So about that same time (or a little later) I had to take a trip to Muscle Shoals and printed out my maps from Mapquest. Mapquest rocked. No more fooling with giant Atlases for me - I would print out where I needed to go when I needed to go there. If I remember correctly, and I most certainly don't, that same trip I passed Intergraph off the side of the interstate while holding my Mapquest printouts swerving all over the road. I haven't looked at mapquest in probably 5 or 6 years.

So twice in one week the past came rocketing back.First off - Intergraph was bought by Hexagon. Hexagon it seems is in the business of "precision". From their website "Hexagon is a world-leading supplier of systems for measurement of objects in one, two or three dimensions.". What makes this Interesting for me is that Hexagon also owns ERDAS. I've had a long standing relationship with ERDAS. I've watched them jump around a bit over the last few years as they were bought by Leica Geosystems..... and then Leica Geosystems being bought by Hexagon...... to the re-emergence of ERDAS as a solutions provider for imagery and other stuff (Apollo). So ERDAS and Intergraph are pretty much in the same 6 sided church. ESRI doesn't much care for wither one. Absolutely nothing could come of this.....or everyone is so busy building flex sites they wont' be paying attention.

Second - Mapquest just announced a $1,000,000 dollar investment in OpenStreetMap . I can't remember the last time I went to Mapquest to print out a map. I do remember however the last time I went to Google Maps and printed out a map...and cussed because it was wrong. So is it a bid to remain relevant? Do they really want to make a better map? I don't know but I am interested just because of all the work I've put into the the Chattanooga portion of the map. Plus there is the US State of the Map conference in Atlanta....at which I will be speaking.

Anyway - two things I had pretty much forgotten about suddenly came rocketing back out of the past this week.