I sleep-walked through my presentation at Practical Cartography Day at the 2009 North American Cartographic Information Society annual meeting in Sacramento, California, USA today…after struggling to get MAYBE four hours of sleep last night. However, my session: Ideas for Creating Smaller Interactive
Map File Sizes in .swf Format …seemed to go over well with the 100+ individuals in attendance.
I don’t think people believed me at first when I was illustrating some of the radical changes in .swf file sizes that were being observed just from variations in the application of tools such as symbols, line segments, and compound paths. A few people even raised their hands during Q&A time and were questioning the results. I was glad to have a few people in the audience though who chimed in and told people that the interesting variations we were observing were very-much real (as well as some of the reasoning/programming behind it).
I’m trying to think of the best way of incorporating those slide materials into our main GraphicsOptimization web site. For the time being though, I’ve been more busy trying to introduce many of those techniques in vector design (and raster exporting) into our day-to-day operations at mapformation, LLC.
The other sessions I really enjoyed today were from Jill Saligoe-Simmel at Ortellius (I’ll talk more about this one later), Event Animation Mash-ups in the Google Maps API (presented by Robert E. Roth and Kevin S. Ross at Penn State), and David Heyman’s (Axis Maps, LLC) demonstration of Indiemapper.
A good day! I had 4-5 minutes of technical difficulties at the beginning of my own session (a flashback to my one and only blue screen of death moment at Practical Cartography Day at NACIS in 2008), but had smooth sailing after that. I also got to enjoy exploring outside the California State Capitol building and grabbing dinner with my friend Hans from The Netherlands as well. I have the pine cone from one of the very tall pines on the West side of the Capitol building to prove it. 
