Spaced Out :: 03 2007

My 6-year old daughter asked me this week why we have hot cross buns. Before I had a chance to look at Wikipedia and explain that they are symbolic of Jesus dying on the cross and are typically made without dairy products during Lent, she promptly informed me that Jesus died on a hot cross bun!!

If only all things in life were so simple!

I contacted a well known GI company this week, sending an email to what (obviously) was an alias. My expectation was that this would get routed through to the person dealing with queries related to this alias and respond appropriately. In response I received the following reply which, as you can see, notes that the person will be back from leave on 11 June 2007. A two-and-a-half month wait seemed a little on the extreme side!! Contacting someone else directly in the firm finally revealed that the alias actually forwarded to multiple addresses; no one had got around to answering the email and this particular person had their auto-responder on. Sometimes email is just a little too easy and you can really send out the wrong message to potential customers.

Well not much really, except I can’t stand people saying PIN number. IT’S NOT A BLOODY “PERSONAL IDENTIFICATION NUMBER NUMBER”!!!! Just as it isn’t a geographic information system system. It’s PI number, PIN, GI system or GIS. Definitely NOT PIN number.

Definitely my favourite news story of the week, titled:

Mashed potato causes road smash

I don’t know who came up with the title, but its great!

As many have discovered, personal geodatabases in ArcMap 9.2 are not backwards compatable. Ho hum, thats nice and helpful. For those who use personal geodatabases this is causing quite some headache in terms of migration and mixed versions of software. 9.2 is not able to save in previous versions either, however the benefits it offers might well be worth using and include support for double precision and the new cartographic features (yes, you might actually be able to throw away those coverages). Spatially Adjusted briefly mentioned this problem late last year and have links to a blank/empty versions of personal geodatabases for 9.1 and 8.3 that can be used in 9.2 to store data in. A work around at least.