June

I find it hard to believe that it is June already, it seems like only a few days ago that I was at Edinburgh Castle taking photographs of the New Year Fireworks. It occurred to me that it is almost three years since I moved back to Scotland and that my trips to the Netherlands have become less frequent, the gaps are increasing and it appears, or certainly feels like, I am settling into being in Scotland for the time being. 

Mid year is also a good time to take stock of what I have achieved so far and what I have planned for the rest of the year and whether I should re-plan. When I was a consultant for a large hydrocarbon based company each year would begin with a yearly plan for developement and of course there would be a mid-year review to see if you were meeting your targets. I was very good at using woolly terms that didn’t tie me into anything crazy “Will continue to develop my skills in x/y/z”. What does that even mean? Well basically nothing, you can’t really measure these types of targets. Of course the company didn’t really care that much as I was a consultant and they prefer to concentrate on the drones they were creating for the long term and not people they could dispose of with a months notice.

Wow, that sounded a little bitter. 

Of course my personal targets are usually much less woolly, so far this year, in no particular order:

  • Relocate back to The Netherlands
  • Travel outside europe (which soon may be achievable by getting out of bed, meh... Brexit)
  • Continue to develop Adam Design Studio (sounds woolly I know, basically get paid to design/implement/update websites)
  • Learn how to implement a PostGIS database and serve WFS/WMS maps from Geoserver
  • Learn how to load and serve Ordnance Survey data to users
  • Develop “Grateful” application for iOS
  • Attend conferences to network and gather new ideas

As alluded to at the start of this post I don’t see any King’s Day celebrations in my near future, I guess I’ll have to make do with more public holidays and no bridging days just now.  

I haven’t done as much travelling as I would have liked so far but I have visited the Philippines during March/April, which was fantastic and also showed me that being in 30 degrees heat isn’t the worst thing in the world. In actual fact I adapted to the heat better than I thought I would, which was just as well. It also taught me that I don’t tan well, I just kinda burn. 

I have built a few sites so far this year and have at least one in the pipeline and will start advertising for new clients this month. Each client I get teaches me something new about my skill level and skills that I need to learn to implement their ideas into their site. My real target for this is to always have a site to be working on, which up until now hasn’t been a problem, I think this will be more easily achieved once I start advertising.

In the last project I was involved in I should have developed an in depth understanding and skills to develop databases and serve them through Geoserver and how to load OS data. This unfortunately didn’t happen and basically led me to a new project wherein I read a lot about how to do it myself. My latest project is interesting as there is no one to ask, for the most part, so it leads to a certain amount of self-reliance and research. It pushes me to be better and develops my patience level to a point that I have never had before as described in a recent post “You do the math”.

I have had an idea for an iPhone application (Grateful) for a while now but haven’t got round to do more than the wireline sketches for it. I think that this will take a little longer to develop than I would like as it relies on me learning a lot more about programming but my feeling is that I need to block out a period of time every few days and sit down and work on it. 

Ah, conferences, how I love and hate them. I actually have two this month, GISUpdate at Edinburgh University and GeoDATA Scotland at the Glasgow Science Centre. Am looking forward to both conferences as I know that I will meet new interesting people as well as people that I have worked with before.  

So that’s it for 2018 so far, no further ahead, no further behind.

Sunday Wanderings

A few photographs from a Sunday wandering around Stirling and Bonnybridge. Accompanied by @alycoste who managed to lose her phone in a nettle bush, while the phone was on silent. Our trips are never dull. On our last trip she lost her gloves at Stirling castle, in the pitch black; the gloves were also black. To be fair at least both items were found again :-)

You do the math

I was reminded about the closing scenes of the film "The Martian" today. 

"You just begin. You do the math. You solve one problem and you solve the next one, and then the next. And If you solve enough problems, you get to come home."

Today I was faced with something that I had never done before and it involved solving many problems, even though I knew what I wanted to achieve it, it seemed like an unsurmountable task to figure it all out. I have noticed that I often become extremely frustrated when I can't figure a task out, so much so that I can't think in a balanced way. 

You solve one problem, and you solve the next one and then the next.

I have been told that I am stubborn and I got to find out how stubborn today, as I would not leave the task until I was totally satisfied that the solution worked, and that I understood why. I also found a tremendous amount of joy in solving the last problem that allowed me to go home. Because hell was freezing over before I left without finishing the task.

I won't bore you with the details of what I was doing but it involved, Ordnance Survey data, GeoServer and a whole lot of data management. I had to "science the shit out of it".

I have taken this kind of approach to situations for a while now, it has taken me to new places and got me out of situations that I haven't wanted to be in. I think the hardest part is sometimes identifying what the problem is.

Punta Cruz Watchtower

One of the great things about touring the Philippines was the numerous historical stops that could be made. This was one of my favourite stops, even though the temperature was over 32 degrees that day! While I was walking about the beach @geraldineyoga at least had the sense to take some cover from the sun.

Officially known as the Fort of Saint Vincent Ferrer, the Punta Cruz Watchtower is an isosceles triangle shaped fort located in the western tip of the municipality of Maribojoc on the island of Bohol in The Philippines.

It was seriously damaged after the 2013 Bohol earthquake but has recently been renovated to its previous state and looks as good as it probably did when it was completed in 1796.

The Punta Cruz Watchtower was declared as a National Historical Landmark in February 2009. Its historical marker was unveiled by the municipality of Maribojoc and the National Historical Commission of the Philippines in May 2009. Together with other watchtowers in the region the Punta Cruz Watchtower is being considered to the UNESCO World Heritage Tentative List since 2006 under the collective group of Spanish Colonial Fortifications of the Philippines.