So here's my new shape file of downtown Canton. The bright green line is the boundary I drew that delineates "downtown" Canton. Never knew there WAS one, didja? The blue is railroads and the red are parcel boundaries. I tried to follow roads and existing boundaries as best I could, but the information we had to go on was a pencil line on a xerox copy of the aerial photo that some lady in the planning department drew for Pete. "Welcome to the real world," he says.

Feel like I did OK on the exam tonight, considering how much of a slacker I've been. It could have been a lot worse--seems I lucked out on some guesses I made, but I should keep my mouth shut until he grades them. I don't want to jinx myself!

Poor Edward lost all the arduous tracing he did for his outline. I was right next to him and witnessed the moment of panic when digital technology determined his destiny. He pulled through it pretty well, and I plan to check blogs more diligently in the next week.

We also talked about the next GIS course being offered at AB Tech this summer--on weekday mornings of all times. Hopefully by then I'll be working for Equinox, but a morning class would still be hard for me to pull off.

Catching up

Felt a little remiss for missing class last week, but I think I'll be Ok. Won't have the same kind of time free to study for this test like I did the last one, but I've learned all I can about editing in one night. Had a little chat with Edward about my beltsander blog and discussed some LP business with Pete. Oh yeah, I made this little Rapid City map thing, too, which as Edward pointed out, was decievingly quite arduous to complete. Found out there's some happenin laundro-mats in that SD town. Never know what kind of information you'll come out of a GIS class with!

Man! The computers tonight were S...L...O...W..... or, at least mine was. It was so slow, I had to drive the unit in the front of the class while Pete directed us through the steps, or else I'd have another nifty watershed map, too. And Edward gave me some kind of computer crasher complex and it turned out his flash was full. My oh my, whatta night. But here's my buncombe county land use map after it was appended, clipped, dissolved and buffered. All these tools from the toolbox and I'm feeling pretty handy. Speaking of tools, I felt girlscout-prepared when Pete inquired, "Does anybody have a screwdriver?" and I whipped out the mini-leatherman like it came out of ARC toolbox. Never thought I'd need a screwdriver for GIS class. Now I'm anxious to rummage around in that little red box and do a little experimenting--maybe a little modeling one of these days. I'm having visions of community mapping and habitat suitability and restoration design. Now THAT will be exciting. Not as exciting as the belt-sander I got for Valentine's Day, but that's a topic for another blog.

Feb. 28

Took the queries test tonight. Feel like I did OK, since we had a good review beforehand, but we'll see.

Pete seemed a little distracted tonight for some reason--a little more scattered and disheveled than usual? (I'm not the only one who noticed). Been up a while Pete?

Enjoyed a beautiful pink sunset behind Pisgah out the classroom window, though. Not to say I was looking out the window and not paying attention, but there was a little down time while everyone completed exercises and practiced queries.

Just checked out my blog and I have 8 posts. It's hard to believe we've had 8 weeks of class and it's already the end of February. Weird how time flies.

So the whole joins and relates concept with tables seems pretty straight-forward except for the few caveats that will probably solve themselves with time and familiarity. Only question I think I'll have once I get more into it is knowing which table to relate to which--as in, which direction to join or relate. And I'm sure that will be determined by how the data is being used, but I know the direction probably won't always be interchangeable. Like I said--caveats that will be resolved with experience.

By the way, Edward is a very sneaky photo pirate with his tiny camera.

Whew

Especially tired tonight, but made it through the tutorial with my sturgis raster image matched nicely to the forest roads, see? And for your veiwing pleasure, I will add the images I couldn't get uploaded last week. I realize now I was in Edit Html mode instead of Compose so the images weren't projecting--learned all about projecting images tonight. I do want to become more familiar with the Datum formats and coordinate systems.

Here's my lovely NC counties map with the scale bar I made for my friend, Reed, who will plot on it the results from a woodrat habitat survey he did. Hope it gets published.

Hey Pete, if you see this, will you post the supplemental power point from class either on the AB Tech black board or on your GIS Blog where we can access it?

Everybody ready for the Query Quiz next week?
See ya then.

so I'm happy

Didn't have time to post during class last night, so I'm catching up from home this morning. But why won't my map jpg's upload from my flashdrive? All I'm getting on the blog after upload is a bunch of text. Oh well.

Did pretty well on the exam, so I'm happy about that. Had plenty of chocolate cake with my SO after class, so I'm happy about that. The book exercises were really a drag. Seems like they didn't contribute to any real product--every map we created, we just erased to make a new map. Seems the previous chapter exercises all compiled into one big final map, which was a bit more rewarding than just going through the motions in chapter 6. Anyway, I did get the NC counties map I wanted, so I'm happy about that.

GIS feb 7

Here's the wonderful percent hispanic population map from the chapter 5 exercises! I actually finished this time! But I moved through the steps so quickly and mechanically, I'm not sure how much really sunk in. I'll have to spend some quality time with the text to sort it out, I suppose.

Test tonight was OK. I think I did pretty well--missed the shapefiles question (how many files), and was a little uncertain about what, exactly, the arrows were pointing to at the very end, but I still think I squeezed an A.

Thanks for the dumdums, Pete.

I added a link to Edward's blog (the "other" GIS blog), so check out his "moving pictures."