The End is Near

It's almost dinner time and I'm sitting in the wireless zone waiting to eat. The past two days have been full of ridiculous amounts of GIS geeking. People here are working on so many different projects and GIS is the thing that ties them all together, so discussions start out talking about a conservation issue and how gis was used to address that issue to how someone else used that gis process to solve a different issue and so on, then it's an hour later and it's time for another talk or dinner or whatever. The whole thing is like a dream. By accident I think, the keynote speaker for the conference said something that I paraphrased into what I think is a great way to describe this conference: Dreams, Passion, Wisdom. SCGIS: Building Community in service of protecting the earth. Its kind of hippy, but it's what you get when you bring together a couple hundred starry-eyed conservationists with extensive science and software skills.

Anyway, tonight's the big conference tradition: The Silent Auction. They said yesterday that over the past 5 years the auction has raised $25,000 all of which has gone to support the scholarship fund to help pay for international conservationist to attend the meeting. It gets more and more crazy each year, with the scholars bringing more and more goods from home. I've seen stuff go for $300 dollars, and there might be 2 or three things that same night that go for that much. There's the silent acution, where you write your bids down, kind of like an analog Ebay, but then there's the live auction, which is the traditional kind. The guy who invented SCGIS, Charles Convis, serves as auctioneer and he's crazy. He got skits and accents and fables- he once sold a half-liter of bottom shelf vodka that one of the scholars brought over from Russia for like $200. It's ridiculous and hilarious and exciting.

I just can't imagine what these international scholars think about coming over here from Angola or Thailand or Mozambique. They get like 2 weeks of training and support before the user conference, they attend the UC, then they come to the SCGIS meeting. It's hard for me to process it.

It was solid gray clouds yesterday until just before the sun set, then the moon and the stars came out and its been clear ever since. I got lost on my way home last night because I was marveling at the sight of the moon shining through what I was calling the lorax pines in the yards. Again, dreamlike. Aside from that, the walking to and from the hotel has been uneventful, aside from the dog-sized deer and the hummingbirds and woodpeckers and scrub jays and ravens and the sparrow that is nesting in the dunes. There's an endangered wallflower that grows in the dunes here and it's easy to find because they are all have little wire cages over them to protect them from the deerdogs.

So I canceled my rental car in lieu of taking a shuttle to the SJO. It should save some cash, but it means I have to leave my hotel at like 4:50a. My Southwest flight leaves SJO at 9:50a. I don't know how this is going to turn out.