Time was spent on other things.

I was going to apologize to my two or three readers for not posting regularly. I was. But then I'd be taking responsibility for my own actions (or inaction.) Instead, I'm going to model my post after President Bush's thoughtful words:

Where mistakes were made, the responsibility rests with me.

Man, you gotta love the power of that passive voice. Let me try it:

I have been settling into a new job and this here blog has been neglected.

Did you feel it too? It's as though something was about to land on my shoulders but, at the very last second, it dissipated into the ether. It's like a magical incantation, that passive voice.

In the civilian world, what I'm doing is called enterprise content management. In my department, Utilities & Plant Engineering, we call it "record integration" because some of the content I'm managing will be linked to the geographic information system (GIS) that my supervisor is building. I scan, I edit metadata, I write webpages, and I document the process. When we finish working on the records at the Central Power Plant, we'll roll out the process to other groups in Plant Engineering. I like it very much. It feels great to be working for a living organization that expects to grow. I even got to design the Utilities Record Integration logo, such as it is. The manager suggested I do something with the block-M utilities logo; I gave him several designs; he chose this one. Joy was felt.

Tomorrow, my supervisor will be giving a presentation on URI to a group of senior engineers and administrators. And (as soon as I finish it) he'll be able to to present a proof-of-concept project of mine -- a package of engineering drawings in TIFF that is searchable by metadata and linked with html. It's hardly revolutionary, but it's a demonstration of the kind of product we can deliver.

He also has to present our progress -- his progress, actually -- on GIS. I don't envy him because developing GIS takes a lot of time & effort, and upper echelons rarely like to hear why. But he's learning some pretty arcane shit that is in high demand in state & local government and utility companies. Those places have GIS departments, not just a GIS guy doing ojt.

We joke about building an information infrastructure one brick at a time. Sometimes it seems like one handful of mud and another of straw at a time, but we'll get there.

Now, if I can only convince them to hire me permanently. Or rather, when hiring occurs I would like to be the object of that sentence.