in which my job is fun

As some of you know, I am somewhat underemployed - not that I mind. I do end up doing a lot of mindless drudge work that really doesn't need my advanced degrees. On the other hand, sometimes the mindless drudge work is kind of cool.

One of the things I do is publish climate model data to the Earth System Grid, a web interface to a distributed data library. Users need accounts to retrieve the data. I have a list of all of the institutions people have listed on their account information and am going through the list with Google, Wikipedia, and Wikimapia, making a spreadsheet of institution names, URLs, and latitudes and longitudes with which to make a Google Earth KML file that will show all the places our users come from. It's sort of like archaeology, starting with a fragment of pottery (CIHEAM-bari, IRI, PIK) and trying to recreate who, what, and where. Plus, yay for getting paid for playing around the web all day!