Time flies....

Yes, I have missed posting for a few months, broke my goal of posting once a month.  Which means I owe a nice long post or a few quick posts to catch up.  From my previous post, it will be hard to top that off!

The economy seems to have recovered.  We are busy in the County Surveyor's Office.   I hear of people getting hired in surveying positions.  I got some calls from land surveyors looking for people to hire.  So it is a very active time.  A great welcome to our profession.

Sometimes it's just being in the right place at the right time.  The decisions we made in the past puts us in positions for opportunities when they knock on our door.

So here's a small world story.  A long time ago I worked a summer job at Inyo National Forest on a survey crew.   We were a mighty 6 person crew, a few from colleges, a couple making job transitions and my boss.
Making a long story short and sweet, that was a great job.  It was my very first surveying job and I learned so much.  Well, a couple of decades later, 33 years if you want numbers, I meet up with this guy Doug.  After a few questions to jog the memory I shout "Cowboy Doug?"  Yup, he and worked on this one survey crew, one summer 33 years ago.  Wow!  And to top that off, he is now County Surveyor for San Luis Obispo.  Now you math gurus, what is the chance that TWO people from this summer survey crew would BOTH end up as County Surveyors.

Amazing!  Now I really believe in that 7-degrees of freedom theory (aka the Kevin Bacon theory)

Valley Of the Hearts Delight

Ah, yes, finally a time to pause and get back to this Blog.  It's good to see things get busy in the area.  As we see things change from the past, say 50+ years ago, when we get a moment to ponder.  We think about what this valley looked like years ago.  I get to ponder quite a bit as I am force to slow my pace down as I commute in traffic.  Well that's the plus side of a slow commute.  Our ISD - Information Services Department put together an online historical map.  A big thanks goes to Doug S. who has been a great help and inspiration to us in expanding more into the GIS world.  (GIS = Geographical Information System)
And a big thanks to Brad B., PLS who stitched the map together and shared it with us.

Here's a preview to get you interested.

First we have the big screen picture....a couple of views....

Now zoom with the "circle" or "loupe" aka magnifier....

Zoom in closer and see....

So what you are seeing in the background is the County GIS layer so you can relate to what it looks like today.

To see what potential this has, zoom to Mt View and you will see....

now you say, what the....is that?  It's an old map of Mt View that you can view along with the background.

So check it out the webmap, play around with it and  have some fun.

Here's the link:

http://bit.ly/valleyofheartsdelight

And remember to have some pie today for it's Pi day!