Sean McGinnis

 I originally saw this posted @ Signals vs. Noise, the Newseum in Washington DC has incorporated interactive mapping into their day-to-day presentation of information. They have built an interactive map for the World and allows folks to navigate to the area of interest and get the headlines from that area. The interface itself is a pretty simplistic, but the wealth of information comes from the interaction with the graphics on the map. The interactivity and use of Flash doesn’t actually rerender the site, but it is simple to use and can provide alot of information to folks who may not have much experience working with maps…

Well, in celebration of Home Brew Day I pulled together an American I. Pretty excited for this one, it is the first time I am ever dry hopping a beer in the secondary fermentor. Hopefully I can take it out of the primary in a week to 10 days…

Off course, to brew you have to drink a few. Was drinking Lagunitas Maximus IPA for the brew, if mine is half as good as this one, I will be happy. Very heavily hopped American-style IPA, alcohol is approximately 7.5% abv, but with those kind of hops, you can’t drink too many too fast… 

Civil Solutions got the Megan’s Law delivered to the project partners. Well, last week we got the application delivered to two of the project partners. I am very proud of the work that the team @ Civil did over the last few weeks to make sure we made that deadline. The application handles the full business process of the Megan’s Law registration and notification process. The application is built to run off any ArcGIS license, ArcEngine to ArcInfo. It will allow the Prosecutors to manage all of the restrictive features, registrants without any other GIS support. The application also handle the generation of ALL the documents associated with the Megan’s Law notification process from Word .DOT files. This allows them to make edits to the documents as changes occur without having to bring in any other resources. If you want to get more information about this application, reach out to Rich Rehmann @ Civil Solutions, he will get you some more information about the application.

Now, in saying that, I have resigned from Civil Solutions. Friday, April 4^th was my last day. I have accepted a position with Avencia in Philadelphia. I will be starting there on April 21^st, I am going to take a couple weeks off to do some fishing and kayaking.  I will post some more details as my start date gets closer, but I wanted to say ‘Thank You’ to all of the folks that I have had the opportunity to work with over the past couple of years and look forward to working with you again in the future.

I don’t know how many of you folks are using Base Camp for project management, but I found a nice little surprise in my dashboard this morning. They have expanded the file storage space, in our case it went from 500MB to 3GB!

The holidays have come and gone and my beer fridge is looking a bit thin, I haven’t had much of a chance to write about them…

Between Thanksgiving and Xmas I work @ a close friends Christmas tree farm. We always try and have some good beers floating around for friends who come up for a tree. This year was no different:

Stone Oaked Arrogant Bastard - I try to stay away from Stone beers if I have to drive since they are REALLY strong. This beer was no different. A light oaky flavor tied to a strong malty ale. Not a session beer but very good to warm up with after schlepping trees in the cold.

Pabst Blue Ribbon Pounders - Alright, it is not a great beer, most would even say it is not a good beer. But it might surprise you that Pabst is almost always listed on the awards sheet at any of the major beer festivals. Plus they are also sponsors of our friends in the Philly Roller Girls, so we have to support the locals. After working all day, it was really easy to drink them cold. I would warn against letting them sit in your hand or on the table for awhile, when they get warm it gets kind of haggard,

Lefthand Brewing’s Juju Ginger (sorry, it is a flash site and I cannot directly link to it) - This is a really smooth beer with a thick head on it. Dave actually was able to float the beer cap on the head for awhile before it fell through. The ginger is noticeable as soon as you start to tilt the glass to your mouth. I wasn’t able to taste much of the ginger, but the beer was a really smooth malty ale.

Rogue Monk Madness- This is a really malty, slightly sweet beer that is a really nice sipping beer. Not a Belgian beer in the sense of the small bubbles and slightly tart flavor, but a solid beer w/ a complex character.

Canned Beers

Surprisingly there were a number of good canned beers that were passed around this year (If you don’t count the PBR’s)

Dale’s Pale Ale - This beer was named the best IPA by the New York Times a few years ago, and they were not wrong. It is a really light and crisp IPA. It was a really good session beer with a serious hop flavor. We drank this beer while just sitting around or when we were putting together a meal of tamales and beans.

