Without fail, the social media exhaust from GEOINT every year has me queuing up Black Flag.

I had a dream last night that I was stopped at a traffic light when a car pulled up next to me. Its windows were down and it was blasting “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous” by Good Charlotte. This is not a big song for me but it’s now stuck in heavy rotation in my head. Damn subconscious.

I am convinced the phrase “Under-promise and over-deliver” was first uttered by the parent of a toddler.

I wonder if the ETL/ELT/iPaaS segment will survive past its current round of enterprise and annual contracts.

The phrase "generate a CSV formatted for easy import into Postgres" is magic with Claude. Even if you don't plan to use Postgres, it gives you a nicely cleaned up CSV. I usually also ask it to make a metadata markdown file to preserve richness it may need to strip out.

Spatial finance can see assets, hazards, emissions, and exposure with increasing precision. But places are also shaped by institutions, memory, liability, politics, and trust. This post looks at what spatial finance cannot yet see from orbit. blog.geomusings.com/2026/04/28/w...

@fedgeoday.bsky.social 2026 reinforced a key point: federal geospatial data assets are becoming foundational to AI. Four talks stood out to me, connecting data stewardship, foundation models, agents, provenance, and mature implementation. blog.geomusings.com/2026/04/27/f...

Anyone who really knows me knows how much I love REM. Their music has moved me since I first heard them. Over the past year, boygenius has joined them. Their small catalog gets right to the heart of me.

I love this so much

Geospatial AI may be accumulating the conditions for model collapse, where AI-derived labels silently re-enter training pipelines and errors compound across generations. NLP experienced this and geospatial can learn from it. I write about it here: blog.geomusings.com/2026/04/24/p...

Understanding can arrive in unexpected ways. A typewriter in my father’s shed became a way of seeing him more clearly. blog.geomusings.com/2026/04/22/t...

In 1983, the photographer Tom Arndt heard about something interesting happening in the parking lot of a Holiday Inn: a casting call for extras in “Purple Rain.” See his images of Minnesotans who wanted to be in Prince’s new movie: newyorkermag.visitlink.me/jB-nEf

Cercana Systems LLC - From Archive to Map: Processing Geospatial Data with Claude Cowork by Cercana https://cercanasystems.com/2026/04/from-archive-to-map-processing-geospatial-data-with-claude-cowork/

New tools arrive with new vocabulary and new claims of rupture. What changes less is the work underneath. Context, judgment, and stewardship are the center of gravity beneath rapid technical change. I write about it here.

Spatial Analysis with Claude, Part 2 Following up on my previous post, I built a new Claude skill to take advantage of the increasing wealth of data online in cloud-native formats like GeoParquet. Given that DuckDB can read from such sources in place, I built the skill to use it to perform spatial…

RFC 1 is a reminder that governance and stewardship were part of shared technical infrastructure from the beginning. In geospatial, that same long arc runs through standards work like GeoJSON, STAC, and OGC Simple Features, and it matters even more as AI builds on inherited structure.

Always a good day when a new issue of @bittersouth.bsky.social arrives

Cercana Systems LLC - Cercana Executive Briefing — Week of March 28–April 3, 2026 by Cercana https://cercanasystems.com/2026/04/cercana-executive-briefing-week-of-march-28-april-3-2026/

On the treadmill: 4 miles, sub 10:00 pace, last mile sub 8:00. First time for both since prior to last year’s eye surgeries.

This week’s geospatial executive briefing points to something larger than product news. Standards work around EO embeddings, renewed national governance efforts, and growing defense-sector scrutiny all indicate a period of geospatial infrastructure evolution. cercanasystems.com/2026/04/cerc...

And I’m Out I have decided that, in the next phase of my career, the most advanced spatial analysis I will perform will be deciding where to park this baby. AI is taking over the entire industry anyway, so I thought I'd use it to make a conceptual rendering of my food truck/semi-retirement plan.…

Our latest geospatial executive briefing is up! cercanasystems.com/2026/03/cerc...

