22 June 05
Davis Dartboard
The new O’Reilly book Mapping Hacks has arrived in the campus bookstore; it looks excellent. I haven’t picked it up yet since supposedly I’ll be getting an email giving me a 30% discount on it and the related book Web Mapping Illustrated by virtue of going to the conference last week. The former book is by Schuyler Erle, Rich Gibson, and Jo Walsh, who are quite active in the ‘locative media’ movement. Here’s a game which I may play which is very much in this spirit.
I’ll take a city map of Davis and drop down a couple dozen random points on top of it (all in my GIS, of course). Then I will go to each point and sketch/photograph/write about what I see there. The results of this exercise will end up on this blog, on separate web pages, and/or in a physical book.
Thanks to the Davis Wiki, this town is perhaps one of the most extensively annotated-on-the-web places on the planet. And as it turns out, the city has a comprehensive set of GIS layers that are freely downloadable, not to mention a set of detailed aerial photographs dating from a couple of months ago. But GIS layers and imagery only get you so far. I’m sure I’ll learn things about this town through this exercise, and perhaps catch glimpses of deep culture as well.
21 June 05
Solstice
I’ve been thinking a lot about the solstice for the past few weeks; an Artist Trading Card swap for June has this as its theme and I’ve been wondering how to approach it. It’s a bittersweet time: the languor of the longest day combined with the heading back to winter.
We walked up on the levee to watch the sun set and the moon rise. While we were sketching we heard the sounds of bluegrass from Jim’s house (the former artificial insemination barn). We headed down there to make sure they had seen the moon. (They hadn’t, and immediately headed outside to serenade the moon with a stirring rendition of Blackberry something.)
20 June 05
Cat Dancing
When we went over to Nat and Ben’s last week, one of their kitties would fetch a cat toy like this one when tossed. So we got one for Charlie and Diego, and they agree it’s a very good toy. Charlie even ignored the fact it was dinnertime when we were playing.
19 June 05
Walking
Numenius and I decided as part of our walk today to walk into Davis for lunch.
It’s not very far, but it’s something I don’t do nearly enough. You see different things when you walk, as opposed to riding a bike (or, of course, driving):
1) a red wasp, similar in movement and general size to the blue mud daubers we have waiting for the hot weather to come (we’re having a freakishly cool June);
2) a tree in flower in the Arboretum we couldn’t identify, but wanted to, whose flowers are like snowflakes with green stems;
3) the shifting shadows on the bark of the trees in the Redwood Grove;
4) a secondary covert feather of a red-shouldered hawk;
5) a bug (true bug) neither of us recognized, only on the bladderpod (currently half in bloom, half in seed)
6) the fact that the star thistles (an invasive weed) are able to grow through tarmac.
Lunch was good. So was the DVD (which we watched at my office on the way home) of the making of the St. John’s Bible, which featured these vignettes of local insects and flora too. It felt all of a piece.
Approaching our driveway I spotted the turkey which had apparently been hit by a car and was down the bank by the bullocks, under the California black walnut. The barred feathers confused themselves in the dapple light. I want those quill feathers…
19 June 05
Geospatial Geekery
I’m back now from my open source geospatial conference in Minneapolis, completely jazzed about the experience. There were a little over 300 people attending, a very good size for a conference, small enough so that you can interact with many of them. Yet it is a community that is growing quickly and is really starting to come of age.
I think of all the the open source communities I have some relation to, however tangentially, the geospatial community is the one with which I feel the deepest sense of connection. Naturally that’s because I’ve been in geography for a long time now, and also because of my distaste of the overwhelming dominance of the field by a certain 800-pound industry gorilla (no, it’s not Microsoft). Anyway, it was great to be able to attach faces and voices to familiar names.
The next such conference is in September 2006 in Lausanne, Switzerland. Pica and I might just plan a trip to Europe around that!
17 June 05
Smiles, Applause, and a Wolf
Last night I attended the Graduate Commencement Ceremony at UC Davis, an event I used to be in charge of coordinating. I casually volunteered to help in case my help was needed since my replacement in Graduate Studies hadn’t done this before; my help on the night probably wasn’t, but thanks so much for offering; suddenly, on Monday, desperately it was, there being so many special circumstances and just not enough people to handle them: there were two hearing-impaired students (one with a dog, an apparent Portuguese Water mix) who needed to sit in front by a screen where they could read the live captioning by the bearded, smiling Devon (who afterwards gave them both beautifully wrapped gifts, such a mensch, he) and be told when to join their lines, especially since the non-dog owning one was getting two different master’s degrees and wanted to walk twice; a faculty presenter who had shattered her kneecap (ouch) and was on crutches, also needing to sit up front with her student so she wouldn’t have so far to hobble; a student in a wheelchair who wanted to process with her class and who also had a dog (a loopy golden retriever, not that there’s really any other kind) who’d be joining her for the photo (a special before-ceremony arrangement) but who’d be sitting (the dog, that is) with her family during the ceremony; and David, a PhD candidate in Comparative Pathology in a wheelchair whose guide dog was a wolf. Timber wolf mixed with something-Valley-wolf (Siona could probably tell this by looking at the wolf, but I can’t). No dog. No domestic dog involved at all in the genetics, at all. At ALL. I think her name was Ohlona. She mostly slept through the ceremony on a fleece pad he brought for her.
