Thursday, December 27, 2007

Hawk at Work

My office mate Ken, a knowledgeable nature enthusiast, made a strange gesture looking out the window the other day and said he thought he saw a big weird bird. It disappeared from his view, but then he saw it and said it was a hawk. I saw it too and went outside with tinycam to stalk it. When I got outside, I heard a very noisy squirrel overhead. Probably the intended prey of the swooping hawk. I sneaked up on the tree where the hawk was, keeping the trunk between me and it. On the right is the first picture showing its back side.





On the left is one showing the front side of it. This got it scared and it finally flew away, seen below. The closest I've ever been to a wild hawk.








Tuesday, December 11, 2007

Return to Geocoding



Above is my final project map with some red dots on it. Those are addresses I geocoded. It was back in the Spring semester when I did that last, but it came back to mind with just a little refresher. The problem is that the street data that I have is not the best quality, so when I go to geocode the addresses in my table, the address locator can't place all of them on the map. In fact, it was missing about 40% altogether, finding no place for them to go. Need better quality street data which will be hard to come by for some of the counties I want to include. Since I have little time left to wrap up this project, I think I will do a different classification based on zip codes for now, and return to geocoding and possible carrier route analysis next semester.