San Diego report - part 2

[kmusser]

Monday zammis has to head home and the reason I'm in San Diego, the ESRI International User Conference, begins. Monday has most of the big speakers. ESRI president, Jack Dangermond, gives the usual talk about the latest and greatest version of ArcGIS, which does indeed look really cool (and amused that the improvement to get the biggest audience reaction is the ability to move groups of line/polygon vertices instead of having to do it one at a time - yes we're geeks).

I think my favorite speaker was Carlos Salman Gonzalez. He worked for the national mapping program in Mexico during the 70's. The IMF in their wisdom convinced Mexico that accurate basemaps were not a worthwhile investment and they canceled the program as a cost-cutting measure. Undeterred Carlos founded a private company and proceeded to map Mexico on his own, now it's the largest mapping company in Latin America. Now he spends his time supporting the art of making mosaics of antique maps and tree planting beautification efforts. His speech boiled down to a message to follow your passion. National Geographic's Gil Grosvenor was there to present awards to Roger Tomlinson and Jack Dangermond and gave a speech about geography in education - I'll post a bit about that separately. The keynote speaker was Richard Saul Wurman who's talk I found kind of disappointing, especially for Mr. TED talks - babbled on about needing to be able to compare cities to each other.

Monday evening was the opening of the map gallery, at which I had two maps, which were happily well received. Wandering around the map gallery and seeing the amazing stuff that other people are doing is probably my favorite part of the conference.

Tuesday and Wednesday I won't bore you with - more conference sessions, many dealing more in depth with the new ArcGIS, and socializing with co-workers. Thursday I decided to take the morning off and visit Balboa Park which was quite nice though I only did a few of the museums, it did get a little hot in the afternoon, highlights included the model railroad museum and the cactus garden. Thursday night was ESRI's big party on the bay front which is indeed big, this year had a Mexican theme, with lots of good food and music and fireworks. All in all I had fun, would go again although certainly not a must do. If I go again I might try to stay for Comic-Con which I hadn't realized was booked back to back with the ESRI con.