G I S M e m o r i e s

My Bicycle Collection

2010-07-21T21:13:00.009-04:00

There's my "main" bike, the one I ride the most. It's a Giant Acapulco. I bought it from a friend in about 1997 for $50. I'm just a recreational rider so it means a lot that I've put thousands of miles on that bike. It's a little too small for me I think, but I'm pretty comfortable on it for the distances I am likely to ride. Usually not more than a couple hours at a time.

I've got it pretty customized to my preferences. There's the dashboard to the right. That old Vetta trip computer has been on several of my bikes and was new in the early 90's. Hard to believe it has lasted that long. Combination bell and compass for directionality and warning pedestrians. Bright headlight. The suspension stem, a cheap find on ebay, is a great improvement in comfort. Completely takes the jarring out of your arms and is simpler, cheaper and lighter than a suspension fork. You can see where I repaired the right shifter with J-B Weld.

I also have the rack on the back and great bag to go on the rack. Cheap suspension seatpost does some to keep the jarring and vibration from traveling from frame to seat to butt. Sturdy lock (not like someone would really want to steal this bike.) Tire pump with built in gauge. It has 18 speeds with simple index shifting for the rear deraileur and friction shifter for the front one. It doesn't have a really low gear so I have to break my cadence on really steep hills. It's made out of steel and weighs 39 lbs with all that stuff on it. Taking off the lock and bag gets it down to 33 lbs.

Here's the next bike, the Schwinn High Sierra. Looking at this reference page it looks like the Bronze color was only available in 1986. I think I got this one day when the Goodwill was overstocked on bikes and made them all $5. It is in quite good condition for it's age.

It is really a little too big for me. I can straddle the bar on flat feet, but riding on a trail, you sometimes need a bit more space than that. It is a good thing I wasn't riding this bike on this trail ride. It has some really wide handlebars, and I guess the larger frame gives it a longer wheelbase. It really feels quite different to maneuver than my other bikes. It has some unique features that I suppose were very state of the art for their time. The roller-cam brakes seen below on the left and the biopace chainrings on the right for instance. The chainrings are not round, they are sort of elliptical but not exactly. They look round standing still, but when they are turning you can see the eccentricity of them. The idea behind them is that as you crank them around with your leg muscles, they provide different effective gear ratios for different segments of the stroke. I don't think that idea ever really took off for some reason. It seems like a really good and clever idea to me. I think it makes it easier to pedal both at high speeds and low gear hill climbing. This bike is also steel and weighs 32 lbs. It has 18 speeds and no index shifting at all. I don't like that.

Next on the list is the LL Bean Bike:

This one I got out of the trash. Really what I wanted from it was the rack that was on the back, which I have since removed. Then I noticed it was pretty light and made out of aluminum. A little more poking and research and I found it was made by Cannondale. Someone told me it was from the mid 90's. I had to replace the chain and all the cables, but now it rolls pretty good. Still needs some handgrips and then it's pretty much ready. It's only 15 speeds but the low gear is pretty low. No index shifting again. I actually tried to convert the rear deraileur to index shifter, but that apparently doesn't work unless all the components involved in shifting are set up to do that. My lightest bike at 28 lbs, but it doesn't even have a kickstand on it. Me, I like kickstand. This bike feels feels very quick and maneuverable to ride. Maybe it's the light rigid frame or the geometry?

The Trek Navigator is my newest bike:

It's kind of a cruiser/comfort type bike. It's got totally modern components on it like V-brakes and trigger shifter for the 7 speed rear deraileur. The front deraileur has a grip shifter. I actually got 2 of these from a Freecycler. They are almost exactly the same but the other one has some damage from some sort of traumatic incident with the chain going where it wasn't supposed to. This one has a quality suspension seatpost and a stem with adjustable angle so that you can sit very upright if you like. The frame is quite small though, and I can't get the seat high enough for even me to be ergonomic. It has *really* low gears. Check out the giant "megadrive" sprocket on the rear. It is so much larger than the next sprocket. Kinda hard to believe the chain will jump over onto that thing. But it does, and then you put it on the small front sprocket and it feels like you could ride up a tree with ease. This bike has 21 speeds and is 31 lbs of aluminum including no kickstand.

WZBC Radio from the late 1980s

2009-12-30T17:41:00.009-05:00

I have loved radio for a long time. I remember my Mom taking me to a local radio station when I was about 13 years old because I wanted to be a DJ. We just walked in and she said I wanted to find out about being on the radio and somebody there told me all about it. I lost interest in producing radio but have remained a discerning radio consumer.

