High School Football

Sussex Tech and Caesar Rodney High Schools made-up their rained-out Friday game this past Monday afternoon. I had the day off (Thanks, Columbus!) so I was able to attend, and take a mess of pictures.

The game started at 4:30. The home stands at Tech face west, so I had to deal with looking, and photographing, into the setting sun, but the skies were clear and blue.

The CR Riders are a very good football team. They led 41 to 0 at the half, but Tech's Ravens came back with a pair of touchdowns in the second half.

Of course, I was there mostly to watch my kid play the bass in the marching band.

Filed in:

• football
• highschool
• tech
• delaware

What's The Deal With the Ducks?

A comment from imsobob on one of my Peabody Duck photos on flickr led me to realize that I need to explain what's going on there.

I spent last week in the Peabody Hotel in Little Rock, Arkansas, at the annual NSGIC Conference. Downtown Little Rock itself is photogenic, but the photos I wanted to take all week were right in the Peabody Lobby. I finally got to be in the lobby at the right time of day on my last day in Little Rock.

A tradition at the Peabody Hotels is to host ducks in the lobby fountain. The Manager of the Peabody Memphis was hunting, and drinking, with a friend back in the 1930s. As a joke, they left their (then legal) live decoy ducks in the hotel fountain when they returned late one night. It has become a tradition and spread to the Little Rock and Orlando Peabody Hotels as well.

Each day at 11 and 5, the ducks march a red carpet. In the morning they come down on the elevator and march to the fountain. At 5 in the afternoon, they march back to the elevator and so to their rooftop home.

The last day of my conference, I was finally able to make it to the 5 p.m. march. It was great fun. I was particularly charmed by the little girl in blue.

Filed in:

• NSGIC
• conference
• LittleRock
• Arkansas
• Peabody
• Ducks

Moved to the Inactive-Blog List

following the brush: Shae is on hiatus. But hey, she just got married! She'll be back.

The Meaning of Life, and Other Weighty Matters...: She does say "occasional..."

Red White & Blue Hens: I guess they are studying.

Upstart Radical: The last entry (a month ago) was titled "I'm Back."

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• blogging
• inactive-blog

It's a Small World Web

Heidi Cool, over at Case Western Reserve University, refers to an earlier Musings entry in a posting on the value of links within blog postings: From Case to Colby in 8 jumps: The value and vagaries of external links.

She'd followed links from an unrelated blog posting at Case and, within 8 links, found my entry on the Babson Gravity Monument from back in April of 2005. She points to a Colby Echo article on the monument, which I found most interesting.

Ms. Cool and I were at Colby together; she graduated a year after I did and I remember the name, I think. She certainly remembered mine.

She's right, it's the links within blog posts that make for information flow and discovery. I think we all have a duty to try to find new things to point to, to spread knowledge.

Sometimes, I'm afraid, we tend to get into ruts and blog about, and point to, the same things and the same places, over and over. I will try to break out of that mold and cast my web-net farther afield.

Filed in:

• memory
• colby
• gravitymonument
• blogging

Another Protest Song

The WXPN All About the Music Blog has a new protest song by James McMurtry.

McMurtry's God Bless America isn't quite the screamer that Michael Franti's Light Up Ya Lighter is, but it speaks to me:

Negotiation's just no fun
And it don't serve our interests none
Gonna turn up the heat till it comes to a boil
So we can go get that Arab oil

And we'll suck it all up through the barrel of a gun
Everyday's the end of days for some
Republicans don't cut and run
Tell me ain't you proud of what we've done

I like it.

Why is it Called "Little Rock?"

I've just spent a week in the capital of Arkansas and I learned a few things, including why the city is called "Little Rock."

As it turns out, the city is named for a little rock formation in the bank of the Arkansas River.

The story, as I have it from Shelby Johnson, Arkansas' GIS Coordinator and our host last week, is that as European trappers and traders came up the Arkansas River there were few landmarks as they entered what is now Arkansas. Much of the land they found was low, flat and featureless.

When they came upon a bedrock outcrop the size of an elephant, it stood out in their minds and became their landmark. "Meet me after the season at the Little Rock," I imagine them saying. It would have become a natural place to trade and eventually would grow into a settlement, a town, and a capital city.

The Little Rock itself is now partly buried by the concrete base of a railroad bridge. It is accessible via a decaying footpath and has a scruffy but informative historic marker affixed to it.

If you visit, don't be fooled by the even littler rock in the river just off-shore. It is popular with the local turtles, but is not the little rock that gave its name to the future home of the Clinton Presidential Library.

Filed in:

• nsgic
• conference
• arkansas

Home at Last

It's good to be back home, after a week away at a professional conference.

