So what else have I been up to lately? I decided to look a bit more closely at QGIS, the open-source GIS program, and so I found a group of online courses on using it. They’re free, and you kind of get what you pay for here, but they’ve been an eye-opener into QGIS and its capabilities — it’s a much more powerful program than I realized, and with the ability to run R, GRASS and Python scripts, as well as automating tasks (and linking them together like unix pipelines), it’s got almost limitless expandability. I’m working through the third course (of five) right now, and when I’m done with these I may start looking into possibly going further.