There have been times that I have loved a radio program so much that I had to save it. In the mid to late 1980s I lived in Boston where there is a lot of interesting college radio. I found several programs on WZBC, the radio station from Boston College which I loved. I have 6 tapes from WZBC in 1987 and 1988, most are 90 minutes. They had a program called "No Commercial Potential" on in the evenings. It could be quite variable based on who was doing the show that night. Sometimes it would veer into really discordant experimental stuff that I couldn't take. Other times it was beautifully assembled sets of songs that I had never heard but was now in love with. I didn't remember this until I started digitizing these tapes but it turns out most of the NCP programs I taped were a show called The Widows Walk done by a DJ named Mike Cronin.

Also enjoying Mike's show a few towns over was Steven Howard. He was inspired to begin a career in radio around that time. Steven did an excellent radio show called Mental Notes on the Asheville low power FM station WPVM, which had a great list of music programs by talented local DJs. It actually reminded me of being in Boston and having access to all those independent and diverse college radio shows, but all on one station just different times and days. Unfortunately, the license-holder of WPVM destroyed what I loved about the station. Dark radio times ensued for a while but Steven and many of the other talented local DJs have created ashevillefm.org, an internet radio station. You can catch Steven's Mental Notes on Sunday Mornings from 9-12. Looks like they may even have previous shows archived now so you can listen to the last show at your convenience.

Below are links to WZBC in the 1980s. Each mp3 file is one side of one tape. They are about 30-45MB each. Click one of those links and you should be prompted to download the file to your computer where you can play it. Some of these 22 year old tapes have some sort of distortion in the form of random blip-blip sounds. Let me know if these links don't work.

Old Cameras

2009-08-09T12:40:00.004-04:00

I always look for interesting cameras at thrift stores. Occasionally I'll find one at a reasonable price that I can't pass up.

Most recently I found the Olympus 35RD in the foreground for $5 with the cute little Vivitar 50 flash on it. The flash appears to take some weird battery so I'll probably never use it. The camera is very clean and judging by the film compartment was used very little. It has a nice looking 40mm f/1.7 lens. That is very fast for a rangefinder camera like this. The Konica C35 in the background is f/2.8. The Olympus has adjustable aperture and shutter speeds and also seems to have a shutter priority automatic mode. Problem is, it has a serious shutter problem. Occasionally, it works correctly though I don't know if the timing is accurate. The rest of the time the shutter doesn't open or opens but doesn't close. I bought a new battery for it hoping that might help, but no. The meter also doesn't seem to work even with the good battery.

In the background is the Konica C35 that I think I got for $3 some time ago. It has automatic exposure and a clever thing for shooting with flash. In the old days of fixed output flashes, you had to adjust the aperture based on the distance to the subject. This camera has a setting that links the focus ring to the aperture setting. You set this based on the guide number of the flash you are using. It then changes the aperture to match the distance you are focused on. It even prevents you from focusing on things too close for the camera to expose properly when using more powerful flash units. Very clever. I have never seen this on a camera before. The problem with this camera is that it takes an obsolete 1.3 volt mercury battery that is no longer available. At least not easily available. I found several sources that said a 1.4 volt hearing aid battery will work. So I got some of those and it still didn't work. Oh well. I may at least take the bottom off and see if there is an issue with the battery contacts. They seem a little loose. I wish I knew more about camera repair so I could fix these.

Update: Oooooh, look at this!

Sunday Morning Rain Fall

2009-04-19T12:17:00.008-04:00

A soft gentle spring rain falling making everything so green this morning. Driving Nell home across the smoky park bridge and there are a lot of police cars in the right lane. Traffic slowing way too much and I always worry about being hit from behind when that happens. Cops are looking through a little white economy car with gloves on, passenger door open. That part of the bridge is high above the land and road below. I hope somebody didn't jump. I change the subject in my mind and in conversation.

On the way home my mind returns to what might have happened. I decide to take the scenic route home on the road below the bridge. I often do this when going in that direction for some reason. It's a more pleasant drive than the expressway, there is much more to see and the slower pace is relaxing. To the right is a nice photo of the railroad bridge you pass under on this route. The photo is by one of my talented Flickr friends Mogmismo (aka Michael Tracey). I wonder if I really want to go this way today but knew they would have the road closed if someone had jumped.

