WELCOME TO PROFESSIONAL SURVEYOR MAGAZINE ONLINE

Over a one-year period, more than 100,000 individuals and companies will have looked at and used the inaugural edition of Professional Surveyor Magazine's Surveyor's Red Pages.

Work on the second annual edition has begun. It will provide users with even more details about you and your business.

The 2009 edition will be printed and distributed to our nearly 40,000 subscribers with the November issue of Professional Surveyor Magazine and distributed at several major trade shows, including the ACSM attendee packages. In addition, the 'live' continually updated online version will provide even more information about the companies listed.

• Get listed in the FREE directory portion of the 2009 edition
• Get more information about available advertising possibilities in the 2009 Surveyor's Red Pages
• View the 2008 Surveyor's Red Pages online, as it was printed
• View the updated online Surveyor's Red Pages of surveying companies and organizations

In honor of the 35th anniversary of Hewlett-Packcard's introduction of its HP 35 scientific calculator, so popular amongst surveyors, Professional Surveyor Magazine will be giving away 35 of Hewlett-Packard's newest HP 35s. Every month, three new questions will be posted on our website. The answers can be found in the content of the 2008 Red Pages. We will randomly select three winners every month from the correct responses, and each winner will receive a FREE HP 35s calculator, courtesy of Hewlett-Packard and Professional Surveyor Magazine. The contest ends soon, so enter NOW to win!

• Click here to see the current questions and enter to win!
• Click here to view the e-Edition of the 2008 Red Pages

In my last column, I suggested that requiring the licensure of GIS professionals as land surveyors was a poor solution to ensuring competency. Before that, I said that trying to license photogrammetrists as surveyors dilutes the surveying profession while doing nothing to increase the quality of photogrammetric products. This time, I am going to go one big step further and suggest that licensure of professional land surveyors has also become a poor solution, and this magazine is my first piece of evidence.

Just look at the articles now being published in Professional Surveyor Magazine that cover aerial photography, GIS, RTK GPS, robotic total stations, terrestrial photogrammetry, precision farming, lidar, and precision construction. Many of the technical topics appearing here are also found in GIS-oriented publications. The surveying and GIS professions share much of the same technological and scientific foundation, but they remain quite distinct in other ways that define them as separate professions.

The tools of boundary surveying and the methods used have evolved, certainly, but not all at once. The old methods work perfectly well for however long it takes for us to acquire new technical skills. Besides, as www.LandSurveyor.us says, "It is important to realize that most Land Surveyors will tell you that surveying is an 'art,' not a 'science'."1 Boundary surveying has always been about the law and its application, the discovery of evidence and its interpretation. This has not changed. It is also what makes surveying a profession.

"What's up, dude?" was the greeting I received from my assigned instrument man.

My regular man was out sick. This guy, with long blonde hair and a cocky attitude, was the epitome of a "surfer dude." That's not such a bad thing in itself, but he was obnoxious and rude. More than once he muttered inaudibly, only to have the satisfaction of saying, "Why don't you clean the dinosaur crap out of your ears, old man? Then maybe you can hear me when I speak." I was 25 years old and he was 17.

After several small projects in the morning and a most intolerable lunch together, we reached our assignment for the afternoon. We were to lay out survey control points for a freshly dredged canal for quantities of fill dirt. The canal was very long, so several crews were assigned to this job. After arriving at our section, we got out of the truck to access the situation. I quickly came up with a plan of attack, and it was time to get started.