There are a few blogs that I follow daily that I try and take advice from. Some I read to, well, try and make myself into a better person in general, and some to try and learn how to be a good manager. One that is particularly useful, nay inspirational at the moment is Gretchen Rubin’s Happiness Project.I am consistently amazed about her ability to be honest about her failures and faults, and the fact that she maintains such an optimistic and constructive outlook.

Since they say it’s bad to apologise for not posting, I’m going to try not to do that, but instead ‘fess up to a massive gtd-reversal, wagon falling-off incident, and general deadlines-looming stress. In the next few days, a project that I have been working on for over a year finishes, and a tender has to go in for another piece of work that will start in March if we get it.

If you need almost-free contour data, for broad-scale maps showing the terrain of an area, and you live in the UK, then the Scottish Mountaineering Club have kindly provided data in Garmin IMG format on their website. To convert this into other GIS formats, then there is a programme called GPSMapEdit, which is shareware but quite useful. Paying for the software unlocks an option to convert to mapinfo, and from there the world of GIS is your proverbial oyster.

Wordpress is now set up on my new domain www.archaeogeek.com, so this will be my last post from this wordpress.com hosted blog. Next job is to export the existing posts to the new domain, then the new feed should be available at www.archaeogeek.com/atom.xml. I’m going to try and set it up to forward the old address, but in the mean time if you’d like to keep subscribing, that’s the way to go…

I’m going to be moving away from a wordpress.com hosted blog in the next few days. I’d like more flexibility with the layout, and I’ve been playing with some cool mapping that I would like to be able to show- what’s the point in blogging about it if I can’t actually let anyone see it! So, this is a three step process. I’ve got to install wordpress on my shiny new www.

On Friday I attended a one-day conference at the e-Science Centre at Edinburgh University, entitled “Maintaining Long-term Access to Geospatial Data”. The quote above came from one of the speakers and, to me, it was the key point that came out of the day. Having said that, some interesting themes emerged that align nicely with ongoing discussions amongst the geospatial crowd. Firstly- the overwhelming trend in all the discussions was a move towards a service-based decentralised architecture for geospatial data storage and sharing.

In my spare time/lunch times I’m in the middle of a major project at the moment, to update our site database. Without going into the gory details of how it ended up in three separate, totally unlinked databases, it is supposed to document the archaeological sites we’ve worked on since the 1970’s, and to help with the administration of project archives, the location of finds within our finds store and so on.

There have been a few heads-up over the last week about 52°North, who have just announced an initiative for geospatial open source software. Of course, we’ve heard this before, but this time ESRI are on board. So, we have Autodesk supporting OSGEO, and ESRI supporting 52North’s initiative (it needs a snappy title or acronym). The approach seems different though, because Autodesk chipped in right from the word go by open-sourcing one fork of MapGuide, which they freely admitted was not a core product.