First day at ESRI

I just had my first day at ESRI today, where I have joined the ArcGIS Server .NET ADF team.

Everything here seemed well-prepared and set-up when I got there, including a small "seminar" for everyone who started as ESRI today, and ready-installed desktop and laptop computers.

I already got to look "under the hood" of AGS and play around with it - there's definitely some very cool stuff in there! Hopefully I'll get some time to blog some more about it later - or you can have a look at Arts blog as well.

Up-to-date maps

Yesterday I went on my very first "road-trip" in USA, driving from Redlands up to San Luis Obispo to visit a friend of mine, a 5-6 hours drive. Of course I brought my TomTom  navigator to help out (since I had more or less no idea how to get up there), and already after 10 miles of driving it got handy, when the whole I-10 freeway closed, probably because of yet another accident. TomTom has a neat little feature to avoid roadblocks or entire parts of the trip, and provide you with an alternative.

I wasn’t  too sure how up-to-date the map was, but thought I would let it guide me on a round trip. Well it turned out that the maps were a little too up-to-date, when it suddenly wanted me to enter an only half  completed freeway :-). Good thing I brought my paper-maps as well, although they are far harder to use while driving ;-)