PLSO The Oregon Surveyor January February 2021

2 The Oregon Surveyor | Vol. 44, No. 1 From the PLSO Chair Tim Fassbender, PLS PLSO Board Chair MESSAGE FROM THE CHAIR So, is change good for surveying or do we call it progress? On the one hand, we need change. Without change we would still be measuring distances 300 feet at a time and spilling coffee on that almost completed survey map. Change or Progress? T he year 2021... Will it be better, different, or will it just bring more challenges? We learned that we can stay at home and get some of our work accomplished. We now know all about streaming TV shows and mov - ies. We’ve become experts on hunting down elusive toilet paper and when that store gets their shipment in. But, did we learn to accept all the changes we had to wade through to get to 2021? Our Annual Conference was our biggest change in PLSO, and it was very success - ful due to the work of our Conference Committee and our Executive Secretary. Without those people we would be in dire straits in keeping our PDH credits up to date and our members informed. I found that I missed meeting up with people, sharing stories, and just having that in - teraction with our fellow surveyors that we all appreciate. However, I did enjoy sitting in a very comfortable chair and having drinks and snacks at the ready while listening to the presentations from my home and/or office. It was easier to take notes and follow along while be - ing comfortable (those chairs in a warm conference room can get uncomfortable in a short time). The change came with holding our Scholarship Auction during the conference. Gone was the room filled with auction items and the oral auction during dinner. We successfully held the auction virtually and it appears we did very well. We had a great list of contri - butions and thank you to all of you that contributed. Without you we would not have the ability to raise the monies for our scholarship. Yes, most of us already knew about Zoom and video conferencing. All but one of this past years’ PLSO Board of Directors meetingwas via video conferencing. Some may like that format for a board meeting; it means no traveling and not turning on your video feed if you are having trou - ble staying focused on the meeting. It did allow us to still move forward with our organization and keep striving to make our profession better. Change is hard to accept sometimes and welcomed other times. I never thought I would be writing an article and saying I remember working up fieldnotes aver - aging angles and reducing distances to horizontal then working up the traverse using a coordinate sheet and looking up sine and cosine values in a one second table (yes, we had a one sec - ond book, good times). I even still remem - ber how to use a