[Mapserver-west] another introduction

[Eric S. Theise]

Hi everyone,

Thought I'd take a minute to introduce myself, too.  I signed up
earlier in the week and am happy to see west coast traffic today.

My training is in operations research (optimization modeling) and
after a short academic career, I started doing Internet work (back
in the day of another UMN product, gopher (!)).  A few more career
twists and turns, and last fall I found myself team-teaching a
course on mapping (broadly defined) at the California College of
the Arts.  I taught myself enough GRASS to realize that it was going
to be too complex to teach to art students with varying degrees of
computer expertise, but I was able to demo it as part of the history
of cartography, and in so doing, I seem to have caught GIS fever.
I've joined the Bay Area Automated Mapping Association (BAAMA), and
am looking for work where I'd be able to get up to speed with the
ESRI tools and eventually figure out how my earlier training could
dovetail with GIS.

In the meantime, I have a pet project I'd love to get online using
MapServer, and have spent a good part of the last few days trying
to get all the pieces to play together.  (It's an old freeBSD system,
4.10, with a fresh gcc, 4.1.0, but gdal does not want to build.)

Anyway, hello, nice to see all the Pacific Northwest action and if
there's any Bay Area MapServer activity, I'd like to know about it.

Cheers, Eric