clouds skulking in the gorge as in the photo. The ride back was nice and followed by the hot shower. I packed up and left and still never saw any park employee or another camper.

Variety Pack

photo by Shari Pastore

(I started this post weeks ago, and now it is finally ready to release.)

This week's GIS class was a variety pack. I remember on special occasions, maybe 3 or 4 times in my whole childhood, Mom would get the variety pack of cereals. All those cute little boxes of different types of cereal. (Do they even exist anymore?) It was special. Mom didn't go for that kind of extravagance very often. Her argument to me was that I wouldn't eat all the different types of cereals in the package, which was probably true. She probably also saw the lack of economy with all the extra packaging and higher cost. Mom grew up in The Depression.

That paragraph above brought back some memories of shopping trips with Mom to the grocery store in the small town we lived in when I was about 6-12 years old. It was Colonial Beach, Virginia. A town of about 2000 people on the Potomac River, near where it meets the Chesapeake Bay. It's a big river there, 3 or 4 miles across. It was a special place to live for those years of my life. Lots of cool things for a kid to do like swimming, fishing, boating, biking everywhere, and developing a powerful curiosity about the natural world and how things work. The grocery store we went to was the A&P. It seemed huge. Over the years, I've had dreams of being in a grocery store, and vaguely feeling like I was a kid in the dream. I always thought it was just a generic grocery store, but the variety pack memories got me thinking about that A&P and I realized that it has been that store in my dreams.

All the memories of the A&P got me wondering about the store and what became of it over the years. I remembered seeing at one point it had become a hardware store whose proprietor was one of my classmates from those childhood days. Some googling showed evidence that the whole little strip of a shopping center has been somewhat updated and is now for sale. I could find no decent photos of it on the net though. There's a talented photographer I know from flickr named Shari Pastore. I found her work on that site doing some searches for Colonial Beach photos some time ago. I asked her if she had any photos of the little shopping center and the old A&P building. No she didn't, but offered to take on a little assignment to go out and shoot some especially for this blog post! The subject matter is less than inspiring, but the photo she got, at the top of this post is pretty nice, I think. I mentioned remembering that cupola on top of the building, and asked if she would shoot anything that looked like traces of what the building used to be. If you click the photo and look at the larger version you can better enjoy its beauty. You can also see how the roof is all patched up and the end of the building is just bare plywood. Colonial Beach has always been like that. It probably has more than its share of old derelict businesses that did once thrive, but maybe it was a long time ago. Or new ones that were never really going to get off the ground and just folded and ended up sitting to slowly decline. I've always been attracted to that kind of stuff, and maybe that attraction comes from those formative years in Colonial Beach. Those sad old stores and houses and cars and boats and towns seem to have a lot to say to me. I just keep thinking about all the lives they have seen and the stories they might tell. This may be one reason I keep taking vacations in West Virginia. It also has a bounty of derelict structures, along with dramatic natural beauty and a tough, hard-working spirit that appeals to me.

(We now rejoin the original GIS class blog post from several weeks ago)

I did some work on a map that will be featured in an upcoming blog post about the kite powered message in bottle release project I recently completed. This involved assembling a map of the North Atlantic with some continents on it and drawing a 1000 mile long line at a particular angle.

I did some more work on my geodatabase. Pete says we should concentrate on the geodatabase part of it and less on making maps. That sounds good, since the last 2 courses have been more about making the maps. I worked on creating a geometric network out of the MSD data I got last week.

We got our tests back. I've been getting grades a little lower than I would like on the tests this semester.

I had a near disaster when I almost shut off the computer before copying my work back off of the hard drive. When you shut down the computer it erases all the changes you have made, so it is very important to copy your work to removable media so you don't lose all you have done. I was ready to hit the last key in the keyboard sequence that shuts it down, then remembered. Really close. That would have really sucked.

Hello Kitty powered Message in a Bottle

All photos will enlarge if you click them.

