"... with a little help from my friends", part III

25 years ago this week, I left the Natural Resources Canada to start a business with Teknika. I was encouraged (if not pushed) along by a fellow geologist, who had a comprehensive petroleum geocomputing system at Husky in Calgary - his colleague encouraged me at University of Calgary to take a class in computer sciences, the same department where Jim Gosling later on created Java. I teamed up then with a brilliant surveyor who delivered a video-tracing system. These were the DOS days when we used AutoCAD as the graphics prior to Windows. And as my banner note states, he spatialised AutoCAD with a 10Kb DOS kernel that might've given Intergraph and Esri a run for their money, had AutoDesk picked it up at the time.

Reading Social Web Maps

Look at this map, and what it doesn't show is as instructive as what it shows. You guessed it, it's the low number of social media hits - anyone on the blogosphere or twitterverse would find those numbers on the low side, especially considering the passion current events in Egypt generated on the ground and online - and I wager doesn't reflect poor map making, but rather the fact the web was tampered with during the events in Egypt.

5 Ws for citizens-as-sensors

Des Kilfoil at the CBC in Calgary, Canada introduced me 20-odd years ago to the 5Ws, the basic tenets of any investigative reporting, from journalists to police, from Wikipedia:

• Who? Who was involved?
• What? What happened (what's the story)?
• Where? Where did it take place?
• When? When did it take place?
• Why? Why did it happen?
• How? How did it happen?

A bit of GIS history

As I watch ESRI's 2010 User Conference remotely via social media and my favorite bloggers like spatialsustain and spatiallyadjusted, this entry from allpointsblog caught my eye:

bp oil rupture

News swirling around the incident in the Gulf of Mexico (GoM) compels me to draw out some salient facts and gather them here to help the uninitiated (I did this yesterday for my in-laws). This blog title is from the last slide of the video in my last blogpost.

Arctic Dreams

I spent a summer in the Arctic in 1986, the year as Barry Lopez wrote a book titled as above. At a recent job in Kazakhstan, I met ice engineers whose colleagues I knew in Calgary two decades earlier! How do you get marine engineers and naval architects in the middle of two continents in Calgary and Atyrau? By developping offshore oil&gas in the Arctic Islands and the Caspian Sea!

New home on the web

My original posts are still here, and my professional website is here.

By way of introduction, here are my original web maps:

• ArcGIS Explorer posting of CLIWOC data (ship tracks, 1750 - 1850), also on ESRI ArcGIS Online beta website
  [Jul.2011: transposed now on new arcgis.com]
• OpenLayers NRCAN web mapping services, Atlas and Polar
• Google Maps WhereamI complete with Google Earth insert
• Google Maps WherewasI with links to original text listings