Killer Exam

I can't believe how hard Pete made the test tonight! Nothing like he was last semester! He asked questions about every little thing and it took forever to finish. He made up for it afterwards by sharing files for using google earth in ArcMap, so we could download shapefiles and connect with google earth to have the shapes and the aerial in one data frame. Pretty awesome. He let us play around with that a little bit and I flew all over the country on google earth--wisconsin, grand canyon, smokys, atlanta. It was pretty amazing. He also shared a short video about RSS feeds and how to set up an account on google reader--very entertaining. Alot more entertaining than the exam, for sure!

Missed having Edward in class tonight. We could have commiserated over the exam! If you read this, watch out Edward!

Class 4

Downloaded celltower info and played around in xcel to reformat data to make this nifty map. These are all the cell towers in North Carolina, at least the ones that meet criteria for the list we downloaded from the fcc website. I made some math mistakes in excel and my cell tower points all ended up in a diagonal line. I tried loading the file again, and they showed up as a big black "L." Pete helped me trouble shoot my source data and found an error in my excel formula. Frustrating, but I'm glad the map finally worked out. Then Edward helped me do a definition query to isolate NC counties from a US map, after he fastidiously removed the lint and cat hair from his sweater. He accumulated quite an impressive pile.

Josh really likes the sunshine layer we downloaded last week, and I wouldn't mind another look at that myself.

Pete did a power point on Earth-Map relations, and reminded us we have an exam next week. I'm really tired and ready to go home. Music night at our house tonight, so I'm not sure what I'll find. I'm hoping to find an adult beverage or two!

Class 3

Tonight I slogged through the ESRI 3D tutorial for draping images to display in 3D, and crashed a couple times trying to save my "scene." So, unfortunately, I don't have any pretty pictures to show you--yet. I'm presently downloading some data for Buncombe county that may evolve into a map. It was pretty cool, though, manipulating the 3D image of Death Valley. But now it's taking forever to download the county data, unzip the files, and add layers to Arcscene. I wish we'd learned about this in intro class last semester. And it seems as though my computer is taking the longest of all to download and recover from crashes, which only adds to the complex I'm getting from the Y-chromosomes in the room. I'm in the company of some pretty savy fellows. But we had a nice look at Edward's tiny cam photos, and some google streets from San Francisco while we waited.

Anyway, I finally got the elevation and streets layers added, but I'm not able to export and save the image in Arcscene (.sxd) as a .jpg and upload into the blog, so you'll have to take my word about how cool it looks. The blog seems so inadequate without some graphics and I feel compelled to say something clever and entertaining, but alas, it's late, my brain is mush, and my wit is not on command.

More next week.