geoLibro.org

Vacation in South Carolina (what, it’s beautiful — like Florida but without the Florida) is over. geoMp3s will soon return. But first a map I want very badly, you could say.

I’ve had a lustful eye on an A-bike or some other folder for a while, now, because renting bikes — while awesome and absolutely the way to do it — means you either overpaid for an unlubed Huffy from 1989 (probably stolen) or an uncomfortable 1-speed cruiser. The A-bike looks just right (especially compared with the pricey Dahons) and they’ve gone after my own heart with a map-that’s-actually-not-a-map trope.

It should be easy to find a dark, sweet Greg Brown talker about Iowa City. But his best songs aren’t about places (his worst songs might be). So perhaps the next best place to look is L.A., where perennial bridesmaid Eleni Mandell released Country for True Lovers (2003), on which appeared today’s track, “Iowa City.” It’s whistful and a little minor, suggesting the narrator isn’t fully trusting what she’s saying about how easy it is for a girl to live there and look for something. But that’s not my bag anyway, and perhaps I’m reading some sadness into it.

Why? Because my wife is in Iowa City this week without me. Which means no matter what this week’s track was going to be the blues. Could have been “On Top of Old Smokey” for all I care. Just need wife back.

So it’s a sweet Iowa waltz, “Iowa City.”

And the kml for all mp3s of the week

Well, it’s here, sort of. With this paragraph in a post at the GeoServer blog the team announces an alpha release of GeoServer with a new admin panel:

The GeoServer team has been working on something very exciting over the past few months, that we’d like to share with you now.  We have the beginnings of a brand new user interface on the admin console for GeoServer.

And it’s better. See the screencaps below. Everythings splayed out in lists rather than pulldown menus, you’re always within reach of major categories of administrative tasks, and the apply/save thing has been cast off.

So that’s all great, but about that GeoServer/GeoNetwork integration…

Wife idiolecto is away in Iowa this weekend. Things ain’t right. Turns out she’s the brains behind pa; I just walk around the house and yard in a daze pulling weeds, drinking soy milk for lunch, delivering soliloquies to the dog. Too nervous to do any real work. Half of the cylinders misfire when mama’s gone. Maybe I can go fix that gate.

Yeah, yeah. I know. I’m late. It’s because both of the tracks I wanted to use this week were hard to place in space. One (next week’s, maybe) makes sense. I don’t really know why this week’s was so hard to pin down. Ultimately a reference librarian named Don Bonsteel nailed the answer for me (thanks, Don). Bonsteel works at Enoch Pratt Free Library/State Library Resource Center in Baltimore, and he answered my question within a matter of hours when LexisNexis, Google, Cuil, Yahoo!, and about 100 other sources couldn’t. And by the way I don’t live anywhere near Baltimore, have never given anything to the Enoch Pratt Free library, have arguably never given anything back to this world, in fact. And yet here I am with free help from a kind librarian many hundreds of miles way. I’m just saying…

Anyway, I’m stalling. This week’s track is by the great, great David Byrne, although I wouldn’t argue the track itself is great. It’s “And She Was,” and the version here is from a show at London’s Union Chapel. Byrne’s intro gives away the location; it’s a field near the Yoo-Hoo chocolate drink factory in Baltimore. But that was the thing that was so hard to find — the location of that fucking factory in Baltimore. According to Bonsteel, according to the 1967 Baltimore Metro Telephone Directory, the factory was at 3500 Marmenco Court. So then I’m guessing at which field, yes, but ultimately the location makes pretty good sense, since it’s less than a mile east of Byrne’s high school (Lansdowne).

So play the song and notice how easy it is to imagine yourself out in the dewy park grass, dreaming big into the light pollution of Baltimore industry. Or doing acid, blah blah.

David Byrne’s “And She Was” from the 2004 Live at Union Chapel (with a rough end because I cut off the interview).

And the kml for all mp3s of the week.

Christian Spanring wrote today about using ArcGIS on Mac OS X using VMware Fusion (his throw to YouTube). Hopefully all of you who were interested in this kind of experiment back in the early days are still reading.

Within what is apparently a constant stream of barcode apps to appear in the iTunes App Store appears NeoMedia’s NeoReader. As soon as this all settles down I’ll need to publish a review. My guerilla spatial inventory project is now well-stocked with everything but labor and funding.

James Fee posts some news from ESRI 2008 User Conference and one piece of it is half welcome:

Q: When will the metadata editor in ArcCatalog be improved?

“I’d say this is very welcomed.  The metadata editor hasn’t improved since 8.x was released and if we are to expect people to edit metadata, it should be made easier.”

–SpatiallyAdjusted.com

Improving the metadata editor is a fine idea, but how about integrating metadata management into the rest of the workflow? How hard could this be? When I add a new column, why don’t I have the option of documenting it? Why don’t I have the option (though as a librarian I might argue it should be mandatory) to at least write an abstract every time a new feature class is manually generated? And why is there no metadata toolbox in Toolbox? It has certainly not been made easy to write good metadata — by any GIS software project, by the way — so I’m not sure why ESRI is so sanctimonious about it.

Is that what they call it? I’m not sure. At any rate, posts to this blog (geolibro.org) should now also simultaneously post to geolibro.livejournal.com thanks to Live+Press.

Now, why? Because the kick-ass idiolecto has been posting rocking, ripping tirades for many years, and I’ve always stayed back. No more! She deserves my attention in life and online.

Rock on, idiolecto, and I will now put my shoulder to the wheel you’re pushing.

I’m sure these are both hilariously fun stories to read, but…I choose the bear. It’s more classic, I think.