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ESRI UC 2019! This was an exciting trip, as I haven't been to this conference in five years.  It was fun to see how much it has grown. After checking in, I stopped by the bookstore to look at the swag.  I learned we are now map ninjas.                                   Barf                               Monday is the notorious Plenary Session.  ALL. DAY.  Everyone sitting in the same room, listening to presenters from all over the world, show off what they've made, intermixed with upcoming release news from ESRI staff. The man, the myth, the legend. The founder, Jack Dangermond, spoke a lot.  He announced the theme: GIS as a nervous system.  He said his favorite thing is story maps.  To date, there are over 1 million story maps, with over 3000 new story maps creat...

In preparation for the upcoming UGIC Conference, I've been thinking about how awesome of a conference this is.  It is a conference for GIS professionals in the state of Utah.  UGIC stands for Utah Geographic Information Council. The first UGIC Conference I attended was held in Cedar City.  I was a year and a half into my career.  I was instantly welcomed by the members of the UGIC Council at the time, and ran around with them for the week, attending classes and social events. I remember a bunch of us went out in the desert to Lions Head, to look at hieroglyphics.  They were amazing.  We studied them, wondering what the people that put them there wanted us to know.  One of my colleagues did the entire hike on crutches with a broken leg.  Now that's a trooper.  I remember watching the sun set into the red and green hills.  On another day, my coworker and I ditched the late afternoon classes to go to Grafton, a ghost town where we had d...

I saw a questions posed on Quora that asked what inspires a GIS Enthusiast? The answer to this will be different for each person.  For me, it is the following. My first GIS job, I spent a lot of time working on preplanning apartment complexes and mobile home parks with the fire department.  This meant that every time a specific crew was working, I would be on a ridealong with them, driving around each complex, marking things down on a map.  We started simple, with addresses and fire hydrants. You see, there isn't an universal addressing standard for apartment complexes or mobile home parks.  Each apartment can have a letter, number, building number, building letter, address, and/or any combination of these.  At the time, the 911 software they were using could get them to the gate, but no further.  This meant precious minutes driving around until they found it.  Mobile home parks start out with the homes in numerical order, but as homes move away,...

The first class this morning was Introducing Coordinate Systems and Transformations.  It was taught by an awesome man that you could tell this was his life's work and he knew everything about it.  He really got into the weeds, and it was fascinating. He had some awesome graphics. Coordinate systems tell us distance, location, and direction.  There are two types of horizontal coordinate systems - geographic (spheroid) and projected (flat map).   Vertical coordinate systems defines origin for height or depth.  There are two kinds - geometric model (base on elipsoid) and gravity related model (geoid). There are 80 projections ESRI support. There are 4 types of distortions going from round to flat - shape, area, direction, and distance. The define projection tool doesn't change the datum. Transformations means changing datum.  There are 33 transformations in North America.  The transformations list drop down are [...

This morning was the Keynote Session. They started with an animated video about "how does our data feel."  Um.... The winners of the dodgeball competition get free entries into next years Dev Summit. I forgot to mention that upon checkin, they did not give an encyclopedia of marketing material and schedule.  Nothing but my name tag and a notebook.  They wanted everyone to download an app.  The app was glitchy but ok.  Come 2 o'clock, the plugs were jampacked with people fighting to charge their phones.   I deleted it.  I was glad I printed a copy beforehand and happened to bring it.  Thank goodness.  I think the app is a fail. The keynote speaker was Joseph Sirosh, the Corporate VP of Artificial Intelligence and Research at Microsoft. His speech was more of a marketing ploy.  He said AI is exciting because it's the opposite of natural stupidity.  He wants to infuse AI into every Microsoft product.  He tried to ...

I only saw one other GIS person on my flight out.  My flight was short and happier the further I got away from the snow.   The biggest news by far, is that Map Girl has been upgraded to Map Woman. They must have had a lot of complaints. When I walked into the Plenary Session, I wasn't quite sure where to sit to see the screen... They said this is the largest conference by far with over 2100 attendees.  The theme is "By developers, for developers." Monday they had a "spatial hackathon," and although I don't know what that means, I'm pretty sure my boss would win it. A little bit of time was spent talking about AR/VR, and a colleague from the state later said it reminded him of our demo at UVU for GIS day and that we "are on the leading edge of it."  High fives all around.  The only thing ESRI did that we haven't yet, is they added a viewshed in their cityscape AR app. Apparently it pays to get there early, becau...