This was an interesting experiment to send a message in a bottle out into the ocean, pulled by a kite. The kite cost $1, and featured a bold Hello Kitty design. It also came with 75 feet of cotton string. The Hello Kitty kite flew pretty well on the beach but tended to veer down to the sand in strong winds.

Monday March 24th 2008 dawned stormy on the coast of South Carolina. There was finally an offshore wind. Typically the winds are out of the south or southeast, which would push Hello Kitty back toward land or to the north and onto the North Carolina coast. Above you can see Hello Kitty fully deployed on her 75 feet of string.

To the right is Nell with the HKpMiB ready to deploy. The note was written on paper with an ink pen. Some sand was added to the bottle to give it some weight.

After deployment, the message system sailed out into the Atlantic Ocean on a 160 degree heading. (Photo at left) The estimated amount of sand appeared to be just about perfect so that the bottle dragged along the surface of the ocean. This kept tension on Hello Kitty's string so she could continue flying, but also allowed it to pop out of the water and release excess tension when a stronger gust was encountered.

We watched HK through binoculars until it was no longer visible.

Below is the map of the Atlantic Ocean showing the trajectory of the HKpMiB if it continued in the direction it left the coast. The line represents 1000 miles of distance and lands smack dab in the middle of the Dominican Republic on the island of Hispaniola. The path also takes HK very close to several of the Bahamas. I created the map using a projection which preserves direction, so the shapes may look distorted. If HK alighted in the ocean, the message system may have ended up in the Gulf Stream and headed toward the UK. So far, there has been no response to the message in the bottle.

I wear a County of Many Colors

Tonight I worked on my Geodatabase. I found some data for water and sewer pipes from the NC One Map project. www.NCOneMap.com I clipped them down to just Buncombe county. Pete is going to continue trying to get some better sewer data from MSD for me. I also got census data from NC One Map. It is quite detailed. I was working with symbolizing it based on total population for each block. I think I will further refine that by also using the area of each block to get a better idea of the population density. Above is one version of the map which I used the very bright color ramp on. That's how I got the county of many colors, which reminds me of The Blue Nile albumn called A Walk Across the Rooftops.

NB: Don't start your feature class names with zeros. Probably not starting them with any numbers is a good idea. ARC not like that, don't do what ARC not like, OK?

GeoCoding Again

Tonight we got globalized again. This time it was much less intense as we just briefly visited the blog of Pam Silvers who is Pete's boss and my friend and IT mentor. She is in India on another sort of exchange program like the one that sent Pete to Mexico a few weeks ago.

Next we learned about Geocoding and watched Pete demo the process. It's a way to turn text data into a location on the map. It is a powerful technique. Usually it takes an address and converts it into latitude and longitude and sticks it int he right place on the map. It is the way that you can put your address in an internet map site and have it find where your house actually is. We did this exercise:
We created an address locator for the whole state of SC and then used it to digest a big list of student addresses from a college in the Upstate. You can see most of them are clustered up there around Greenville. Sometimes parts of the data is not accurate and it can't figure out where to put an address. Then you can painstakingly fix the problems. Fortunately, we didn't have to do that for this exercise. That looks quite tedious.

Since I was all in the SC Street Centerlines file, I zoomed in on the sea shore area where I will visit with my sweetheart on spring break. I'm excited about that.

2nd Geodatabase Project

Pete returned from his school related trip to Mexico this week. Very interesting stories about the sister city to Asheville, and a sister school to ABTech. There is the potential that there will be a GIS collaboration with the school and/or local agricultural agencies. He visited the Mayan ruin called Chichen Itza. I remember from taking the class called "Architecture, Design and Society" years ago tales of the long, tall, wide stairs that lead up the pyramid of Chichen Itza being covered with the coagulated blood of human sacrifices to the extent that they looked like a smooth slope rather than stairs.

Then I got to work on my 2nd Geodatabase project. Check this out:


That's just the county map with some zoning data on it.

Pete also turned us on to maps.live.com, a microsoft mapping product like google maps. They have a feature called "Bird's eye view" which is aerial photography, but not looking straight down. Instead, it is at an angle, so it gives a much better 3 dimensional view of buildings, trees, vanagons, etc. The data for Asheville was just recenlty added. Below is my house, with it's fancy new roof and the Golden Luvwagen in the driveway.

