SPRING HAS SPRUNG

We’ve heard all the conspiracy theories that surround Punxsutawney Phil wanted for fraud but I have the inside story. The groundhog that actually emerged from his winter hole at Gobbler's Knob on Ground Hog Day was in fact Phil’s second cousin Punxsutawney Chill from Siberia who thought it was actually rather nice that day.

When the days get shorter and winter closes in, many people feel like hibernating until a prognosticating rodent tells us our fate for the next six weeks. At Terrametrix we don’t exactly brush off our top hats and break out the tuxedos but we do come calling. We have personally attended more than half of the nation’s state surveyor conferences, 16 related conferences just this season.  It is the height of our marketing efforts networking with surveyors and transportation engineers throughout the country. It was great to see all the familiar faces at the conferences as well as make some new contacts. One thing I realize are the number of people that attend these conferences year after year and it is a truly amazing group of professionals. Traditionally, this time of year is off-season for surveyors who use this time for professional development hours and conferencing because of weather.

Technology is changing all that however. Topographic surveys can be acquired at the desktop, virtually walking the field through measureable point cloud data accompanied by geo-reference, time-stamped imagery. Tool sets that run inside of MicroStation like TerraSolid and TopoDOT easily handle point cloud data collected by terrestrial mobile LiDAR scan systems like Terrametrix’ s StreetMapper system are extending the season. Software applications provide versatile and capable tools for anyone who needs to process and utilize 3D LiDAR data: surveyors, civil engineers, designers, planners.

Springtime is a time of rejuvenation for mother nature and is my favorite time of year. It means warm days ahead, easier days in the field and enjoying the great outdoors. We usually mark the start of spring with our industry SPAR Conference traditionally held in Houston. This year the event organizers moved the conference to Colorado Springs where not unlike the famous gopher we were hampered by the continuation of winter.  Part of our spring fever was seeing amazing new technology our industry has to offer. uGRIDD, a web-based service provider offering geo-referenced infrastructure data offers a platform for public and private sharing of information. There are time saving tools to retrieve and/or process data in Map2CAD, Data2KML, and uMeasure which is free. It is worth a look at http://www.uGRIDD.com.  Also, we are starting to see indoor scan solutions with handheld mobile scanners like DOT Products 3d Handheld which is long on innovation and short on range and 3DLM’s ZEB1. If you are in the market for a handheld scanner these two would be a good evaluation beginning.

I have noticed an emergence in acronyms defining our industry in the recent years. For examples; the New Jersey Surveyors conference is SURVCON, the Transportation Engineers Association of Missouri is TEAM, and the Society of American Engineers is SAME. Even spring fever has an abbreviated form SAD, seasonal affective disorder. Is it possible we have too much creative downtime in the dead of winter devoted to conference naming conventions? And I don’t seem to sleep as much in the afternoon anymore now that spring is finally upon us.