Bill Dollins

Nothing amuses me more than the bemused looks I get when I say I have no intention of retiring.

One advantage of your grandchildren living with you is that there is no shortage of random hugs.

On the treadmill: 4 miles, sub 10:00 pace, last mile sub 8:00. First time for both since prior to last year’s eye surgeries.

Understanding can arrive in unexpected ways. A typewriter in my father’s shed became a way of seeing him more clearly.

https://blog.geomusings.com/2026/04/22/the-typewriter/

"Field of Dreams" hits a little harder after your father has passed away.

@AtanasE@mastodon.social @rjhale1971@fosstodon.org

And you may find yourself living in a shotgun shack
And you may find yourself in another part of the world
And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile
And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife
And you may ask yourself, "Well, how did my vertices get out of order?”

And I’m Out

I have decided that, in the next phase of my career, the most advanced spatial analysis I will perform will be deciding where to park this baby. AI is taking over the entire industry anyway, so I thought I'd use it to make a conceptual rendering of my food truck/semi-retirement plan. The actual truck is a different make and model but will mostly look like this. It should be ready in about six weeks from today. Happy April Fool's Day.

https://blog.geomusings.com/2026/04/01/and-im-out/

This young lady is 7 years old today.

Spatial finance can see assets, hazards, emissions, and exposure with increasing precision. But places are also shaped by institutions, memory, liability, politics, and trust. This post looks at what spatial finance cannot yet see from orbit.

https://blog.geomusings.com/2026/04/28/what-spatial-finance-cannot-see-from-orbit/

New tools arrive with new vocabulary and new claims of rupture. What changes less is the work underneath. Context, judgment, and stewardship are the center of gravity beneath rapid technical change. I write about it here.

https://blog.geomusings.com/2026/04/13/twenty-years-part-two/

I’m sure there plenty of reasons to be unhappy with Anthropic, but I’ll allow myself to be happy with them today.

@AtanasE@mastodon.social Perhaps. Interestingly, I’ve encountered two company blogs that run Wordpress and seem to have intentionally disabled RSS.

As an inveterate early riser who’s been working mostly alone for the past three years, I’m having to get back in touch with “scheduled send.”

Twenty Years, Part One

In 1993, at the very start of my career, I was a newly minted AML developer working on a data automation project. A good bit of the industry’s energy at the time was focused on digitizing vast amounts of geospatial information that still existed in analog form, including mylar, paper maps, and other physical artifacts, so it could be brought into GIS and made useful.

https://blog.geomusings.com/2026/03/19/twenty-years-part-one/

Does Your Workflow Need A Model?

I have been circling this idea in a few recent posts. I am not sure this one brings it all the way in for a landing, but it at least feels like it is on the approach. What sharpened it for me were two recent customer conversations where AI was assumed to be part of the answer. In both cases, a closer look showed that it was not necessary. That experience points to a recurring pattern for me. Someone describes a workflow they want to…

https://blog.geomusings.com/2026/05/05/does-your-workflow-need-a-model/

FedGeoDay 2026 reinforced a key point: federal geospatial data assets are becoming foundational to AI. Four talks stood out to me, connecting data stewardship, foundation models, agents, provenance, and mature implementation.

https://blog.geomusings.com/2026/04/27/fedgeoday-2026-four-talks-worth-your-attention/

The Bitter Southerner is one of few physical publications I still get because it is just so well produced.

It's April, it's warm outside, and my family is trading "Elf" quotes in our group chat.