ILGISA

All of Illinois Geocaches in One Map*

All of Illinois Geocaches in One Map*

I work for a living, but in the off times I still play with this technology, so I have a Premium Geocaching subscription. This allows me to query their data in circular buffers and return a GPX file. After about 27 of these queries, I was confident that I had all of the cache locations I wanted. Running a few geoprocessing functions, I dropped any duplicates and union-ed these points to county polygons to get the number within each county. This data are reflected in the Classified inset map. What am I talking about? Geocaching of course. If you're reading this tech blog there's a pretty good chance you already know what geocaching is... 

A Look Forward: No Predictions, Only Productivity

Don't fall into the trap of thinking you know anything about the future. Sure, There's lots of neat confucus-iy quotes about knowing the future from learning about the past, or whatever. I've succumbed to the temptation myself to guess what will happen in the next 5 years. Here's the real deal. You can only control the "now".  Even then just a little tiny corner of your world. The future is ever changing,  take a lesson from Yoda.

Here at Cloudpoint, we are developing Principals to work by and not procedures or policies. We have no employee handbook or workplace guidelines. Even if we did it would be filled with bullet-point list of adages. For Example:

  • Be Professional.

  • Work Hard & Be Nice To People.

  • Are you Productive or Just Being busy?

  • Make it Better. 

  • Why are you here?

  • When the door is shut, don't bother me.

  • Never Stop asking Questions.

When you feel like you can (or try to) predict the future, your pride gets in the way of actually making it happen. Somewhere inside you become a spectator watching life rather than a participant in it: "I knew this was going to happen!" Not helpful. A bit of personal humility can go a long way when you are assisting people with a new technology. Rather, when you set attainable goals you set a standard for yourself, a personal guideline. American author Mark Batterson once said (paraphrased): 'Goals are Just Dreams with Timelines' Well Said, Everybody needs dreams. 

This is what 2015 looks like for us. These are our genericized Goals: 

  1. Increase Benefits to Team Members

  2. Expand our Territory

  3. Hire

  4. 7+ Speaking Engagements

  5. Learn New Software

  6. Read 13+ Books

  7. Freely Distribute Several Useful tools

  8. Centralize Cloud Offerings 

There are others that I'm not willing to share, but this is most of the list from our first 2015 staff meeting. Some of them are personal, some are corporate all are real and attainable. 

Don't let the lure of trying to predict the future fill you with apathy and pride.
What are your goals? 

What are we up to in the next 30 days?

October will be a busy month for us!  We have several upcoming conference events that we will be at and hope to see you there.  Be sure to stop by our booth for a visit if you are attending any of the following:

October 9, 2014- IACE (Illinois County Engineers Association)- Peoria, IL (40.693932 , -89.591996)

IACE.JPG

Here you can catch us at our booth or providing GIS training for the County Engineers.  As part of a new technology twist, the association has decided to offer GIS training as part of this year's conference.  Micah and Jon have some great experience to share as former County officials and will provide a hands-on look at the latest GIS applications available for highway engineers and a lot of "how-to's" mixed with it.  Also don't forget to check out SignOps, our latest sign inventory maintenance solution.

Micah Will be presenting at the Wisconsin Esri Users group in Wisconsin Dells on October 20 & 21st. He will be giving a talk on ArcGIS Online for daily use similar to on given in Springfield Illinois last month in August. Since there will be several of our esteemed Esri colleagues present, hopefully he'll keep the ribbing to a minimum (hint-hint).  

October 27-29, 2014- ILGISA (Illinois GIS Association)- Lisle, IL (41.807391 , -88.110383)

Jon will be speaking on at this conference on Tuesday about using the parcel fabric and Matt will be sharing about GeoEvent Processor.  We also plan on giving away something "really big" as a door prize so don't miss out.

October 28-29, 2014- ILRWA (Illinois Rural Water Association)- Utica, IL (41.315869 , -89.01107)

We always appreciate the relationships that we have formed with the good folks associated with ILRWA.  Some of our best clients were generated as leads from this group and we continue to see them each year supporting this great organization.