The Academic Finish Line After Fall 2026, something strange will happen. I will officially be done with school. Not “taking a break.”Not “considering another program.”Not “thinking about a certificate.” Done. At that point I will have earned two undergraduate degrees and two master’s degrees. That is already more time in classrooms, lecture slides, discussion boards, and research papers than I
The problem started the way these things usually do. Crystal Reports stopped working. The server was reachable. You could ping it. SQL Server was up. Nothing obvious was broken, yet reports refused to run and kept throwing SSL and connection errors that looked vague enough to be annoying but serious enough to block real work. Ping working did what it
It Starts With Good Intentions Spring break begins the same way every year. You tell yourself this will be the week where everything gets organized. You will get ahead on readings. You will outline papers. You will clean up your notes and maybe even get a head start on that project that has been quietly sitting in the syllabus since
While I was watching some CCNA tutorial videos, I noticed something strange. The instructor was clearly speaking, the audio meter was moving, and the volume icon on my Ubuntu laptop proudly claimed it was at 100%. And yet the sound was barely audible. This is not the kind of problem you expect in 2026. We have gigabit internet, cloud computing
Spring break is upon us. So what does a grad student and full-time IT administrator do when escaping the usual cycle of late nights, research papers, production systems, and those mysterious alerts that only happen at 2:17 AM? We game. Because after weeks of debugging networks, writing GIS papers, and explaining (again) that yes, rebooting sometimes fixes things, the only
It’s been a while since I posted about Linux, or networking, for that matter. Between grad school and work projects, blogging about networking and Linux kinda took a back seat. But I’m still working on improving my networking and Linux chops, along with everything else. The learning never really stops… yay. (Yes, I am somewhat still able to find gaps
When people talk about evictions, the conversation usually focuses on numbers. We hear about eviction rates, percentages, and housing statistics. But those numbers rarely show where these problems are happening. That is where Geographic Information Systems (GIS) become useful. GIS helps us move beyond simple statistics and see the geography behind social issues. By mapping eviction rates, we can start
Introduction In this project, I completed a full ortho mapping workflow in ArcGIS Pro to create accurate satellite imagery products. The goal was to correct geometric distortion in raw satellite images so they can be reliably used for mapping, analysis, and measurement. This workflow included creating an ortho mapping workspace, performing block adjustment, adding ground control points, generating a digital
Most people think GIS is about making maps. In reality, the most valuable GIS work happens when spatial analysis supports real decisions. This lab focused on a practical problem faced by many communities: how to identify open-space parcels inside flood-prone areas that may qualify for FEMA Community Rating System (CRS) credits and potentially reduce flood insurance costs. What makes this
Introduction In a recent lab exercise, I worked with GeoDa, developed by the University of Chicago Center for Spatial Data Science, to examine spatial structure in geographic data. The objective was not simply to map values, but to determine whether patterns were statistically clustered, dispersed, or random. A map shows distribution. Spatial analysis tests whether that distribution has structure. What