Next week us and the local family will be at Anna Maria Island for what is largely a “staycation” — a week at a beach house about 45 minutes from home.

We’ll see how things work with trying to stay semi-quarantined while off-site away from home. The house we’re staying in is right on the beach about 100 feet from the Gulf, with it’s own section of private beach. If we’re properly provisioned, we should be all set to have a relaxing time for the week¹. The...

We’re in Miami for a couple of days for an event to talk about AI and meet some companies working in the space.

After getting in I was able to fit in a nice run around Brickell Key. Beautiful weather.

I’m an airplane window seat guy. So when on a flight with good views, I end up gazing out the window for most of the time and capturing my own aerial imagery.

Our Monday flight from Fort Lauderdale to San Juan took us over the Bahamas, so I got some nice scenery to look at during the trip. The first batch was over the centerline of the Bahamian chain, next over Turks and Caicos, then a gap of ocean north of Hispaniola until reaching Puerto Rico.

Here are some of the best shots, with captions for reference.

The Bahamas

We’re in San Juan this week for the NetHope Global Summit. Through our partnership with NetHope, a non-profit devoted to bringing technology to disaster relief and humanitarian projects, we’re hosting a hands-on workshop on Fulcrum on Thursday.

We’ve already connected with several of the other tech companies in NetHope’s network — Okta, Box, Twilio, and others — leading to some interesting conversations on working together more closely on integrated deployments for humanitarian work.

Fortin...

We took the kids over to Kennedy Space Center on Saturday on the way up to Jacksonville. A quick stopover in Titusville Friday night then morning over at the Cape.

I always loved visiting KSC when I was younger. We had the opportunity to go and see multiple launches over the years, including a couple of Space Shuttle launches. Visiting again brought back memories since they’ve got several things there that haven’t changed much over the years. On the way in you get to walk through the Rocket Garden, which...

Earlier this week I finished reading Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air, his account of climbing Mount Everest and surviving the 1996 Everest disaster. The book reads like a thriller, giving the account of how an expedition team prepares for the climb, including the experience in country beforehand and acclimatization process for weeks leading up to the climb.

While reading it, I found myself wishing I had the visual aid of maps of the route, photos of the camps,...

The news of the fire at Notre Dame in Paris was devastating to follow along with as the blaze continued to spread throughout the day on Monday of this week. Many people from the office and on Twitter were reminiscing about their own visits there in the past, which got me looking back at old photos of mine.

We visited Paris twice, once together on a tour in 2014 and again when Elyse was little in 2016. Both times we took walks down the Seine to Ile de la...

I’m here in San Diego for the week for the FOSS4G North America conference. Today there was a “B2B / Government” focus day, hosted at the Mission Bay Marina Conference Center, a gorgeous spot right on the waterfront.

We’re staying at the Hyatt in Mission Bay. I got in a nice run out to Mission Beach, which is easy to fit in with the weather and views available along the route.

Over the Bay

Mission Beach

Next week Joe and I will be out in San Diego for FOSS4G-NA 2019. This’ll be my first one since I think 2012. There’s always an excellent turnout and strong base of good folks to catch up with. This year they’ve put together a B2B and Government Theme day to kick it off, which to my knowledge is a new thing for an event typically focused on the eponymous free, open source, and community-driven projects.

I thumbed through the agenda to pick out some topics I’m interested in catching this year:

...

We just got back this evening from a long weekend trip up to Jacksonville for medical follow-up and to visit with friends. It’s about a 4 hour drive from St. Pete, and I usually do a route that takes us up I-75 to around Ocala, then connect up to I-10 up US-301. Then the same route home in reverse.

The trip down 301 takes you through a half dozen tiny to small towns that are quintessential “Old Florida”¹. On this drive down I thought I’d briefly document each of them with a...

One of the highlights of the west → east flight from Northern California is the chance to get views over the ranges of California, Nevada, and Colorado. The first leg of my flight home this week took me from San Jose to Denver, offering up those snow-capped mountains I so rarely get to see living in the southeast.

Not too far into the flight you come upon the Sierra Nevada, if you’re lucky passing right over the Yosemite Valley. Today there was a thin, low cloud layer over the mountains, so the view...

I don’t remember what got me to it, but the other day I found this short documetary video about Southern California’s Salton Sea, a saline lake about 80 miles inland from San Diego:

I knew about its infamy as a failed resort destination, with planned developments like Desert Shores and Salton City that popped up on its edge in the 1950s. What I didn’t know was the sea’s history as the result of an engineering accident, induced by the California Development Company trying to divert...

Today was day 1 of the 3-day SaaStr Annual, my third one. Each year they up their game in terms of size and session quality. Logistics are much improved at the larger San Jose Convention Center. The team at SaaStr did an excellent job improving on the shortcomings of past years while still expanding in attendance quite a bit.

I did sessions today from Tom Tunguz from Redpoint, Ryan Smith of Qualtrics, and a great back-and-forth discussion with Jeff Lawson (Twilio) and Anil Dash (Glitch).

We just touched down in San Jose this afternoon, here for the SaaStr Annual conference. An uneventful flight through LAX, arriving around 1pm local time here in California. One of my favorite things about westbound travel is the ability to get here with enough time to check things out the same day.

As I like to do with a new city, I got out on the road for a run to explore a little. The Guadalupe River runs through downtown San Jose right near where I’m...

Another great Geography2050 is in the books. This year’s focus was on energy, and as you might expect much of the panel discussion and subject matter expertise was on renewable energy sources and climate change response issues. It’s a topic I follow loosely, but I learned a lot about the diversity of organizations working on the problem and heard a number of interesting new ideas.

One of the best panel discussions was on energy consumption and economic growth in China — nearly an hour and a half discussion on how China got...

Every year we make the trek to New York City for the annual Geography 2050 conference, the pillar event organized and hosted by the American Geographical Society. We’re staying in Times Square and the event is uptown at Columbia University, with day 2 hosted at the incredible Low Memorial Library.

After a nice 2 hour delay this morning I finally made it into town. Picked a good seat with the approach into LaGuardia past lower Manhattan. This is always a window seat flight...

A few weeks back I had an opportunity to catch a game at Fenway Park for the first time. That’s definitely a bucket list item checked off.

Tim got tickets last minute, some great seats down past the bend on the third base side, beneath the Monster. It was a beautiful night, with Chris Sale on the mound against the Blue Jays.

🎓 Numbers at Play: Dynamic Toys Make the Invisible Visible

Great tools keep up with their users. They operate at the speed of thought, ever shrinking the feedback loop between conceiving of an idea and exploring its consequences.

Tools for thought must support communication not just from the expert to the novice: they should enhance conversation between collaborative peers. They should enact thought at the speed of speech. With tools this fluid, we can reinforce natural dialogue through novel representations without awkward pauses. We can support students in co-constructing meaning as they discuss and resolve their multiple...

Since we never get out and about much on trips up to Atlanta, this time we took a trip out to Amicalola Falls up in the North Georgia mountains, near Dawsonville. I forget where I started googling around looking at waterfalls in GA, but probably something in the book I’m currently reading got me looking around for outdoorsy things to do while we were up there.

The falls are actually the tallest of all the waterfalls in Georgia, with a 729-foot drop!

The drive out was about an hour and fifteen...

I recently took a trip to Tunis to attend the GCT-Tunisia conference, a geospatial industry event focused on capacity building and promotion of mapping tools in the fluid and exciting region of North Africa. It was a fascinating trip to visit a place at such a turning point in its development. Both Tunisia and Libya, each of which had significant representation at the conference, are still just 3 years out from revolutions that unseated regimes in power for decades. It was a welcome opportunity to visit during this period of transition (yet relative safety and stability).