Like many of us, i printed out most of the posts that supplied important information. Reams of articles fill my office. Loyal, Jobo, John Hamilton, Kent, Mr.G, Dave Doyle, Deral, Scott, Paul...(the list goes on and on) - so many people that i wouldn't even recognize on the street have become honored mentors - unbeknownst to them.
If something should happen, please remember guys that i am thankful for all that i've learned from your efforts on Mark's board.
i worry about all that information being lost now, and a great library of our profession being no more, and the people that follow without the benefit of that knowledge. It's like we're starting all over, losing a hard drive of 12 years of data. i know - i know, the data is being archived and made available, but i just don't trust those people.
We've made our stand here for all the reasons known. In retrospect, and with 4 decades of work and experience, i don't see one damn once of true respect for the great surveyors that came before us by those people over there that are trying to re-name our profession and turn our history. i will not give that truck!
My wish - all those posts owned or at least backed-up here, immediately accessable here at home.
all the best,
long life and prosperity,
david in Winamac
We've made our stand here for all the reasons known. In retrospect, and with 4 decades of work and experience, i don't see one damn once of true respect for the great surveyors that came before us by those people over there that are trying to re-name our profession and turn our history. i will not give that truck.
It's a discussion board, not the Alamo. The Internet's a big place, there's room for more than one spot for surveyors to exchange ideas. And there's no guarantee that any one of them will be there tomorrow. POB may or may not succeed in getting a new board format humming, but even if they do they'll always be evaluating the cost/benefit ratio. When the day comes that the ratio drops too low, they'll shut it down. Or maybe their whole business model will collapse, and the board along with it.
Wendell is no different, except that his cost/benefit ratio probably includes a lot of sentiment on the benefit side, meaning it isn't all dollars and cents to him. And we all owe him a debt of gratitude for that. Nevertheless, there may come a time when he won't want or be able to keep paying the hosting and bandwidth charges and performing site maintenance.
My suggestion: don't put all your emotional or professional eggs in one basket. Make use of all the resources available to you, and enjoy them for what they are in the moment. It's about communication, not good versus evil.
"It's a discussion board, not the Alamo."
That's the best thing posted about our own little soap opera since it all began 🙂
Semi-Permanent, Searchable Notes
> My suggestion: don't put all your emotional or professional eggs in one basket. Make use of all the resources available to you, and enjoy them for what they are in the moment. It's about communication, not good versus evil.
The issue that I'm hearing here is more one of a readily searchable format for what are in effect notes on topics of professional interest. For example, the posts that Bill Strange aka Mr. Geodesist made to the POB Message Board probably remain unsurpassed as a treatment of the matters he took up. The problem always was partly one of format (the message board format wasn't that great for Bill's longer posts) and partly just one of finding them later.
If there were some way of simply adding a "Gold Star" or "Archive This" tag to a particularly good post after the fact (and possibly by someone other than the author) and using the same tag as a filter for search or to filter the threads displayed in a category to only the "Gold Star" or archival-quality threads, then that might be one way of improving the accessibility. It would probably also encourage a somewhat greater level of effort be put into the occasional posts on particularly worthwhile topics.
teqc, for example
For example, if there is anything that I'd like to have a quickie reference manual for it is a summary of the commands and syntax for the teqc software. The price is right for the software, but the documentation is a bit of a swamp. Just a guide to doing the mundane things that I manage to forget in the months between actual need to know would be a perfect "Gold Star" note.
I think there's a Jewish prayer that goes like this:
LORD BLESS AND KEEP TEQC,
FAR AWAY FROM US!
(you need to imagine Tevya's Rabbi singing that)
A necessary evil
Sadly, teqc is a necessary evil for the time being. The good news is that most surveyors probably don't really need to do very much with it. I know I don't.
I'd settle for a cheat sheet on:
- cutting up a longer file into shorter pieces that OPUS-RS will process,
- RINEX conversion from native Trimble .dat format,
- concatenating RINEX files,
- running basic QC on a RINEX file, and
- whatever I forgot to mention but will need to do sometime in the next six months.
A necessary evil
I can barely do CRX2RNX but I don't need to anymore because my software (and OPUS) will take a Hatanaka file with no conversion.
Well, teqc came to mind
Well, a cheat sheet for the basic functions of teqc came to my mind as a subject for something worth making easily retrievable.
I'm sure that others have their own nominations. a cheat cheat for using the USHD on-line historical declination software to estimate the grid or true bearings of lines run with a compass using a stated variation in a certain year comes to mind.
Found Library
The transfer of the archives from the old i-boards site appears to be complete -- I just did a couple of random searches that pulled up posts from 2002. The site is still slow as molasses, but it looks like the old information is there.
Found Library
How did you do that? The Archives section still says "coming soon" and if you click it, it says "no topics" or something like that. Did you just go to the search window on the main page? I just put my old POB name in there and it came up with a whole bunch of stuff unrelated to me at all. Also, the counter for the archive forum lists something like 39,000 posts. Weren't there about a million and a half total?
Ditto on the molasses.
Found Library
How did you do that?
I just did some keyword searches from the main window. That brought up "Main Forum Search Results" that included both old and new posts.
I can't address the post count question. I don't know how many there were on the old board, nor do I have a feasible means of determining how many are on the new one.
Semi-Permanent, Searchable Notes
Hey! Bill Strange was my father, if you thought his post were long, you should have seen this papers! Tiny neat, hand written on legal pads! We still have most of them, I, not being a geophysics, have no clue what most of them mean, but I have them none the less!
I miss him!!!!
> all the best,
> long life and prosperity,
> david in Winamac
I miss you greatly my friend. 🙁 :u:
