This morning I was reminded of a rather frustrating job I stumbled into a long time ago. I was working on the Black Hills National Forest and was the new college grad in the office; which made me the de facto computer “expert”. I had little clue as to what I was doing, but that was measurably more than anyone else there.

What this perceived “expertise” brought onto me was helping the Range Con, or trying to help, plan routes for GPSing the grazing allotments so they could be used as a GIS layer. This was way back when GPS and GIS were fairly new and first entering public land management processes, so no one had any idea of what was going on.

The problem I was stuck on was making the timestamps lineup so the GPS data from one allotment could be folded into another so that the pathways were usable. Probably not an issue anymore, and quite possible it wasn’t even then, but I had it in my head that the time stamp on the latest point from one line had to match the earliest point from an adjoining line. This was necessary to use the data in calculations and management decisions and not just be pretty to look at.

In the decades since I have figured out a couple ways to do this much more effectively than I had in my head back then. The biggest hurdle was not looking at the allotments themselves, but just the fence lines.

What got my crazy brain thinking of this was watching a car behave oddly in front of me. Nothing new, and I am certain everyone is experiencing this uptick, but my mind went to wonder how a hacker would be able to make it look as though a person went to a place they did not actually go. Or, erase a place they did go to and make it look as though they were somewhere else. You know, just another day.