Sly Fox Pikeland Pils- A really light pilsner, low alcohol and a true and traditional crisp pilsner style. This is the only canned beer that Alison will drink!

Xmas Parties

Dave and I have been trying to outdo each other for years at his families Christmas Open House.  This year he won! He pulled out two 2005 Vicitory Old Horizontals he has been saving. They were AMAZING! The complex malty flavor and hoppy nose was amazing. I am glad I only had one, because they could have gotten me in a lot of trouble…

Lagunitas Cappuccino Stout - Very smooth stout (to be honest, I am more of a porter fan than a stout fan, but this was good). My other weakness is coffee, and the head on this was a very light and creamy coffee nose.

Dogfish Head Olde School Barley Wine - This burly beer was a great sitting and sipping beer. We got a bunch of cheeses from the grocery and had the beer with just some apples and cheese. Really complex flavor and really high alcohol content (~15%). For being so high in alcohol, it was a really easy drinking beer.

New Year’s Eve

For New Year’s Eve, Alison and I went to Monk’s Cafein Philly for their early seating. They had a 4 course beer pairing dinner and it was not a disappointment. They paired the beers perfectly with the courses were not shy about making sure you had enough to eat and drink.

Allagash Four aged w/ Strawberries - I do not know the exact method the beer was aged, but it was a really light Belgian that had a light fruity taste and paired perfectly with the salad. You could really pick up the fruit aroma as you lifted it to your nose.

Stone Vertical 05-05-05 - The Vertical Series is one I became aware of this year (I have two bottles of the 07-07-07 in my fridge). All of the beers are designed to be aged until after 12-12-12 and are suppose to change from year to year if you decide to sample them early. The beer was very clean and crisp, ended without much of an after taste. It had very complex flavors that matched nicely with the terrine. This was my FAVORITE beer of the holiday season. I am excited to continue the Vertical Epic progression.

Wintercoat Vildmoseol- This peat smoked brown ale has a very distinct flavor, one that reminded me of blue cheese. It is not one that I would like to drink by itself, but it went very nicely with the meal.  Similar to serving the beef with a crumbled blue cheese topping. 

Port Brewing Cuvee de Tomme- This was a really light berry flavored kriek. Went real well with the chocolate and raspberry dessert. I am not one who likes these types of beer, but it was nice.

That’s about it for my beers between Thanks giving and New Years. I do have a few still sitting in the fridge waiting for the right time to break them out. Those beers include: Allagash Curieux and Dogfish Head Pangea. I am waiting until Al makes her Apple cheesecake for the Curieux, they should pair together wonderfully!

Hope everyone had a great holiday season and look forward to seeing you in the new year.

This map shows all of the places I have spent more than one night in 2007. It was a slow travel year, hopefully I will get some more miles over this upcoming year…

 Click to view the interactive map…

Happy holidays everyone. See you in the new year…

I can’t say that I want to go see the upcoming Speed Racer movie, but I do think the Mach 5 is a pretty slick looking car…

I was talking w/ Brian Flood this morning @ the ESRI MUG, he gave me a personal demo of A2E’s embedded virtual globes in ArcGIS. That was a very impressive application. The speed at which the layers were being drawn in the VE environment was impressive. There wasn’t that lag we are all used to in working with ArcGIS. The layers were being read right out of the TOC and put right into the VE viewer and the only wait we had was waiting for the VE data to come back across the Union League’s wireless (which was a crappy connection).

In that conversation he also let me know that the November CTP of SQL Server 2008 has geospatial support in it!!! As I am typing this, I am downloading it on to my sand box to start playing with it.

I am sorry I missed out on the Monk’s festivities this evening, hope you had a good time.

I thought this was pretty cool when I happened to stumble upon it this morning, Google has included terrain mapping as an option. It shows a nice graphical representation, but I am trying to find out more about the source data it is using.