One of the things I had not gotten around to doing in ArcGIS 10 was figure out how to directly manipulate the geometry of a record using the Field Calculator. When I stumbled upon a bug in the way the Extract Values to Points tool handles Null geometries, I figured it was time to figure it out. Setting the X, Y to 0,0 was sufficient for my needs. I set the Parser to Python and the formula was simple once I figured out the syntax:

In the last couple months, I’ve had a bit of an eye-opening about Geography. People actually trained in geography may implicitly understand this but I, with my Accounting degree, have spent the last 16 years ‘doing’ GIS without realizing the foundation of geography–geology. I picked up enough geography to understand some of the inter-relationships between people and the lands they live on. But what I didn’t pick up on was how the lands we live on are formed.