Ancient Scotland

I have a love/hate relationship with unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones as most of you know them. I very rarely "like" or "select" a drone photograph, they feel like a way to cheat at photography. I realise that of course that's a similar way that people find that editing a photograph is also cheating at photography :-)

Anyway, I found a video that really shows the potential of drone videography, a mix of some spectacular scenes of my home-country with perfect ambient music. Definitely worth three minutes of your day.

June/July

As my Instagram followers and posts can attest to, I haven't had much time to go out photographing in the last month. In what was probably the best month of weather that Scotland has ever seen, with included spectacular sunsets, I have been busy moving to a new apartment.

As much as I enjoy building furniture from IKEA after hauling it up three flights of stairs and then having to spend over a week building it, my body decided that it was not much fun. Never before has a bowl of Swedish meatballs cost so much.

Now that I have been in the apartment for over a week I am starting to get myself into a routine where I can balance working with some web design and some photography. After the world cup has finished I'll start appreciating this summer weather before it disappears again.

GeoData 2018

After the rather good GIS Update at Edinbrugh last week I was pretty excited about attending the GEO Data 2018 conference at the Glasgow Science Centre. It was rather different to conferences that I have attended before, mostly becuase the conference sponsors and exhibitors made up the bulk of the agenda. Needless to say they were mostly intersted in selling their 'product'.

I was also a touch looing forward to being able to go up the Glasgow tower and taking a couple of photographs but alas it was closed due to high winds. On the bright side I wa allowed to go into the base and gets this photograph. The whole tower is shaped lie a ball point pen and this is the "ball point" at the base of the tower. More inforation about this tower can be found on their website.

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The presentaton that stood out to me was by Liam Mason from Marine Scotland and makes up the bulk of the rest of this post. His presentation was on 'Improving Accessibility in Data Visualisation':

"Rainbow colour schemes are commonly used in data visualisation, particularly in climate science & meteorology.  Liam will demonstrate how these colour scales can distort, mislead, and confuse your message, and offer some advice on how to improve your use of colour."

Not only did he effectively demonstrate what colour blind people would see in different GIS scenarios but also supplied useful web links to where resources are supplied for avoiding these pitfalls. Apparently 1 in 12 men and 1 in 200 woman are affected by colour blindness in the world.

I thought I would end this post with a list of some colour blind resrources to help make colour blind friendly maps.

Vischeck - simulates coloublind vision
Colorbrewer 2.0  - has a colorblind safe option
Color Oracle - a colour blindness simulator for Windows, Mac and Linux

It's also worth noting that since QGIS 2.4 offers color blind and greyscale simulators.

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 :-)

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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.