An Alignment of Pet Peeves

A blogger out in Ohio has touched, in a way, on a pet peeve of mine in discussing a pet peeve of his own:

In the past year I’ve noticed that the media, and sometimes city officials, use the terms Delaware County and Delaware (city) as interchangeable terms. They’re not.

I try to track news and discussion about the State of Delaware. I have deployed standing searches using Google and other tools to try to catch references to, and discussion about, the First State. I've found some fascinating things this way, but I do have to wade through far too much news about Delaware County and city in Ohio, that county just north of us in Pennsylvania, and numerous Delaware Roads and and Avenues around the nation.

Maybe we should have copyrighted the name.

A Return to New Orleans

I'm in New Orleans for a few days for a meeting sponsored by the US Census Bureau. I've visited here twice in the past; once with The Lovely Karen and once for a NSGIC conference. Both of those visits were pre-Katrina. Things have changed.

We're in a hotel on Canal Street, just at the edge of the French Quarter. There are several refurbishing projects in this part of town; you can tell that something went on, but there was no bad flooding here and things are getting back on track. I don't know that I'll have much time to look around, but what I've seen so far has not looked too bad.

I rode in from the airport yesterday evening on a small bus-load of visitors. There are several conferences in town this week. Our driver offered to give us an update as he drove. We agreed and he spoke for the whole of the 25-minute (or so) ride about what had happened, where and why. He pointed-out abandoned hospitals and the high-water marks in places that had flooded badly. He described some of the recovery efforts and credited us, as visitors to his town, as a key part of that recovery.

The Katrina flood, and its aftermath, coincided for me with a minor personal health challenge. I spent the first few days of that event in Beebe Hospital with a blood clot and the balance of that first week recuperating at home. I was feeling vulnerable and couldn't help wondering what it would have been like for me to try to deal with something like Katrina, and to try to protect and take care of my family in that situation, with even a minor health issue like the blood clot.

So it is interesting to be back and to have even a brief look around. We are scheduled fairly tightly, but a small group of us plan to walk down to Jackson Square in the morning for beignets at the Cafe du Monde. That's near the levee along the Mississippi River, which is said to be about as high and running as strong as it ever does just now. I hope to get some good photos in the morning before we go back into another day of meetings.

Go! Fight! Win! (Okay, maybe not "Fight")

I got to do something very new this evening. For the first time in my life, I found myself in a grandstand yelling encouragement to one of my kids on a high school sports field.

Colleen is a member of the brand new Girls Lacrosse Team at Sussex Technical High School. Today was their second game. Ever. There have been a few scrimmages and practice, of course, but they are a brand new team, in a brand new program. And given their complete lack of experience, they don't look too bad.

Our girls are both dancers, and have competed in that discipline in the past. And Colleen went through a period of competing in equestrian events as a younger girl. But traditional high school team sports are something new.

So there I was, yelling "Get in there!" and "Go Colleen!" and "well done!" and things like that.

I asked Colleen as we left, "could you hear me?"

She said, "oh yeah."

Three Tens on a Black Screen

I was waiting for this point in the life of my Prius. I reached 101,010 miles on my odometer on the way into work this morning. The way the number "1" works in the digital read-out adds this once every 10, 1000, and 100000 miles spacing that I find cute.

It really doesn't take much to make me a happy man.

Fishing and Birds

I found this Osprey hanging out on the rooftop of a small building about halfway out the Naples Fishing Pier, in Florida, last month. He(?) was hooked, with a fishing lure hanging from his beak. It didn't seem to have affected him too much, though he seemed very tame and was letting a few of the regulars feed him by tossing small bait fish out onto the deck for him to swoop down and grab. Otherwise, he flew around the pier a few times and then perched, watching things, on top of a fake owl.

There were plenty of gulls hanging around and a fair number of pelicans in the water below looking for fish as much as the retirees and tourists on the pier.

And there were birds that I didn't recognize. The fellow at right was swooping in close. I think he was after the fish that the anglers were offering to the Osprey.

What Did We Call This Place When?

In order to save electrons, allow me to point to a blog post I just wrote on the NSGIC Blog: Getting Serious About Original Place Names.

It is about a recent small grant by the Federal Geographic Data Committee to the state of Hawaii to add audio pronunciation guides to geospatial place-name data for that state. It builds on an idea developed by the Coeur d'Alene Tribe, in Idaho. The Tribe's GIS program has created audio map data, including for Google Earth and has entries outside of Idaho.

The project is open to input on names outside of traditional Couer d'Alene areas. Philadelphia, in Pennsylvania, for example, is at the same spot as what was once known as Tsi wahswèn:to (MP3) which translates as "at the coal forked mouth."

I think this is a cool idea.

Unexpected Fact #195

I found out today that the spell-checker in Microsoft Outlook includes the word "supercalifragilisticexpialidocious."

I had added an extraneous "l."

How and why did I learn this unexpected fact? I found a use for the word in an e-mail at work. Every once in a while it helps to use absurd language. Even if the sound of it is said to be "quite atrocious."

Delaware, Victorious

There's been lots of reaction this week to the decision by the US Supreme Court to confirm Delaware's denial of a Coastal Zone Act permit for the proposed Liquid Natural Gas terminal at Crown Landing, in New Jersey. Plenty of news coverage and blog reactions; from Delaware and New Jersey and elsewhere. Some positive, some neutral, and some negative. I've been tagging what I find in del.icio.us.

Second Golf Game of 2008

I almost broke 100! I scored a 102 on the par-72 course at the Naples Beach Hotel and Golf Club in Florida. Had I not had a complete blow-up on the par-5 14th, I might have done it.

It turns out that using the 5-iron, which looks remarkably like the sand wedge when you are flustered (5 vs. S) , in a green-side bunker is a bad idea. When you've already hit a tree, the water hazard, and a half-submerged log that bounced your ball right back at you, on the same hole, these things happen.

I was playing in my walking sneakers and with rental clubs (very nice clubs), but had a wonderful time (except for the 15th) I played the first nine with a dad teaching his 15-year old the game. I played the second nine with an older gent who plays that course regularly and either his son or son-in-law. These guys were playing very well and they helped me raise my game a bit, I think.

The course was built in the late 1920s and has been redesigned a few times since. It is mature and tree-lined and, though flat, fairly challenging. And nice folks, too.

And... We're Back

We're back in Delaware after most of the last week at the Naples Beach Hotel and Golf Club, in Florida.

We flew down to Tampa early on Monday and drove down to Naples from there. We stayed in a vintage hotel on the beach in Naples. We swam, we sunned, and we burned a bit. We visited the zoo and the everglades. I golfed. Th e girls shopped. We ate at a variety of restaurants, from a classic burger joint to a relatively fancy place.

I took about 380 photos, and Colleen took a few more. So far, I've only posted a few from the Naples Zoo and the beach view from the Naples posted at right. I'll get through the rest and post more in the next few days.

I liked Naples, but it struck me as very like the Rehoboth area on steroids. They have very large developments in Florida and the sheer volume of shopping malls and restaurants on the main drag was daunting.

But the weather is so nice. And the Golf of Mexico shows many moods. And I got to spend five days disconnected from the world and with my wife and children. I like that.