First Test of Spring Semester

We had a test tonight and it was not too bad. I think it was not as long as previous tests, so it didn't seem as bad. It was still kind of hard, and I got some things wrong. I think I did well on the hands on part of the test because I had just done something very similar for practice last week.

Over there on the right is something from the exercise I was working on tonight, which was really in the nitty gritty of creating a geodatabase. It's all about subtypes and domains and default values and constraints on the data that is entered. It was kind of tedious but informative.

Super-Phat Tuesday

It is totally Super-Phat Tuesday, and I'm back in GIS class after 2 long weeks of absence. I missed out on an attempt to do some sort of long distance participation from my vacation in California one week due to the fact that I forgot what day of the week it was. I guess that could be expected on vacation.

Next week we have our first test and I have some serious catching up to do after missing 50% of the classes so far. I also did the project from one of the classes I missed tonight instead of the current project so that I would be ready for the lab part of the test next week. So there is the result, above. We took a CAD file that had drawings of a lot of features around campus and georeferenced it to a map file of the buildings on campus. In my version I made Pink Roads, Red Sidewalks, and Yellow Buildings with tight black borders on them. The buildings look tight, which is good on a Mardi Gras Super-Phat Tuesday.

GIS Class Resumes

This time it's GIS 215: Data Models. Wow.

Class started out with a discussion of some interesting things we are going to study this semester. Lots of stuff about the databasular workings behind the GIS data we work with. Later, we will do some GPS work which I am very much looking forward to. We will train on an expensive professional grade GPS unit the college has.

Then we had a lecture on databases in general and dove into some work on a step-by-step tutorial on using Access 2007. This was tedious and not too valuable to me. It did get me a little deeper into Access 2007 than I have been, and would have definitely been valuable for anyone in the class who had never used Access.

Above is a little screen capture from the exercise. All those fussy little data fields and labels and property sheets.

There are 7 people in the class, including Josh and Ben from last time. I miss Mary. Where is Mary?

Return to Geocoding

Above is my final project map with some red dots on it. Those are addresses I geocoded. It was back in the Spring semester when I did that last, but it came back to mind with just a little refresher. The problem is that the street data that I have is not the best quality, so when I go to geocode the addresses in my table, the address locator can't place all of them on the map. In fact, it was missing about 40% altogether, finding no place for them to go. Need better quality street data which will be hard to come by for some of the counties I want to include. Since I have little time left to wrap up this project, I think I will do a different classification based on zip codes for now, and return to geocoding and possible carrier route analysis next semester.

Where is Everybody?

Last week I came to class, but there was no class. I was confused because the community college where I work had class, but the community college where I study did not. It was so freeing to arrive here and find all the parking lots empty and buildings dark. I went home and was all geared up for an arduous class, and thought I would use all that energy to get all this stuff done at home instead. Then I sat down and my momentum spun down and I went to bed at 9:30, which was nice also.

This week we got our test back, which I though was so hard when I took it, but I got a good grade on it. Maybe I just didn't feel confident but actually knew the material. Pete did some interesting lecture on the use of type on maps. Now we are working on our final projects, which we only have 2 more classes to get them done. I'm doing an enrollment mapping project for my work that I'm pretty interested in. I'm already hitting trouble though, as the carrier route data is not available online from USPS like I thought it would be. I'm not too worried about that; I think I can find another source through our bitchin' PIO. I'm also now clipping some street data that is taking forever... Oh, it looks like it might be done now, after 40 minutes and 12 seconds! Glad I got that done tonight, so I can start fresh next week.

Pete kills us with test #2

Pete, what are you trying to do to us with that test? I hope there is a lot of partial credit on those answers.

Fortunately, we got to do Pete's evaluation *after* the killer test. {evil laughter}

Below is an image from the project we worked on in class after the test. It was the old fashioned hands on stuff we did last semester. It was kind of fun, and that lab work is a pretty informative way to learn.

