Summer Sunday Night

I had spent some time with my friend Sarah, one of my favorite xGFs. She had a foot problem, couldn't get around very well, so I brought her some dinner and we ate it in her yard as the day and weekend faded away.

I drove off in my Vanagon, and it was just dark enough that we should all use our headlights. Driving in the Vanagon always makes me feel sort of happy and relaxed, like I'm on a trip somewhere, travelling on a whim, without everyday cares. I turned on the radio and of course it was tuned to WPVM since it was Sunday night, and that is the time for River of Sound. River of Sound is my favorite radio program of late. A young woman named Amanda puts together this 2 hour program each week. It combines music, natural sound recordings, old movie soundtracks, and other mysterious content into a surprisingly cohesive experience. Sometimes I like it more than others, but even when it is not so much my style, I enjoy the challenge and stick with it to see where she is going with it.

I decided to take the long way home, and just fell in love with the moment. The temperature, the windows down and soft air blowing through, the music, the Vanagon feeling, the light fading and shifting from warm pink to cool blue. I drove along the river, who's banks were so fecund and lush with plants. Sweet honeysuckle wafted in and brought up all the sense memory that goes with that smell. I just continued along the river, up past the mulch pile with its own tangy decomposition smell. I turned around and headed back the way I just came since it had been so nice. The light was now getting very dim, and Amanda was wrapping up the River of Sound as I crossed the river (here) and turned toward home.

This is my favorite time of year as we aproach the solstice and all the plants have fresh full leaves and are adding growth like crazy. I like it so much that I get anxious in anticipation of its passing.

Big Bush

I like a big bush. This azalea managed to hold it's buds in until the big Easter weekend freeze passed, and now it is being rewarded for its reluctance, with rampant, no-holds-barred fertilization. See, sometimes being cautious, reluctant, tentative and so forth can be a benefit.

If anybody out there has a bigger blooming azalea bush, I want to see it.

Final Project Finally Finished

It's done. To the right is the main map page that I completed. If you click it, you can see it bigger, or if you want to see the whole output of the final project with more charts and data and writing and stuff in PDF format, click Here.

I think it came out pretty well considering the amount of time spent on it. I did burn up some time deciding on what to do for my final project, and then seeking data from outside sources to do a different project. The data never materialized, so I sort of fell back to this project.


The GIS class was quite interesting. Lots of credit goes to Pete Kennedy our instructor who clearly loves the subject and puts a lot of himself into it. He is also very knowledgeable, and if he can't tell you the answer to a tough question right off the top of his head, he'll find it for you. I hope to take additional GIS classes in the future.

The last class came and went, and it was a bittersweet farewell to my friend Mary, who I met in the class. Smart, and a smart-ass, and friendly and funny, she added a some much needed energy to those brain-fried Wednesday nights. Maybe we will have the opportunity to entertain each other in a future GIS class. Or, get together over the summer for some social fun.

GIS class may be over for now, but stay tuned as the blog rolls on to cover new and exciting topics!

Final Project & Final Test

Tonight I worked on the final project. It was kind of fun. I did my usual intuitive playing around with the data to decide what to do. The map is on the right. I never got the data from the city for my original idea discussed in last week's blog post. So I started on a modified version of the class project Pete suggested. I decided to look at the watershed of my neighborhood and I guess I will total up the impervious surfaces and do some calculations. I ended up putting 2 watersheds together to cover a little more space, and then used some editing tools to remove the part of the watershed on the east side of the river, which I don't want to include. I still have a ways to go.

We had our final test tonight and it went pretty well. I totally drew a blank on what topology was. It was frustrating and funny to me for some reason. I tried to remember back to the time last night when I was sitting on the sofa, (non-leather) and studying for the test. Tried to visualize looking up the definition in the glossary. Tried to close my eyes and see the paper where I wrote it down. Wrote topology on the desk with my finger. Nothing. Finally I started writing some silly stuff on the test paper about topology, and the answer finally came to me. Funny how the brain works. I learn more and more tricks to try to get mine to work better as it gets cluttered up with stuff.

Starting the Final Project

We are starting our final projects for class tonight, and we will continue working on them for the next 2 classes. I can't upload the picture right now, but hopefully it will appear here later... OK, Blogger is no longer broken so there it is on the right. If you click it you can see it bigger. More about the map snippet in the next paragraph.

I am trying to do something interesting for my project. Maybe something to do with analysis of streets in some part of Asheville that would be good for riding my bicycle on. Various criteria could be used to assess them. Width, speed limit, traffic counts, etc. Maybe even incorporate slope data to highlight the really steep places. I had to download some streets data from Buncombe County and add that to my geodatabase. Then I wanted to see about the fancy new 5 foot contour data that Buncombe County has available. That is available for the whole county, but is broken up into smaller files, so that it is not enormous. To find the data for the area I'm interested in, I had to find the PIN for a parcel in the area, so I had to add the parcels layer and search it. It was quite an adventure. Back to the map shown above. That's my neighborhood, and I was sort of surprised by some of the contour data it shows. There's 15' of elevation change in my little 1/4 acre lot? I guess I can believe that. The 5' contour data was created using LIDAR , which I became briefly obsessed with, then I got over it.

Pete's wife Haven brought him dinner, and he embarrassed her by making her stick her head in the class and say Hi to all of us. I met Haven a few years ago at my job, and think she is very smart and cute-as-a-button. Possibly cuter. Also learned that Pete is afraid of spiders. Pete, you are much bigger than a spider, you can out run it or whack it with a long stick. Really, you can get hurt by the poisonous spiders we have around here. I remember a story from years ago about a whole family that was plagued by brown recluses. Several of them had been bitten when they put on work gloves that had the reclusive spiders in them. This story has changed forever the way I approach work gloves. Several family members had permanent damage from the spider bites and one of them had lost part of a hand to it.

Mary seemed down-in-the-dumps, and that just put a damper on the whole evening that even Haven's brief visit couldn't lift. Her green sweater was really accenting her green eyes though, which is appropriate, since she works with greens. Mary was not a good fit for a prospective employer, and now that employer is really missing out on an excellent opportunity. And just because she couldn't fill the size 18 uniform left over from the previous employee.

Robin was also suffering from post spring break syndrome. I think we all were looking at the ARC programs going, Uh, how do I work this again? I hope next week we all make some real progress on this final project and produce some really nice maps.

Before and After: Spring Freeze

The freezing started April 6th 2007. Above is the Japanese Bamboo before and after. If you click the photo you can see it bigger. Below is the Daylily Destruction. There were a couple inches of snow in addition to the cold temperatures.

Pete-zah

Pete surprised us tonight by ordering pizza for everybody. Wasn't that nice.

Then we did some more editing, this time following the exercise in the book. This exercise has 62 steps, and I got to exercise 40, and Mary did too. But I suspect she didn't hop over some of them like I did. In the photo to the right, we improved the alignment of the roads based on the info in the orthophoto data layer.

I'll say it again. This is powerful software. With that power comes a daunting depth and detail. It reminds me of Photoshop, but I think it is even more complex.