okiesurveyor

Intriguing anti-western by first time director Scott Blake. A story of a government surveyor circa 1848 on a trek home after surveying land on the Western frontier. It's a highly accomplished period piece with meticulous attention to detail re: costumes, props, location. A rare formalist feat by a young filmmaker who appears to have no interest in the rickety realism he has every right making at his age, 26. Surveyor may require a little patience - it begins minimally and is long for a short at 25 minutes - but it's far from stagnant, and includes a notable last minute pivot into hallucinatory darkness. What begins as a rigorous exercise unfolds like a gothic nightmare - you can't quite make sense of it all, but it feels real. Impressive and mysterious debut film [Watch in full screen mode for better quality video]

The days of communicating face to face or even over the phone are slowing fading away. Electronic mail has become the main form of communication in our society. Anyone remember hand-writing letters? Of course you don’t unless you're 90. The sad thing is that if we did remember when we hand-wrote letters, maybe our eMail communications would be better today. I guess what I’m saying is try to use etiquette for eMail similar to hand-writing a letter but not as short (or stupid) as texting. Our society has become so “immediate gratification” and “instant notification” that we often don’t slow down and make sense when we compose eMail. eMail shouldn’t be written like texting, Twitter or Facebook (those are a whole other level of communication). I probably receive or write 50-100 emails a day and I have seen some of the worst and the best. Here are a few rules that you can follow to make the experience better for you and the recipient. Most of these are business related but stil...

A lot of people mistakenly think surveying is a perfect science with exact measurements. Well, it isn’t. Yes, we can make exact measurements but that is not the science behind the profession. That is just the technology . Nowhere does this appear more often than when an unqualified person writes a new legal description for a portion of a previously described tract of land. Such as the “ South one-half of Lot 2 ” That looks like a fairly straightforward description until someone wants to sell the remainder of Lot 2 to someone else. Lot 2 is platted as 100’ wide so the second [unqualified] person writes the descriptions as the “ North 50’ of Lot 2 ” Probably thinking to themselves “ Hey I will make this description even better and super-duper accurate ” The problem Is, Lot 2 was laid out in 1970 and never surveyed on the ground. When it is finally surveyed, Lot 2 is found to only be 99.5’ feet wide in real life. So the “ South one-half ” is really only 49.75 feet and the “ No...

In an earlier blog I discussed the Initial Point , which is the origin for the majority of surveys in the State of Oklahoma. The exception being the Panhandle, which has its own history and point of origin for the surveys that followed after it became part of Oklahoma Territory. “The public land strip which is included in said territory of Oklahoma, is bounded by the one hundredth meridian, south by Texas, west by New Mexico, north by Colorado and Kansas”   excerpt from the Organic Act of 1890 Eventually, there would be a need to lay out the lands into sections and quarter sections just as the “main body” of Oklahoma was done. The “other” Initial Point was too far away to serve as a sufficient starting point for the surveys, so a new starting point was established just for this small strip of Oklahoma. The starting point (Cimarron Meridian and Base Line) was determined to be located at the intersection of 103 degrees of west longitude (meridian) and 36 degrees and 30 ...

My wife and I were talking about our grandpas the other day and how much change they must have seen in their lifetime. I thought about it and I believe the last 50 years may have given us more change than the 50 years before that 10 things I use every day that weren't around then: Zenith Space Commander 300 TV Remote GPS (Can you imagine telling a 20-something to read a map?) TV Remote control (My dad used to call his “Burk”) Intermittent windshield wipers. (Before this, they were either on or off) Smoke detectors (before these, people just died) Digital Cameras (you had to go to the drug store to see your pictures) Microwave (maybe if you were rich in 1975) Electronic payments /ATM’s (cash, what a novel idea) Cell Phones Personal Computers THE INTERNET (Probably the biggest game changer)

I normally don’t do food reviews. Mainly because I love all things food, so what’s the point? Today I made my 10 th trip to the Empire Slice House in the Plaza District of Oklahoma City with a great friend of mine. He bought, so that’s why he is a GREAT friend, not just a GOOD friend. There are lots of new trendy hipster restaurants popping up all over OKC and, frankly, this is one of them. But what makes Empire Slice House different? They got it right ! Yes, they are in the trendy part of town with trendy wait staff (aka awesome wait staff) but the main reason is they got it right . They serve pizza, really good pizza and beer. That’s it! Oh sure, they have the obligatory salad or something like that for all the healthy eaters out there. But mainly they serve really good pizza at a really good price, and beer The one non-pizza/beer item that is a must-try is the garlic knots; garlic bread dripping in butter with marinara sauce.  If you are here, you are probably ...

In some form or another, I have been asked this question more times than you think. So I want to take a minute to clarify a little about technology and Land Surveying. Gunters Chain and early compass Technology has been changing in the survey industry ever since the first transits were built. Even more so in the last 20 years than the 150 years prior to that. The profession of Land Surveying, however, has remained basically the same since the beginning of time. We locate and mark the boundaries of land. The technology involved in making those decisions is irrelevant. It is just a tool to measure distance and angles. I have heard people use technology as a “crutch” to say something like “the property corners moved because we can measure better today”. Property corners don’t move. When we are asked to locate the boundaries of a parcel of land, we have to consider the means of measurement that were in place at the time of the original survey. It’s what we call in our prof...