The map above is from Africa and has the digital elevation model and hillshade combo that is so popular with the kids these days. Below is the whole poster thing that all this work contributed to. It is sized 44 inches wide, so it is severely shrunk in this image. Everything about Africa makes me think about the movie War/Dance which I saw last weekend at the Asheville Film Festival. I bought tickets for the winning documentary and student films not knowing what they would be. I wouldn't have picked War/Dance to go see based on it's description, but I'm so glad I did see it. It was a very well made doc about such a moving story. I see now it's about to make its theatrical debut and also won best doc at Sundance.

NC Map Project, Part 4

Above is the map as it is shaping up into an actual map document. Still a ways to go, but it is exciting to start visualizing what it will look like being on a page 40 inches wide. They have a big, sexy new plotter there at ABTech. Printing that large you really can get quite a bit of detail onto the page and still have it simple and meaningful. I want to have something to print out for GIS Day, which is this Friday, November 9th 2007, there at ABTech in Asheville, NC.

NC Map Project, Part 3

Remember to save things to the flash drive earlier before the end of class comes. I'm still struggling with the issue of managing all these large files. I was working away and then it was 10 minutes before the end of class. So I went to save my files from the hard drive to my flash drive. and it says it's going to take 35 minutes, then 17 minutes, then 194 minutes. Pete wants to leave on time, and Haven is there, and she wants to leave too, because of the mouse situation at their house. She's all consumed with the mice as far as I can tell. As the minutes tick down, it's clear that I'm not going to get my files copied to the flash drive any time soon. Pete intervenes and puts my files on his portable hard drive. Why is the actual hard drive faster than the flash drive with no moving parts? Seems like the archaic whirling metal disk hard drive would be slower than completely motionless memory. I guess flash memory is just not that fast.

Below is the image I was working with tonight. The elevation data is in raster format. It's really quite beautiful. Raster data is something I'm pretty familiar with from working with digital photos. Where each pixel in a photo has qualities, like it's color and brightness, each cell in the elevation data has a quality. That quality is it's elevation. In the case of the image below, the elevation data for each cell is just converted to a shade of gray, with the highest being white. You can display it in many different colors, and process the data to simulate 3 dimensional views and stuff.

WNC Map Project Expands

Tonight class started out with some recovery work. I had a pretty bad data disaster on my fancy new (cheap) 4 GB flash drive. I think it happened when I was working in ArcMap with some of that stupid giant 5 foot contour data, and things got all frozen up and it went shizzly bad. After that the flash drive was never the same. If I worked it too hard it just disappeared from the computer, like, *blink*, your drive could not be found. I ended up using a data recovery tool on it and I think I got most of the data back, but it was all over the place in folders with names like [29FF] instead of more meaningful names like "GIS Final Project". I ended up reformatting the flash drive, and it now seems to be working better.

I pretty much gave up on the data I recovered and decided to start anew on my project. I also decided to avoid the stupid giant contour data that has vexed me for several weeks. Pete sort of opened up what the project could include, so I also opened up my map to cover the whole state. It will still generally be a General Reference Map showing mostly major roads and municipalities and elevation data. I did figure out some cool stuff tonight. First I wanted to automatically label the roads based on data that is in the file. I decided to only show Interstates and US Highways so that the map would not be too busy. So I had to exclude all the other roads. Then I figured out how to automatically label the roads with the different little shields for Interstates and US Highways, and to put the appropriate route number in each little shield. After that I started working on doing something similar with Municipality Names. I want to not show the tiny town names, and show the larger ones with increasing font sizes based on their population. I'm well on my way to making that happen. Pete said he had never done that. I was surprised at that since he is uber GIS guru. Uber guru, that's fun to say. Please see above my map in its current state of development.

Cartographic Frustrations

We're continuing our WNC map project tonight. More computer frustrations dealing with huge data and... don't put any spaces in your file name or path! I just ran into that problem which we learned really early in the first class. My super 4GB flash drive acting weird too. Suddenly disappearing when I try to make it work hard, like saving a big file to it. These computer frustrations are really affecting my project. I haven't made much progress at all during the last 2 classes. I wish they would stop.

