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On my way to my first class, I saw a cartography genius on the escalator, and had a total fan girl moment. My first class was GIS for Active Shooter Response.  The class was PACKED.  It ended up being nothing that I had hoped, and only a grad student's project on FBI stats.  I could not leave to go to a different class.  So here are some random facts - there have been 277 mass shootings between 2000-2018.  California has had the most.  The least occurrences in less populated states.  No correlation for seasons, ccw/armed households.  7 states do mental health background checks.  Did not compare to gun-free zones. This class time was shared with a GIS person from a city in California that showed her project that took her two years.  Basic aerial with building outlines.  For schools.  Oh. Man. I decided I need to present next year. I apprehensively followed up that class with a class on GIS for Informed Decisio...

Day 2, diving right in. I started with an Arcade class.  Arcade is not a programming language.  It is not a replacement for python.  It is an expression language that can be used across all ESRI products.  It is not case sensitive.    TextFormatting.Newline - AGO does not support.  Boo....seriously, make things work everywhere before releasing!    The presenter recommended a book available on Amazon called "Writing Arcade Expressions" by Dave Allen.    My coworker and I met with some ESRI staff in the vendor area to discuss some problems we've been running into, and to get some help.  We discussed using a base64 encoded string for pictures in pop-ups (they didn't know how to do this), related tables in pop ups (no real way to do this with truly live data), vector tile packages to get our data out to custom apps, and how in the world are we getting duplicate global ids in globalid fields??  I also aske...

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 [...