Shortening Translation Distance I spent the first five years of my career, from 1993 to 1998, doing mostly AML programming. There was also some AutoLISP, MapBasic, Clipper, and Avenue during that time, but it was mostly AML. In hindsight, that was a fortunate place to begin. I had no real exposure…

Geo Roadshow 2026 Over the next several months, I will be making the rounds on my 2026 geo-conference schedule, with stops at FedGeoDay, State of the Map US, and FOSS4G North America. These are not just events I plan to attend. They are communities I have been involved with in different ways, and…

FedGeoDay is now on ALL your favorite platforms! Follow us for updates on #FedGeoDay2026 — April 22–23 at US Census Bureau HQ. Keynotes, workshops & networking with federal geo leaders. Register: fedgeo.us #GIS #Geospatial #OpenData #FedGeoDay #FedGeoDay2026 #OSGeo

Twenty Years, Part One In 1993, at the very start of my career, I was a newly minted AML developer working on a data automation project. A good bit of the industry’s energy at the time was focused on digitizing vast amounts of geospatial information that still existed in analog form, including…

Hey y'all. @fedgeoday.bsky.social is on here now. The next FedGeoDay is April 22-23, 2026 at the US Census Bureau in Suitland. MD. Follow the account to for announcements and registration info.

I don’t wear green on St. Patrick’s Day, but I do have Sinead O’Conner on a loop all day.

Our hardware store had someone outside handing out small slices of “pizza pi.” Why a hardware store? Who knows? But it was fun.

Liking Claude Cowork so far.

"Field of Dreams" hits a little harder after your father has passed away.

Sovereignty and Open Source Open source geospatial tools are good. I have been making some form of that argument for most of my career, especially on this blog. The mature projects are equal to or better than their proprietary alternatives. The communities that build and maintain them represent…

The Siren Song of Global Identifiers Recently, a proposal submitted to the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) set off a thoughtful discussion within the open geospatial community. At issue is the idea of a global identifier system for real‑world geographic entities, which is something that would…

509 BCE - Roman Republic established 46 BCE - Julius Caesar named Dictator for Life 27 BCE - Roman Empire begins with Senate declaring Octavian as Augustus 476 CE - Fall of Western Roman Empire The Western Roman Senate convened through all of this. People matter more than institutions.

We’ve added a daily briefing feature to GeoFeeds. geofeeds.me/briefings

When the leopards are busy eating their own faces, let them continue.

When Geospatial Is Consumed at AI-Scale In February 2026, Gary Gale published a brief post describing a problem that, on its face, looked mundane. A volunteer‑maintained mapping project called Vaguely Rude Places had experienced an abrupt surge in traffic. Daily requests jumped from the low…

The most important geospatial app you will see today: www.whereisitfiveoclock.beer

Doing a little work with Mergin Maps. blog.geomusings.com/2026/02/17/x...

I haven't needed a single additional feature released since MS Word 6.0.

Github and AWS seem to be in an intense competition to see who can create the most inscrutable permissions management experience.

I tell you what, Ring figured out exactly how to weaponize white people’s empathy in service to a corporately controlled surveillance state. Tell them it will find your dog.

It’s fun to see this again, @james.fee.fm

Mudpocalypse about to hit the DMV.

Ten years ago, I wrote about the geospatial landscape as I saw it then. Ten years later, I decided to take another look.

Minneapolis residents aren’t just pushing back against Trump’s crackdown—they’re undercutting MAGA’s core philosophy, Adam Serwer argues.

"Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator. You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?" - Joseph Nye Welch

The people who spent years defending and even lionizing Kyle Rittenhouse and Ashli Babbitt now want us to believe that an unarmed mother in her car and a disarmed nurse were domestic terrorists who deserved to be murdered by law enforcement.

We've added 12 more feeds over the last couple days. Check out the updated aggregation at geofeeds.me/view