Recently in Education Category

Busy day at school today. The picture is of Dr Gary Coutu setting up some of the posters for the West Chester University Geography Club and Department of Geography and Planning's contribution to the world-wide celebration today of GIS Day, sponsored by ESRI, the makers of the ArcGIS suite of mapping products. It is a day when Geography students and educators can show how they have applied the emerging technology of Geographic Information Systems to their research and classwork, as well as to introduce the ways that GIS can be used in any number of areas. That's my poster in the lower right=hand corner of the picture!

Also, this is my first test post using the blogging interface from Flickr!

I guess I must be making progress in my re-entry into the academic world. Just moments ago, I submitted my first abstract for a poster presentation at the 2007 Annual Meeting of the Association for American Geographers. Granted, submission does not mean acceptance, but it is such a thrill just to feel that I may have the opportunity to present at a national meeting! The really super part is that it is being held this coming April in San Francisco, California, a place that I truly love. And if I am fortunate enough to be accepted, there just may be a cross-country rail trip to get there as well, something I have always wanted to do. More on that later since I have a status report due tomorrow for my Local History class.

It is hot and muggy out today, but Fall (as in Fall Semester) is starting tomorrow. I am ready to rock with the following courses on tap:

HIS480	Computer Use in History
GEO502	Topical Seminar - GIS
GEO505	Planning and Design

I am also trying to add one more, Public Speaking, one of those wonderful you need this to graduate classes. It is also one of those that is oversubscribed since they never provide enough instructors for the glut. Hopefully, I can get in one of the sections I want. Time to get the notebooks in order!

I feel like I will be on a random walk through the rest of the month. There are only nine days left, but still I feel like I have such a diverse group of things I want (and need) to get accomplished. Some are interrelated, but some are not. I feel like I have taken a long vacation since Election Day, basically recharging the body and mind from the numbing experience of 20-hour days, the one thing that I gladly left behind when I retired from the phone company. The major difference with these was the high level of satisfaction received from the hard work, something that was sorely lacking in the latter part of my IT career. So here is my to do list for the next little over a week:

• Pearl Jam - yes, I am going to see Pearl Jam live in Philly!
• Begging forgiveness on course #3 - yes, I need to take care of this issue tout de suite! I have been avoiding and now I will have to pay the consequences.
• Business stuff - making money is important if you want to eat and the good thing is that we have yet another new customer with three more potential right behind. Also, have to get working on the next level of one of our best customers. Sharpen the pencils and get to coding!
• Weather data - I have to get the cron processes running on our meteorology server at school so I can get all of our observational and model data pulls from NOAA up-to-date. I have been running them manually, but it is a pain when Linux can take care of it all for me.
• Weather tools - now that I have Fedora Core 5 running on my laptop under VMware, I want to get some of the nifty weather tools from UCAR running. Just in time for hurricane season...
• The pool - yes, this is always hanging over my head... I am going to get this started this week, dammit!
• The RV - ditto

And I am sure that there are a dozen other things that I need to get done, but I just don't want to think about them yet. They'll creep up like they always do. So, the hell with changing the blog template for now - actually like this one - and put it off until I can rip May's page off the calendar.