I flew back yesterday afternoon, after a meeting of the NSGIC Board of Directors. I was on the one daily flight from Little Rock to BWI, along with a few others from the NSGIC Conference. We had a pleasant gab-fest in the departure area in Little Rock and took our leave at baggage claim in Baltimore.

I was at my car by 7:00 and planned to drive a short way before stopping for supper. I figured I'd be home by 9:30.

Unfortunately, the winds from the northeast storm now off Delmarva led the Maryland Transportation folks to not open a third east-bound lane on the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, as they normally would on a Friday. Because that third lane would be on the west-bound span, and a gust could knock a vehicle into on-coming traffic, they have a wind-restriction.

The result was a crawling slow back-up from the bridge west for many miles and up Route 97, the highway from BWI to Annapolis. As it turned out, I didn't even reach the bridge until 9:30 and wasn't home until 11:30.

What fun.

Filed in:

• travel
• nsgic
• conference

Update From Little Rock: At the Clinton Library

I'm sorry to say that most of my photos from within the Clinton Library from the other night did not come out well enough to post on flickr. We were asked to not use flash photography, so my shots, while interesting to me, are not sharp enough for "publication."

I did get some cool shots outside.

The evening's event was sponsored by TeleAtlas, a company that DelDOT and the three Delaware counties are working with on a comprehensive statewide update of road data in Delaware. They had one of their data-gathering cars there for us to check out. These cars, and vans, and outfitted with some high-end locational data gathering tools. They are simply driven around, by highly trained folks, to find what's there.

Pretty cool.

Filed in:

• nsgic
• conference

Still in Little Rock

I'm still ensconced in a hotel in Little Rock, Arkansas, in the middle of a grueling week of the annual NSGIC Conference.

I've mentioned before how crazed this organization is; we meet all day, for days on end, trying to cram as much content as possible into one week. As a result, of course, I'm usually too pooped to post.

I have been trying to blog the conference on the NSGIC blog. I have been reduced, by limited web access, to one post a day (generally). I'll keep working that angle.

Thursday morning I will make a presentation on using blogs, wikis and other social media to increase communication among our user groups. I guess I'd better get to writing that.

This afternoon, I did get a chance to take an hour's walk around downtown Little Rock. With my camera, of course.

This evening, our social event was a dinner at the Clinton Presidential Library. It is a fascinating place. Very impressive. The meal was great and the crowd was interesting, as usual.

Because we were at a presidential library, we all made an effort to rise to a certain sartorial level. One long-term NSGIC leader remarked that he'd never seen the group look so classy.

Yes, I did take photos at the Clinton Library. I'll post those tomorrow.

Filed in:

• travel
• conference

Here I Am

I'm seated at a desk in a room at the Peabody Hotel in Little Rock, Arkansas, getting ready for the 2006 Annual Meeting of the National States Geographic Information Council (NSGIC), which gets started tomorrow at about 9:00 a.m.

The NSGIC conference is an important part of my professional life. It is the annual gathering of people who try to do what I try to do for Delaware's state government: coordinating the use and sharing of geospatial data among local, state, and federal agencies, along with the academic and private sectors.

There will be state GIS coordinators from probably 40 of the 50 states (maybe more), with lots of private sector folks, USGS staff, Census Bureau staff, and federal Homeland Security people. We'll meet from early morning until late at night Sunday through Thursday and finish up with a Board Meeting on Friday morning. I have the honor to serve as a member of the Board of Directors of NSGIC.

There will be breaks, and members of the group will be out late drinking beer every night. Likely without me. Lots will get done and by the end of the week I will be a wrag (even without too much partying). It's all worth it, though. This is an active, directed, and valuable group.

Riding in from the airport this afternoon, I shared the hotel shuttle with several USGS staff and , as it turned out, several folks who are in town for the annual meeting of COSLA, the Chief Officers of State Library Agencies.

One, I think, was Gary Nichols, the State Librarian of the State of Maine, with one of his staff. I think Mr. Nichols is the President of COSLA. A nice man, and interested, as I am, in the possible cross-overs between our two organizations. We are both, after all, in the business of enabling public access to information.

I was, as a graduate of Colby College in Maine, interested in talking with the Maine State Librarian. In addition, his staff member is a fellow Colby Grad, though she notes that when she was there, in the 1960's, they still had to wear skirts or coats and ties to class.

I'll have to keep an eye out for Anne Norman, the Delaware State librarian, and see if we can have a Delaware Caucus here in Arkansas.

If I can figure out how to get wireless access in the State Convention Center, next door, I plan to try to live-blog much of the NSGIC Conference on the NSGIC Blog. One of my goals for this week is to try to turn the NSGIC Blog into a group blog, recruiting and, if needed, training a few of my colleagues to add content.

Filed in:

• travel
• nsgic
• gis
• conference