Adversity Builds Integrity, I'm not quite sure where I ever heard this phrase or where I ever came up with it, but they are words that best describe my outlook on life in general. We are made stronger by the things and events that we have to face and overcome. It is the ability to not only come through and survive adversity, but to learn, and to grow in a positive manner from these experiences.
After seventeen long years working in manufacturing and production, a blue collar lifestyle that I had grown up with and had grown accustomed to, I had decided to re-invent myself to learn and develop more marketable skills and the flexibility of having a marketable service.This was not an initially voluntary decision on my part, permanent reductions in work forces and plant closings were something that I had grown all too familiar with.This country was changing from a manufacturing society to a service oriented society, and the skill sets that I had spent 17 years developing were slowly becoming less marketable.
I had some tough decisions to make, do I continue to find low paying industrial jobs or do I make the decision to better myself by further developing myself, my skill sets and my commercial marketability.
While in college, I had worked for the 2000 US Census and determined that being a geographer was something that I might like to do. The term GIS was new to me, but I saw a market that was about to open up and explode so I spent four years in college working and gaining experience in my field of study to prepare to market myself post graduation. I went full steam ahead and tried sold myself on a new way of thinking to develop new marketable skill sets.
Not only have I had the opportunity to develop professionally, I have made it my hobby also as I am an avid geocacher when I am not working on one form of geospatial software or another.It's a hobby that has helped me professionally in putting real world perspective into what I have chosen to do with my life.
My interest in GIS is temporal issues in GIS data sets. As geographers, you must have an understanding of space, place and time. Digital geospatial data has a limited window of integrity and this is my area of concern and emphasis. Datasets change, and to think that everything is static and nothing changes is a limitation of many geographers.
About Me
