360 degrees 30 years later

A little hint..please please change this MAP!

After returning back to New England I've decided not to pursue my original plan of paying it forward. I have learned something very important related to my trade. I do not need to pay it forward where I started land surveying. 

Just as the land surveying industry has matured and evolved.  I have done the same thing. I have always paid attention to the demands of software as well as hardware. I can still see my first party chief standing in the woods with his cherry tobacco pipe hanging from his mouth and his other hand holding a compass and sketching kieldnotes. To this day I stop dead in my tracks whenever I smell that scent of tobacco. My experiences and knowledge base was a mutual investment from me and past employers.  I do not subscribe to the idea of my employer having to pay for my education of software or special training. 

I was told a long time ago by many Rhode Island and Massachusetts land surveyors that I could never be licensed in thier states because that was reserved for the upper class. The upper class that they were so proud of are the same people who today are owners of these firms and hate t he industry or don't know enough about it that they need a full time staff to just manage equipment and software. I figured I would go west and take advantage of the forwardbthinking people I would read about in magazines like P.O.B. or Ht. After I began to see first hand the decay of leadership and authority in townships and cities I started to believe that the land surveying industry was on course and parallel to technology . The only problem was I felt like I was alone in how I felt about our roles in the field versus office and the so called one man crew.

I think it was 1993 when I last saw a three man crew being billed out as a full crew. It was 1997 during the "BIG DIG" In Boston that I was sharing files and folders on line to upload field data for me to process and for engineers to utilize. I can't help but wonder who started the first field to finish catch phrase...was it Carlson 14 autocad or was it land desktop? In terms of field to finish work flows I was already creating these line work late "1980s" and it was normal to edit our RAW files while matching up our field book seups

So I'm heading to a new project and FLIR along with photogrametry will be my focus. I know technology can produce a variety of data sets but it is useless if I can not conventionally determine control or datum. It is just my humble opinion and I hope I'm not sounding like the guy who would point out "that's not the way we did it" or ?? It doesn't matter just as long as the survey can be reproduced and our observations are documented. Like I tried to hint on before I'm starting a new project and I'm looking forward to be calling this new area home. I'm hoping I will have people who will make use of my experience and knowledge.  I also hope I will have the opportunity to share my knowledge and experience with a person or group who will fall in love with this profession and invest in themselves as much as the profession has invested in this thing we call Land Surveying. I was never alone and he always showed me my true north. God is great thank you Jesus for showing me..God Bless us all the 5th day in April in 2022.