Re: Day of PostgreSQL - July 22, Sunday before OSCON

Hi pdxpug

(I have been lurking, and I plan on attending at least some meetings
once my wife and I move up to Eugene. She will be getting a masters
in architectural history and planning, and I will be doing field
research in sociology in the Willamette valley for my PhD. If anybody
wants to rent near U-O to a couple in their late thirties with a
graduate school habit, please send me an email offline...)

> > And, Rich - are you talking about spatio-temporal (i.e. GIS-system)?
> I'm talking about learning the status of variables (e.g., permits,
> hospital patients, stock ownership,
<SNIP>

I think this would be really interesting. I wonder if it might be
experiment with meetings structured around some puzzles/problems
members are trying to solve. I went to a meeting sponsored by a
company that makes a plagiarism database, and they presented their
architecture and their current challenges and then asked for advice -
it was a really nice, creative discussion, that helped the company (I
think) and gave us all a chance to talk software approaches to real
problems.

I would be willing to be one of the guineau pigs on this (though I
don't want to go solo :) ). I will be collecting field data in
Postgres: life histories, genealogies, transcripts for qualitative
analysis, as well as public data like Census, economic time series,
and property shapefiles. I will be doing some analysis in R and
Postgis and maybe some fancy text processing, and I would love some
good advice.

Just a thought... and an introduction. Hopefully we will be up in
time for OSCON.

Webb S