Saturday, 5 January 2008

New Year and a quick summary of 2007

I still can't believe it's 2008 - the past year has gone unbelievably fast. I really haven't had much time to blog, or even keep up on geospatial goings on over the past few months - but I'm going to try and find some more time for that this year!(New Years Resolution)

So since the early months of 2007 I had been working on my masters dissertation which culminated in a submission around the middle of August. I'm playing to put a summary of what I did on this blog (another to do in 2008). In the end while the ultimate aim was to make practical improvements to an online gazetteer service, and bring interoperability to the data structure, it turned out to be a vastly larger task than expected, with a range of issues that XML could either not deal (well) with, or current limitations of the stylesheets (both XSLT and CSS) in reproducing what was required. As such the dissertation became a much more theoretical discussions of the practicalities and implications of converting to an XML basis, without that work having ever been undertaken on the kind of scale that was needed for it to appear in the Gazetteer for Scotland.

In the meantime I was also applying for various jobs locally here in Edinburgh, knowing that after 12 months of student living I really needed some cash fast. I was lucky to be offered an interview the day after my submission (still a bit red-eyed, but luckily not hungover!), and was offered the job shortly after. This meant that the week after I had submitted my final piece of work, I was starting my new job for a small GIS company here in Edinburgh - not a bad turnaround I guess.

I'm really enjoying my job, having been working for the company for some four months now. My role covers a range of areas, from customer support to software installation and setup, software testing and other jobs here and there in between. The diverse nature of what I do, is really what is the best thing about it.

In November I had my graduation (and finally that year long effort was over), which was a lovely day out with parents, girlfriend, fellow students and tutors. I'll post some pictures in due course on my personal blog. Christmas and New year very quiet, but nice - and my little Reciva powered Imp internet radio is still going (!).

Need to catch up with all the other blogs I read soon! Wishing all a happy New Year,

Jan.

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