Graduation

November 29, 2016

I graduated from The University of Edinburgh on Monday with an M.Sc. in Geographical Information Sciences. I have always felt a bit overwhelmed at the pomp and circus that is the graduation ceremony. It is a time honoured ceremony that is a celebration of completing a course. Celebrating the commitment and hard work that allows the conferring of the academic (in this case) degree. The graduation was at the Usher Hall as the McEwan Hall, where The University of Edinburgh usually has graduation, is undergoing renovation.

I think I find graduation overwhelming as it is nerve-wracking crossing a stage in front of over a few thousand people, trying hard to remember how to walk normally.

I thought I would post a few of the photographs that I took on the day and a couple from friends timelines.

Edinburgh University Class of 2016 GIS / Earth Observation / GIS & Archeology

Nick, Will and Maia discuss the finer points of Python.

Professor Bruno Labour's speech after receiving an honorary degree.

Belated Canadian Thanksgiving

October 20, 2016

Thanksgiving Day (Canada) occurs on the second Monday of October, our M.Sc. class celebration was a little belated but this didn't stop the celebration going ahead on the 16th of October instead.

I took a few candid photographs during the evening and these are the shots that are safe for public consumption. I'll apologise here for the shocking standard of these photographs but to be fair there was a lot of whisky and wine going around (but at least I didn't take part in the 'buck fast tasting').

It was a nice evening to mix with the new class as well as catching up with my own class from the M.Sc. course. It's great to hear where my fellow classmates are now working and their new experiences at the forefront of GIS.

Dissertation writing up...

July 9, 2016

The last time I had to 'write up' a large body of work I had a job in the university library. Actually I had about four jobs in the library, which basically funded my beer, accommodation, and cheesy pasta that I apparently lived on. The jobs I had in the library were amazing, they were never terribly busy and I was always sat at a computer. This allowed me to type up my work, think about my work and run downstairs to the journals if I needed to look something up. Of course now I can find any journal online... Of course, I also served people when it was required ;-)

Still, I miss having those jobs right now as I have been finding writing up more difficult this time, hence being up since 4am (which is when it gets light) having slept very little last night. This dissertation come in two parts, a scientific paper and a technical report. Thankfully the paper section should be finished off for review today and i can start finishing off the technical section next week.

It has been interesting getting back into a subject that has always interested me (Glacial Lake Outburst Flood's) and it has been great applying new skills learned during the M.Sc. to that subject. My results have been interesting, lots of histograms and images of glaciers with polygons around their pro-glacial lakes! :-)

Well, it's almost 6am and the rain is steadily falling. Time for some tea I think.

GISUpdate at Edinburgh

June 18, 2016

I was in attendance at the GISUpdate conference yesterday, held at Edinburgh University. It is a small conference designed to give the attendees an opportunity to hear about some of the new
developments in the Geographical Information Science industry. The conference also provides a way of maintaining contact with the GIS M.Sc alumni network through the conference talks and social aspects in the evening.

As the conference employs Chatham House Rules, I cannot talk about any of the discussions, but I thought it might be useful to post some of the websites from the speakers yesterday and some web resources for those that could not attend.

Color Brewer: colour advice for cartography http://www.colorbrewer.org

CartoDB: transforms layers of geospatial information into data-drive maps that enable analysis and visual discovery http://www.cartodb.com

GeoServer: an open source server for sharing geospatial data http://www.geoserver.org

Blue Sky: maintain national aerial photography, height data, tree and vegetation mapping and our expertise also includes LiDAR and thermal airborne acquisition and photogrammetry http://www.bluesky-world.com

Flyte: Producing an application for dedicated flight planning for drone pilots http://www.flyte.ie

Geo.Geo: Captures high-resolution imagery using unmanned aircraft systems (read drones) http://www.geogeoglobal.com

Centre for Ecology & Hydrology: world class research organisation focussing on land and freshwater ecosystems and their interaction with the atmosphere http://www.ceh.ac.uk

Kindrogan and Christmas

November 6, 2015

A few days out of the city. Normally this would turn out to be a time to recharge batteries and catch up on reading. This trip turned out to be a coffee fuelled marathon of data collection, processing and presenting. A "fun" coffee fuelled marathon of data collection processing and presenting.

Time has marched on in my education and the first block of classes went past faster than I could possibly imagine. The distant memory of being told that we would be going away for a long weekend 'at the end of October' suddenly appeared. As I start the second set of classes I would like to think that I have a better handle on time management and organisation but I think I may be kidding myself on.

The excitement of Object Orientated Programming, Distrubuted GIS and Remote Sensing is driving me for the next five weeks into the exams and the potential of a Christmas Break. I think this is the earliest I have ever thought of Christmas.

The trip to Kindrogan was for project management. It was to see how we would cope under a certain amount of pressure which would be directly linked to how organised we were before the trip and how our strategies held up under real life situations.

I didn't get to take as many photographs as I would have liked when I was away, but that wasn't really the point of the trip. I did get a few candid and posed photographs though. I am open to captions for some of these :-)