My interview went well. He offered the position to me! I have a lot of information, and I am not quite sure how to organize it, so I will just do a brain-dump.

He is a civil engineer with a degree from Penn State. He hates Ohio State; loves Michigan. That will be fun. He looks to be about my age. Married with a 3 or 4 year-old-looking son.

There are 312 miles of county roads under the county's jurisdiction.

I will have a very large office. It must have been designed for an engineer because I think I saw a drafting table in there.

Initially the road database was digitized using the right-of-way centerline, which is not the same as the pavement centerline. A project was recently finished that re-digitized the road database using the pavement centerline. It is mostly good, but there are some small things that need to be tightened up. One of my first projects will be to proof and correct this database. This can be a tedious process and he said he will try to keep that to just about 20% of what I do. I thought that was a sign of a good manager. This database tightening has to be done because they are going to use this data for a routing network; creating the most efficient path for snowplows; guiding rescue vehicles to emergencies, etc.

They are in the middle of a big expensive project to put their GIS data on the internet. Patrick Engineering is the main contractor for this project, and he said there would be a lot of opportunity to work with them.

He said I could work from home when it is convenient. At the office I will be in, they only have a T1 line, which is 1.5 Mbps, for the entire building (it is a small building). Our cable modem service at home is a 2.0 Mbps connection, and we often times go faster than that. They support VPN which means I could securely log-in to their network and see all of their data at home on my PC! He made a comment about how people that they let work from home have to be disciplined and trusted, but with my background and being bonded at two large banks for the last 12 years, he said no problem.

The current intern is a grad student at NIU and is working on some cartography, and that I would pick that up. Producing cartographic products is not what I want to focus on, but it will be fun, and it will just be a part of what I will be doing. It is good to have experience in all aspects of GIS.

I asked about a permanent position, and he said the county has had a hiring freeze for the last three years, but there are two impact analysis positions on the near horizon for another department. He wants to move that responsibility into his department; hire just one impact analyst; and then hire another GIS person. He said if that happens, that I might be able to have that position. But that is months away.

Everyone was very laid-back, happy, and joking around with each other. Always a good sign.

He needs to get final approval from the finance office, and put together a project plan for me before I start. Sounds like a couple of weeks, which is fine with me because classes will be over in a couple of weeks.

He said they are flexible with school, so I should be able to fit my last class at Northern in.

In the old days they would get traffic counts by laying one of those rubber hoses across the roadway. Each time a car ran over it, air would compress and click a counter in a box at the side of the road. The new way of doing it gives you traffic counts for each lane! There is a little black box that they dig up a little brick-sized hole in the road. It has some kind of sensor that can tell when a big metal object is over it. It even differentiates between cars and trucks. They will put one of these in each lane.

There is a company called Transmap, based in Columbus, OH, that is going to start doing some work for them. They have a van that has gyroscopes, GPS receivers, roll indicators, etc. and eight cameras mounted on top of the van that cover 360º. You specify how often you want a data sample taken. For example, every 50 feet. You then use this data to inventory, down to the foot, every asset in the field. Every road sign can be recorded in a GIS database. That sounds like a lot of fun, and he said I will be able to work with them. The guy that started Transmap used to be a geography professor at Ohio State.

All in all I am very excited about it. Lots of good technology to play with and learn. He really liked my experience with VBA and SQL. I think I might pick up a book on SQL.