Mike's Page

After 60s last weekend, today we got hit with 2+ inches of snow here in upstate South Carolina. It made for great birding at our feeders behind the house...I don't think these southern birds knew what to do about it.

I wish I had such a nice turnout during the bird count a couple weeks ago. Today I saw:

• Pine Warbler - my favorite...see the halfway-decent photo I grabbed from my video camera.
• Red-bellied Woodpecker
• Brown-headed Nuthatch - I've hardly seen these in a couple years, so it's great to see them back
• Northern Cardinal
• American Goldfinch
• Dark-eyed Junco
• Carolina Chickadee
• White-throated Sparrow
• Tufted Titmouse
• American Robin
• House Finch
• Eastern Bluebird
• Common Grackle

Last night my neighbors, who had just had a baby, called with a big problem. They had inadvertently deleted their digital photos off their camera's memory card before the photos made it to their hard drive.

I thought they were unlikely to get the photos back, but a little digging around the net and I found PC Inspector Smart Recovery. The sole purpose of this software is to recover deleted images from a digital camera memory card. I installed it and we had their photos back within minutes. Fantastic.

Recovering important digital images is something most people would be willing to pay for. This tool, however, is free to use. That is very convenient when you don't know if you'll be able to recover the files at all, and you're in a hurry and don't want to take the time to make a purchase, wait for a license code in the email, etc.

As I wrote in my entry last month on the GPS Mapping Software, "USGS topo image data is public domain, but it's near impossible to get without paying someone a hefty fee." It's sort of ironic that one Google Adsense ad with that blog entry is "USGS Topo Maps - entire USA only $5500".

I realize the Digital Raster Graphic (DRG) topo maps are large data files, and someone's got to pay for the bandwidth to transfer them, but I think they're overpriced.

The GIS Data Depot used to let you download DRGs, but now they charge $0.58/MB to write a file to a CD (plus $10 to burn it plus shipping) or $0.16/MB to download them. One of the sites I run uses Rackspace, and they charge $3.00/GB when we go over our monthly bandwidth limit. That's $0.003/MB. Do you think GIS Data Depot is making enough of a profit? Sure, there's more to running a site than paying for bandwidth, and people have to eat, but that data still seems too expensive to me.

You can still get DRGs for free out there, but the availability and selection are spotty. This Army site has a good index of states where you can get DRG and other GIS data, but not every state is available, and each state has their own formats and rules.

Lately I've been getting my data from the South Carolina DNR's GIS site, but they make you publish a disclaimer when you use the data. They probably never even edited the DRG files.

I was thinking that if I had a broadband connection to the net, I'd try to set up a BitTorrent site or some P2P of the public domain DRGs that I have. I could set up and index site with the file names and their MD5 hashes, and maybe these files would be easier and less expensive to obtain.

All I want to do is create the occasional topo map with my trip annotated on it, and publish it on my website, free of restrictions. It shouldn't cost a fortune to do it.

First blog in February...been swamped lately.

I ran across an interesting link on Phil Greenspun's blog. This article discusses research that indicates that people are happier doing things than buying things. I tend to agree; I really enjoy planning on going on trips, but buying stuff is a chore. The things I like to buy are usually in support of doing something interesting. That's why we bought our kayaks, so we could explore new places. Going through the unused stuff and clutter in my house is a good lesson in this...were those things important at the time I bought them? Just think of the extra trips I could've taken with the money.

I could have paid a lot more on my house, gone through a couple more cars, or had a bigger TV, but I wouldn't trade my trips for anything.