Technobabble

Did you know you can geocode on a Mac with just a few lines of Python script? It's true. I just did it. No ESRI and no Windoze necessary.

I'm not a programmer but I'm being forced by peer pressure to learn it. The lab has been on a balls-to-the-wall hiring bonanza and everyone we hire is young, idealistic, brilliant and loves coding. Damn it all to hell.

It's actually not all that bad. The thought of programming on a Windoze machine makes me want to jump off a cliff, but somehow doing it on my Mac is almost appealing. Almost.

I just spent the last 24 hours, minus a few hours for sleeping and eating, working through an entire 400+ page "classroom in a book" on Flash. I've also been learning Python, and soon will dive headlong into Flex, and I'm going to have no choice but to pick up some Javascript along the way as well. Oh, and all of this is besides my full time graduate work doing Google mashups and studying environmental applications for GIS. I'm literally chained to my computers. Just plug me into the Matrix and be done with it.

Cartography these days is a whole new game. Everyone wants pretty, functional, interactive web maps, and if I can't deliver then I get left behind. It is kinda fun, I admit. I never would have dreamed I could make the kind of money I make these days and get to do it playing with Flash and Illustrator on a Mac. And you should see the way peoples' faces light up when you show them their data in a gorgeous web map that they can pan, zoom and turn things on and off. They think it's magic.

I'm trying to tell myself that I might as well give in and try to cultivate some real passion for this because it pays the bills and lets me live quite well. Being a mountain-man-cowboy won't pay the bills, although being a published author certainly could, and writing is the only thing I love as much as my mountain-man-cowboy fantasy. But I have no time for writing much of anything these days. Even this blog is cutting into my sleep time tonight.