charlie's blog

The Big Presentation

In a suprising turn of events, my four years dealing with the Presentation portion of Annual Formal Inspection for the Grizzlies Battalion back in high school actually came in handy. I assisted my boss with a presentation he gave by you guessed, clicking his slides and demonstrating the ArcGIS program that i use. Lets just say i was extremely cool under the pressure, considering that there were mayors, county commissioners, police and fire chiefs, representatives from homeland securty, the national guard, all manners of emergency response and preparedness, district attorneys, higway patrol, NDOT, etc. I don't think i am exaggerating when i say it was a big deal. I had to wear a security badge.

My boss is part of a group of people trying to get everyone in the northwest part of Nevada, and even some of Cali to start sharing their data. Right now everybody collects data differently, organizes it differently, and shares it differently. So on the maps, there is a big gap between Carson and Washoe. Everybody wants to be all secretive and not share, when they don't realize that everyone wins by working together. It is funny how people get so protective of things. So Sparks, the NSBDC, and Washoe County (Reno thought they were too good for the whole thing, and i don't think anybody likes their GIS guy) have been working on a pilot program and now the FEDS are mandating that Homeland Security start working on creating data repositories for homeland security data, so they finally found somebody to fund it, now all they need is the cooperation, so that is what the presentation was for, to show what they have done and to show what they could have if everybody comes on board. All in all it went very well, and i finally got paid to run a powerpoint. If you had told me in high school that ROTC was going to teach me something i would use in the real world later on, i would have laughed in your face, go figure.