GIS in the Rockies and a bit about Rita

So I went to this pretty awesome conference this week, it was GIS in th Rockies and I got out of most of my classes on Weds and Thursday to go.

I was able to skip the $300+ registration fee because I was a volunteer for the conference.

(For those of you who don't know GIS, it is Geographical Information Systems, basically mapping on computers and much much more)

All the big companies were there for the job fair:
ESRI (the people who make ArcGIS which is the leading GIS software),
NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration),
USGS (U.S. Geological Survey),
Leica (they make ERDAS Imagine which is a big remote sensing piece of software),
National Geographic,
Pentax (yup, the camera people, they make survey equipment),
Jeppsen (whee! airplanes and rockets.),
Digital Globe (if you've seen any of the aerial images of the damage of Katrina, most likely these were from the Digital Globe folks), etc.

DU and CU-Denver were both there too because they offer GIS certificates (which is one thing that CU-Boulder doesn't have :( blah.). I am going to check into CU-Denver and see if I can get a GIS certificate through them as a CU-Boulder student.

I dropped my resume everywhere, just about with every company I talked to. I posted a few on the resume board they had, one got taken....woot!

I talked to the USGS guys for a long while. That was really fun. One of the guys was looking over my resume and was like "Oh wow. You're a DJ?! Are you on before Terrasonic on Saturdays? I've totally listened to your show." So I got into a long disscussion with the guys about music. I also picked up a huge 3-D poster of the Grand Canyon they had for free.

I talked to one lady who works with CDOT (for you out-a-staters that's the Colorado Dept. of Transportation) and she said she might have an unpaid intership doing some survey work for CDOT, which would be really good to learn.

I hope I get some e-mails of phone calls out of this, and if not, oh well. It was def good networking.

One of the volunteers I talked to had 3 little girls in a Ft. Collins Elementary school who might be doing a "make-your-own-CD" project. Basically they need to do a fund raiser, so instead of a bake sale or whatnot, they are going to create a CD of music and skits they've created and will preform and then put the CD together and sell it. They are doing this in Feb., I might get involved with it, either helping out or maybe a bit of teaching.

Oh yeah and I am going to join a GIS group called GITA, they help with internships and scholarships. woot.

And I think this grad student from DU who is transfering to Boulder next year was totally hitting on me. Told ya my new haircut was hot.

....
Forgot to tell a funny story from NDK. This girl walked up to me and said "Can I glomp you?" (Glomp is an attack hug thing, basically a hyper persons hug) and I was like "Um, sure!" so she glomped me.

I totally thought of Juni. She glomps all the time.
....

I was watching AZN television (it's the Asian Network that the International Channel became). So it was China News. All in Chinese but I could kinda figure out what they were talking about when the showed Hurricane Rita heading toward the coast of the U.S.

People are spending 17+ hours driving to try to get of Texas and they can't. I was thinking, why don't they open the other side of the interstate to traffic to accomedate the flow of people that want to get out of the area. Seems to me it might be a smart idea.

This country would be so screwed if we were attacked by anything (natural or terroist)...oh wait, yeah our country is fighting a war in the middle east and we can't even deal with evacuations in our own nation.

The Army Corp of Enigneers said that the leeves will break if they get more than 6 inches of rain or more than 5 foot wave surges. Well then comes Rita. I wouldn't doubt if New Orleans becomes flooded for a second time.
....

I am supposed to go see "Turtles can Fly" with Matt tonight. But I haven't seen him at all today so I dunno if we are going. There is a showing at 7pm and 9:15pm...I am not sure if I should just go to the 7pm showing with or without him. We never decided which time we were going. Hmmmm...we'll see. I am not really hopeful that the whole "us seeing a movie together thing" is going to happen.

Current Mood: Anxious.
Current Music: "Money left to burn" - Kettcar