Instead of installing and configuring various tools to add more to this site (Disqus comments, pretty links in the footer to my airplane photos on Instagram and Tumblr, updating the DNS resources for my domains I don’t use so that they point here, etc.), I should be reminding myself of what I was going to talk about when I was going to talk about maps back in August (but then had to cancel). We’ll see how much housekeeping I can get done on this site over the coming weekend.

On Tuesday, December 12 I am going to be giving a tutorial about mapping in R at R-Ladies San Diego. The organizer has put all of my materials on the GitHub repo, so you can see what I’m planning on talking about. (And if you are in San Diego, then you should come to the talk.) As you can’t help but notice if you read the narrative outline of the tutorial, installing all the required tools can be a bit of a nightmare, so I have tried very hard not to update anything important on my laptop since then so that the tutorial will still work.

What you might also see from the tutorial is that the points on the map follow the tracks of airplanes taking off from San Diego International Airport. Since this blog is pretty new, I haven’t yet had the opportunity to write much about airplanes and the airport. I really love the absurdity of our airport. If this city had any real weather ever, it would be impossible to get here.

Speaking of airplanes, last night I took my new camera and lens to the airport to try to get photos of airplanes under low-light conditions. We get a 747 direct from London every evening right around sunset.