While waiting for the computer to work properly (or not) I have put some thought into what I want my map to be like. I think I will basically do a general reference map, with primary roads and towns and so on. I'd like to use the fancy elevation data to show the contours of the mountains, and maybe add some population data so that the viewer can see some relationship between Elevation and Population Density.

In shocking news, Mary was apparently injured in a fall from a ladder and required surgery! Mary, get well soon! That really sucks.

In the memories news this week, I had a dream. In this dream I was talking to a gearhead friend about the axles on the front wheel drive VWs. About how the one on the drivers side was shorter and solid steel and the one on the passenger's side was longer and tubular. They did that cleverly so that they would be the same weight. That much is true. In the dream, I went on to say that in the newer cars, they redesigned the transaxle so that the drive flanges were exactly centered under the car. This meant that the axles could be exactly the same length and weight. I'm pretty sure that is not true at all. I even had a name for what they were trying to achieve by making that change, something like thrust-centralysis. I explained that term in the dream to refer to the absolute lack of pulling to one side or the other under all driving conditions. Interesting how my brain engineers things when it is idle. Maybe I should have been an engineer like my Dad.

Cartographing

We're starting on a new project that will span several weeks. We will each make a map of Western NC. There is certain data that we have to include and other data that we can adapt to our own preferences. I think it will be interesting to see what each of us comes up with.

I have done a you tube. I've done 2 actually. Dude, I totally you tubed. I did it with 2 different pretty young women. Not at the same time. (Remember this reference to most of my friends being pretty young women?) I diverge into the talk of you tubing because it is taking so long to copy files around. Files that I need to make my map. It's currently saying it's going to take another 4.5 hours to copy a few MB from the desktop to my flash drive. Stupid computer.

I'm working with some cool LIDAR data here. It's the digital elevation model for WNC, which is quite high resolution. It is basically contour data, like you would see on a topo map. Where most topo maps cover a fairly small area, being large scale maps, this covers many counties. It also shows a line for every 5 feet of elevation change where most topo maps are at 20 foot intervals. So we're talking about a lot of data. That's why we're running into trouble dealing with it. The digital elevation model files are about 1.5 GB.

Below is my map so far. It's not much to speak of. It shows the whole state and the national forests located in it are shown in a sexy hot pink. It's a darker hot pink, which is what makes it more sexy. I did collect data from various sources tonight and learned about dealing with massive data files.Mary is back tonight, and feeling better, and took the test the rest of us took last week. Maybe we'll get our scores next week. Pete was demonstrating something on the whiteboard and drew a crude outline of NC. He said that it was not an airplane, and Josh said he thought it was "The Iraq." This gave me a good laugh, which was good. See also the iRack from Apple.

Map Projections

Tonight we had out first test, talked about Mary, who wasn't in class, and learned about Map Projections. Actually, we didn't talk about Mary who was out sick and I hope she feels better so she can come back and take the test. The test seemed like a fair assessment of our progress through the first four chapters.

To prepare for the test, I spent a lot more time in the textbook, and am really beginning to appreciate it. I love good technical writing, and this book is pretty good. The older Bentley repair manuals for various VWs I've owned over the years were great reading. They had these really well written paragraphs describing the functioning of the fuel injection system or something else complex, which made it understandable. Nowadays there is so much complexity in the cars, which requires so much volume of information that they don't have space for such frivolity.

The Map Projections are pretty interesting. No matter what mathematical method you use to translate a sort of sherical shape (the Earth) onto a flat surface (a map), you are going to have some sort of distortion. The most disturbing distortion to me is distortion of shape. The most common projection we have seen since we were kids is the Mercator projection. It is really handy for sailing ships on the ocean because you can draw a straight line from your location to your destination and just sail on that compass heading. The Mercator really isn't so good for showing accurate relationships of the size of features at various latitudes though. It shows Alaska about the same size as Brazil, which is actually 5 times larger. Being a very visual thinker, I am now in crisis because the pictures I have in my head of the world may be all wrong. ALL WRONG! OMG.

