First off, a little about me - Army National Guard, Information Technology, GIS, Leadership

I am a Citizen Soldier, and I have 15+ years to date in the Army National Guard, most of which I have served as a combat engineering officer. My current position is the Executive Officer (XO) of the 256th Brigade Special Troops Battalion, and I truly enjoy it. Oh, and yes, I spent a year in Iraq in support of Iraqi Freedom III from 2004-2005.

My full time gig is with LSU AgCenter Information Technology, and I work as an IT Coordinator/GIS Manager. I also love this job! As a matter of fact, I was privelege enough to be the first to introduce an Enterprise-Geographic Information System (E-GIS) into our organization. If you are interested here are a couple of links to try out:

http://maps.lsuagcenter.com/windspeed_elevation - this website allows you to learn your Design Wind Speed for any location in the state of LA. It also queries the USGS Web Elevation Web Service and provides you the ground elevation for that location.

http://www.lsuagcenter.com/floodmaps - this is a portal to our DFIRM mapping project contracted with UNO Chart through LA DOTD. We currently have the DFIRM (That's Digital Flood Insurance Rate Maps by the way) for Iberville, Evangeline, and Washington Parishes. We are contracted to do 15 in all.

Also, as you the title of this post may indicate, I LOVE Information Technology, and I am considered to be a jack of all trades. I've pretty much done it all from RS232 programming to planning Networks to PC repair. I managed a help desk for about 8 1/2 years, spent that many years and then some programming 32 bit apps, and now I am focusing on GIS solutions through ESRI's Arc Products (eg. ArcCatalog, ArcGIS Server, ArcSDE).

In my 15 years in the military and the various jobs that I have had, I have learned a lot about leadership, and I love to study the leadership fundamentals and apply them to everything that I do. I have had the honor and privelege to mentor many young soldiers in the military as well as many student workers trying to make their way through college, and I can honestly say that there is no better feeling than seeing them succeed. Especially knowing that just perhaps I may have helped along the way.

Anyway, this is the start of my blog, and I will post more later or by request. I plan to post more information soon about a new GIS Application that I am working on so if you are interested, check back soon.