One of the giants upon whose shoulders we stand. Rest in peace, Dr. West. thezebra.org/2026/01/18/d...

“In Bid to Dissolve NATO, Trump Raises Prices for American Consumers” - Fixed it for you, @nytimes.com

Weird memory surfaced today. I was a Navy contractor for many years. There was a guy on base with a name very similar to mine, so we were adjacent in the address list. We'd get each other's email/voicemail constantly. Never met him once, but probably talked to him on the phone about two dozen times.

Spatial Analysis with Claude Code I've been doing more (a lot more) with Claude Code lately. With its subagents and skills features, it's become more customizable and powerful. I can really dial it into doing things the way I want them done, which accelerates my development and quickly gets me to…

Notepad++ is my sole use case for Wine on my Mac.

I was one of the founding members of the HIFLD working group and I am mostly ambivalent about the shuttering of HIFLD Open. It was a convenient portal for data that is available elsewhere.

“Open” can mean a lot of things. Here, we discuss its variations and their implications. cercanasystems.com/2025/11/vari...

Terrain, water, and infrastructure shape human behavior. Human behavior reshapes risk, access, and demand. That feedback loop is where many automations quietly break. AI can help guide rules by interpreting spatial nuance. We unpack this in our latest post. cercanasystems.com/2026/01/oper...

Today’s earworm open.spotify.com/track/6z9ehf...

Seemed like a good day to donate.

dog.wagged = true;

The star has come down. 2025 is in the books.

Claude Code doesn't seem to be a better programmer than me. It seems to make the same kind of mistakes I would. It simply finds them faster after the fact.

Hacked up a quick desktop geoparquet viewer with Claude Code. Currently browsing data from the HIFLD archive on Source Collective.

I used Claude Code to build an app to help me with social media. I had it build a version with Electron and another with MAUI. Makes me wonder how many SaaS subscriptions I can sunset by building helper apps for myself this way.

The past year has been difficult for many reasons, but today, I watched my granddaughters experience Christmas with joy and safety. So many choices and challenges were vindicated today.

I just want to say for the record that when the history books are written centuries from now, I believe the election of Donald Trump in a free and fair election in 2024 will go down as one of the most senseless and self-destructive own goals in human history

I have not watched “Elf” yet. What is wrong with me?

Cercana Systems LLC - Reducing the Costs of Fragmented Spatial Data in 2026 by Cercana https://cercanasystems.com/2025/12/reducing-the-costs-of-fragmented-spatial-data-in-2026/

Early bird tickets for #SOTMUS2026 are now available! Save some 🫰 and snag your spot at State of the Map US in Madison, Wisconsin, from June 11 to 13! See ya there! 🐦 openstreetmap.app.neoncrm.com/np/clients/o... #OpenStreetMap #geospatial #opendata #Madison

Can we be done with modals, now?

Attended an event in NYC by Jesse Itzler. It was part business talk, part pep rally and exactly what I needed after this year. No new words were spoken. No new pearls of wisdom entered my head, but the reframe was needed. Sometimes, you need to hear what you already know.

Data Preservation: Let the Pain Guide You As I’ve recounted before, what became HIFLD started as the M: drive on a Windows server in a musty government building in Norfolk, VA. Early exercises made it obvious that the data on our M: drive didn’t match the data on other M: drives. They also made it…

The next few days will see me drive to DCA, Metro to Union Station, take a train to NYC, ride-share to LGA, fly to PNS, fly back to DCA, drive home. What are the chances I run into Del Griffith?

Had a good experience calling the IRS today. Left a callback number and they called back precisely on time. They told me the state and area code it would come from. The agent was polite and efficient. My issue was resolved quickly.

Murphy's Law of meetings: Any meeting that can be scheduled will be scheduled on top of another meeting.

Customers extending their weekend makes for a productive Monday.

Comically bad camera work on the Thanksgiving Day Parade. It’s like they patched into somebody’s phone

Dear SaaS platform that doesn’t provide a public-facing phone number anywhere: Don’t be surprised when I ignore unsolicited calls from your sales team.

The day before Thanksgiving.

Metadata Rising Earlier in my career, I was working on an infrastructure protection task and we were reconciling data from several sources that addressed the same road network. The data from the locality was authoritative, but it lacked some information we needed so we were conflating other data…

Corned ham. It must be approaching Thanksgiving in Southern Maryland.

Can we retire the phrase "at the intersection of"?

Observation of having our granddaughters living here as they learn to talk: Questions at this stage are about the well-being of others. How are you? Are you okay? What's wrong? I admire the beauty in the fact that those are their first instincts as they come to understand what a question is.

I’ll confess that I am slightly jealous of states that can be labeled on a map without using a leader.

Partly a recap of #FOSS4GNA, partly a reflection on 2025 and life. blog.geomusings.com/2025/11/07/f...

Single most useful conference giveaway I’ve ever gotten, compliments of #wherobots at #foss4gna

Important to note that New Mexico ranks 41st in state GDP, yet free childcare is a priority, unlike many wealthier states.

"You get an extra hour of sleep." Tell me you don't have a dog without telling me you don't have a dog.

Yesterday’s hike was spectacular.

You Should Attend FOSS4G North America Once again, FOSS4G North America is bringing together the people shaping the future of open-source geospatial technology. This year, it takes place November 3–5 at the Hyatt Regency in Reston, Virginia, just a few miles from the centers of federal…

Did someone say Old Bay pumpkin seeds?

Nearly 30 years later and Eva Cassidy's rendition of "Over the Rainbow" can still stop me in my tracks.

Supporting Open Source: A Case Study I mentioned in my previous post that, at a previous career stop, I built open-source support into our IT lifecycle. Specifically, we used QGIS. The primary reason we made that choice is that we were a Mac shop. It's true we could have run ArcGIS Pro inside…

Unless… You are already using open-source. I've said that time and again to various audiences. The most committed Microsoft and Esri users will immediately balk, but it's easy to knock the objections down. Azure? Linux abounds. Esri? GDAL under the hood. And what does the "Py" in ArcPy stand for?…

When people are hired, not for their honesty or competency, but for their ability to be snarling trolls on TV for the delight of their immature and unpleasant boss, you get an AG like Pamela Jo Bondi.

I just read about Maxar, Vantor, and Lanteris. I honestly can’t keep track of all of these new Avengers.

Queen