My job last night was to make sure all of them were where they needed to be, plus run and get water or escort any one of them to the bathroom or what have you.
As arbitrary as it might sound, PhD students at Davis process onstage in order of faculty-presenter-last-name. David’s presenter’s last name started with a Z, which put him onstage last, even though they both started from the front row.
He went up the ramp at rear and crossed the stage in his powered wheelchair with Ohlona at his left, so the entire 6,000 people or so gathered there could see her. He stood up from his wheelchair, unsteady and swaying somewhat, to be hooded.
The entire place exploded. I mean, really, really went nuts.
Ohlona smiled a knowing, wolf smile. I cried. So, I think, did David, and I’m going to bet we weren’t the only ones. This was why, I thought. This was why I used to do this. Doesn’t mean I can’t in the future. I just don’t have to lose months of sleep beforehand anymore. But this is why the work I did there was important.
16 June 05
Unplanned Museum Outing
As soon as I stepped off the plane yesterday, I saw an ad outside the gate for an art exhibit entitled Illuminating the Word: the Saint John’s Bible at the Minneapolis Institute for the Arts. As Pica puts it, the creation of the St. John’s bible is the calligraphic event of the last half-millenium, so I figured if I could possibly try to make the exhibit in my crammed schedule, I would.
It turns out the museum is open in the evening tonight, and there is a ticket slot available for a 6 PM visit, so off I go! The logistical complication is that there is a conference social event this evening at historic Ft. Snelling going from 5:30 to 10 PM, so rather than take the bus running from the conference hotel to the fort, I’m going to make my way there after my museum outing using bus and light rail.
All the running around will be worth it—I don’t think this is an exhibit to be missed since I’m in town.
15 June 05
Knackered; Or, Why I'm Behind on Lots of Things But Especially Reading Blogs
December: Maine/Boston
January: Washington/Oregon/British Columbia
February: Texas, San Francisco, Berkeley
March: Palm Desert, Anza Borrego
April/May: Boston
May/June: San Francisco, North Carolina/Virginia, Bodega Bay, Berkeley
[Of special note: we live less than 20 miles from Sacramento, and I’m not sure I’ve been there once this year… just in case you think putting down Berkeley or San Francisco is trivial for a Davisite.]
Numenius left today for Minneapolis and an open source GIS conference. This is the first time he’s gone somewhere without me for ages; I, on the other hand, have been doing some running around, most of it alone. All of it was fun, though. (I’ve seen seventeen new North American birds this year, which is more than in the last ten years put together. Edging toward 700…) What I think I need to acknowledge, though, is that these short trips take me a long time to bounce back from, in terms of retrieving my focus. I can slip back into work, I can slip back into blogging, but I’m not really here yet. The settling takes longer these days. Eh oui.
So today, especially, I’m happy to stay put, having had a massage this evening to deal with sitting on too many planes and not doing enough exercise and generally pampering myself after a physical exam yesterday, of the routine variety but never, ever pleasant…
15 June 05
A Pink Dinner
We had dinner at Natalie and Ben’s this evening, a small get-together to start organizing the next efforts of the Davis group of Code Pink. This will be a campaign to bring home the state National Guard from Iraq, a movement that has started especially in the Pacific Northwest, where the National Guard always plays an important role in summer forest fire control.
I have done nothing remotely activist since the elections, which surely sent a lot of us into deep torpor. Thankfully, there are those who have been carrying on the good work all along, and we left a bit more inspired, not to mention delighted to have met Natalie and Ben’s two new year-old kitties, who even have their very own scratching post trimmed in pink.
13 June 05
Woven Threads
A huge thanks to Numenius for getting us up and running on TextPattern. This was really painless for me: I was off counting scoters in Bodega Harbor while he slaved away. This system is “lean and elegant” (programmers apparently know what that means); it’s certainly easy to use and no spam so far.
While at my mother’s I helped her go through some papers, among which were my grandmother’s birth certificate, her marriage certificate to my paternal grandfather, the latter’s induction into the Blackburn Grand Lodge of Masons (interesting date system they had/have, those chaps), his obituary, a note attached to the obituary listing a relative, I’m assuming, whose address changed mid-note. I have never heard of this relative.
This kind of thing is the stuff of nightmares for declutterers: how do you know what someone might want later on? The answer is you don’t so you keep it, at least the pieces of this that aren’t duplicated elsewhere.
Such as the fact that my grandmother’s mother Augusta who was born in Halifax, Yorkshire, was living with her unmarried uncle, a “wool sorter,” in Bury, when she was eleven. Plots arise unbidden in my mind.