in which my job is fun

[ilanarama]

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!

Comments

[aubrem.livejournal.com]

I would love doing that. : D

[alembicresearch.livejournal.com]

I made a KML file last year of all the upcoming Beer competitions
listed on the BJCP website:
http://www.bjcp.org/apps/comp_schedule/competition_schedule.php

So then maybe I could figure out a way to optimally travel
to as many of them as possible, and to save gasoline
(when I "retire" I might buy somekind of camping RV and drive
around the country judging beer and camping and hiking).


The problem is I don't know any mathmatics, or enough, to do it. :-(

(Its kind of like a travaling salesman problem, I guess,
except the location include "time" a factor, and some beer judging
events are better than others: county fairs aren't as "interesting"
to judge as State fairs or Nationals, etc.
So you might want to go 100 miles out of your way for a state fair,
but you might not for a county fair)