I was surfing the web looking for recent crime reports from the Apple Valley, Lakeville, Rosemount area that would be better than what’s available from the Star Tribune South Metro and the Pioneer Press’ Dakota County sections.

I can’t say I’m terribly pleased by the fact that I can’t find an easy to read and up-to-date listing on Apple Valley’s website (fuck, who am I kidding, they don’t even keep their City Council agendas and minutes up-to-date) but I did locate a pretty nice map of Lakeville’s crime incidents over the last 90 days. Being that the map was done by LOGIS I figured that other local police departments had to be hooked up with this application as well. After plugging in the obvious URLs, I found that you can check out crime incident maps for several other areas including Apple Valley, Eagan, and Farmington. I wasn’t able to get Rosemount even though the city is a member of LOGIS.

If anyone knows of a place that I can locate a text copy of up-to-date crime information other than the Pioneer Press or Star Tribune, please post it below, thanks.

Where the fuck have all the posts gone? Well, to answer that you would have to know that I’ve been breaking a lot of my own rules.

1. I have been working entirely too much. I’ve been busy as hell and stressed as fuck about work — especially this week.

2. I actually did some nerdy work at home the last two nights. This is strictly verboten by me but I was actually enjoying some of the shit I was doing. For once it didn’t have anything to do w/GIS, KML/KMZ, and Shape files for work.

3. I took three days to travel with a buddy through MN, SD, and NW IA hitting 140 caches in the process. I did take a couple of photos of the trip but I just haven’t had the time to upload them. In the mean time you can check out the very few photos I took on the hiptop here.

4. I visited my parents in Pennsylvania over the Memorial Day weekend. We spent a lot of time visiting, seeing some family, checking out the progress on their new house, and eating foods partial to my East Coast heart (like real pizza cut the proper way!). I have some pictures on the camera still from that trip that I have yet to upload but you can look at a couple on the hiptop from the trip here, here, here, and here.

5. Upcoming adventures include a trip out to Redwood Falls this weekend with Aaron and Kim for the MnGCA Ramsey Rally 2007 (aka MnGCA Spring Event) which I haven’t missed one (or the Fall event) since 2003.

6. Next weekend we’re heading down to Knoxville/Pella, IA to camp with my college roommate Josh at Lake Red Rock Recreation Area. Josh visited Ohio while we were in PA and his parents brought him up a case of my favorite PA beer (which has made it up and down the East Coast but not yet to Minnesota where no one would drink it over shitty Michelob Golden Light anyway) Yuengling.

7. At the end of the month we’re going to another Twins game and then flying out to Ohio to visit with Kim’s parents for the Fourth of July where we will likely see several of her siblings and eat some Montgomery Inn ribs and visit King’s Island.

8. Then in July I’m heading up to a buddy’s cabin for the weekend, we’re heading to Edisto Beach, SC for vacation, and then we’re into August where we are almost already booked every weekend from then through October.

Too much shit to do this summer — it seriously almost feels like it’s over and it just started. I hope to have pictures from the Minnesota Zoo up, the PA trip, and my caching trip to SD this week. We’ll see.

In the mean time, make sure you read up on Two Guys from Italy and the freshly opened Kami Japanese Steakhouse in Apple Valley.

I have been working to make the Minnesota Cache Reviewer’s (Surfer Joe) job of making certain caches are placed legally a lot easier by offering up freely available park boundary information in KMZ format for use with Google Earth. This way, if a geocache is submitted in an area that it is either banned (National Wildlife Refuge, AMA, WPA, etc) or in an area that requires permission (State Forests and State Parks), all the work is already done and “Surfer Joe” will know immediately without consulting various maps and doing too much guess work.

GIS departments around the country utilize ArcView to create boundaries and other GIS data information and usually release it in Shape format which w/o ArcView is fairly useless. I have talked about how I have converted SHP to KML/KMZ before but this time I’ve got a ton more content available for download.

If you’re at all interested in knowing boundaries of Aquatic Management Areas (fishing), State Forests and Parks, National Wildlife Refuges, or Waterfowl Production Areas (there’s a beautiful WPA in Lakeville) check out the following KMZ files:

Minnesota DNR Boundaries in KMZ