Eratosthenes and the Authalic Sphere

Tonight was some interesting material, and some of it was pretty dense. I'm going to need to spend some more time with our book. We're getting into the section of the book called "Earth-Map Relations" which I think is getting to the heart of what I like about maps. I'm thinking the core concept of representation might be what I'm attracted to. The Map represents a place on the Earth and as I said last week, it can help us understand and analyze complex data. I like things that represent other things in general, like Art in the broadest sense. Maybe it's things that not only (or necessarily) represent other things, but reveal something about them. Again, it's about the analysis. Strange then that most of my favorite Art is non-representational, or just about itself. Especially attractive to me about the maps is that they represent a place. For a long time I've had the experience of looking a road maps and having the locations or roads on the maps bring up memories of those roads or places. I also have gotten into looking at topo maps and trying to visualize what the area would look like if I was there.

We also did some interesting data importing tonight. We were looking at cellular phone radio transceiver tower information which we downloaded from the FCC. It was in a big 'ol data file that covered the whole country and was just in a delimited format. We imported it into excel and massaged it, which is also something I like to do. (I remember managing a mailing list for a non-profit entirely in WordPerfect 5.1. It was about 1500 people, and could pull out and print appropriate mailing labels based on criteria, on the tractor-feed dot-matrix printer.) Anyway, we had to eliminate the non-NC entries and then convert the Latitude and Longitude from Degrees, Minutes, Seconds notation to Decimal Degrees. That was kinda fun to automate the process, and doing it helped us learn how the two notations interact. Above is that map of NC with 818 cell towers, and we think that's not really all of them.

Back to Earth-Map Relations. I like the way that sounds. It partly reminds me of the Monica Lewinsky era, and I like the idea of the Relations among the Earth and its Maps. I better pull this political angle together with the title of this post now. I've been hearing for years that there are terrorists who "hate our freedoms." Like I also heard for such a long time way too many details about the Clinton-Lewinsky "relations." Tonight we learned about Eratosthenes, who in 250 BC came up with a way to estimate the size of the earth using a well and a post a few miles away. He got within about 4% of what we later calculated the circumference of the earth to be.
I think that was quite an accomplishment of conceptualizing and calculation. It makes me think of how the Arabic contributions to science and math are often overlooked in our Eurocentric
educations. Could that have led us to think they hate our freedoms?

Pete is not a Narc.

Tonight I had a thought breakthrough involving the word "analysis." I have had trouble explaining what GIS is about to people. I tell them that GIS is about making maps and combining that process with computer databases. Tonight I thought that analysis is the word I need to add to my description of what GIS is about. The power of GIS is making maps that help us analyse complex information.

Our first exercise tonight was about a water contamination scenario. The "map" I made is to the right. I'm using that term loosely because it is pretty far from what most people would call a typical map. The pink and red areas represent contamination of an underground aquifer, with the darker red indicating higher levels of contamination. The blue lines are water wells. The top of the blue lines are the surface of the earth, you can see some are deeper than others, and reach into the contamination area. The sort of beige shapes laying flat on the top of the land surface are different facilities in the area. The brown shapes that extend upward are graphic representations of facilities that are at high risk. The risk is based on if wells for the facility extend into contaminated areas. The darker color shows greater risk for facilities whose wells reaches into an area of higher contamination.

We have an interesting group in class this time. Josh is providing interesting information about Forests and chemical compositions. Some types of food that taste good can penetrate all the way into the nucleus of our cells and mess with out DNA. Yikes! Mary and I continued to eat this good-tasting but dangerous food and shiver in the overly air conditioned classroom. Mary brought us a sweater this week, but insisted on wearing it the whole class period while my fingers became so cold I could barely drape my 2D data layers onto 3D models.

It's true about Pete not being a narc. Apparently some of the Asheville sk8 culture had this impression of him. I can confirm that he is far too busy with GIS work, and blogs, and finding new features on google, to do any policing.