Straight ahead, two police cars block the road going under the bridge. Shaken. Now typing and looking out on the fresh green leaves of Spring and the blooming dogwoods. Raindrops fall from so high and make the leaves twitch and bounce. It's so beautiful. We've got to stick around for the beauty. I know for some there is no beauty and nothing to live for. It makes me sad.

I always play these things out... what might have happened. It was just a matter of random timing that we passed when we did. I'm glad I didn't see someone jump, though an image of that event is in my mind anyway. Passing sooner maybe we could have done something. I guess that is a kind of normal thought. Nell might actually have been able to help someone since she works in the psychiatric treatment field. Witnesses told police the woman who jumped didn't hesitate at all so I guess her mind was made up.

Tragedy seems bountiful lately. Friends and parents of friends coming to unfortunate ends and having serious medical problems. Even old buildings I like seem to just collapse under their own weight. It's wearing on me in this beautiful Springtime.

Weekend Mishaps

2009-04-05T15:13:00.005-04:00

I've taken a little bit ill, and that can make my brain not work so well. I noted that to myself, "self, be extra careful, your brain is not working top notch right now, you are susceptible to making mistakes." I only partly listened though.

It was a beautiful Saturday and I couldn't resist playing outside despite not feeling well. I worked on the luvwagen, fixing the parking brake even further than it was fixed before and played with the ignition timing a little bit. I poked around the yard. Neighbor elizabeth, a talented jewelry artist, gave me some tasty meatloaf that was a good lunch. A free-cycler had goat poo to give away, and I was interested in getting some of that good poo. That meant many opportunities for dangerous mistakes. Getting the little trailer ready to travel public roads, hooking it to the car, driving it on public roads, loading it, driving it back home when it is heavy, getting it into the driveway and then the yard near the garden. I'm sure there are other opportunities for disaster in there. Almost all of that went fine. The goat man was really nice and helped me load up the trailer. They have 85 goats in a dairy operation. The milk goes to cheese makers. I could have stayed there and learned about their goat operation all day, but didn't want to take up any more of his time. I made it all the way home safely. Decided not to put the trailer in the yard right then because I was tired.

I unhooked the trailer, now heavily laden with poo. Decided to air up the tires on the trailer since they were a little low. Right, I decide to do this *after* I drive the trailer full of poo across West Asheville. The little air compressor cord was not quite long enough so I went to roll the car back a foot or two. Foot on brake, release parking brake, rolling back... press brake to stop... nothing happens... bang! Foot not on brake. Foot on clutch. I wasn't really all the way in the car, just had my right foot in, so that's how I confused the pedals. It felt like quite a whack and I was worried about having messed up the car. Due to the wonders of the modern automobile with its plastic bumpers, just a scratch or two.

Nell and I had a quiet evening, both of us being sickly and watching NCAA basketball. Sunday was also a beautiful day and I again couldn't resist going out to play. I decided to put the trailer in the yard by the garden. I still had some of last year's manure in a small pile. It is so nicely decomposed and full of worms. I scooped it over in a pile. I found quite a few grubs in there, which is not a good thing in the garden. I chopped up a few, then started saving them. I put them on the sidewalk by the bird feeder. They were gone in about 10 minutes.

Next I set about hooking the trailer back up to the car and moving it to the yard. I angled a little off and the trailer went down a steep transitional area between the driveway and yard. The car bottomed out and was sitting on the cusp of that transition. Unhooked the trailer. Car no go, wheel spinny. I've been here before, or someplace like here. There was a famous incident when I got my parts van stuck in a tree. It actually was just on the grass in the yard, and it had bad tires and no traction. I kept inching forward to try to go backward and eventually ended up with the nose against a tree. In this situation I get another vehicle to use as an anchor and use a come-a-long to pull the stuck vehicle free. So I put the luvwagen in position and got my come-a-longs and chain collection. Due to the wonders of the modern automobile with its plastic bumpers, there is nothing to attach the chain to on the front of the car. There is a provision for this necessity though. You pop out a little cover on the bumper and there is a threaded hole into which you thread an eye. I got the special eye out of the trunk but couldn't get it to thread in. It has never been used before, so I thought the hole was all gunked up with undercoating and dead bugs. Did some cleaning and finally looked at the eye and saw that it had left hand threads. OK. That's odd. It's probably so people can't thread some cheap ass WalMart eye in there and get hurt. That conundrum solved I went to snatching the car out of its mire. The tension on the come-a-long seemed like quite a lot. I thought that I better be careful since I was sick and prone to mistakes. Checked and re-checked things frequently and thought about the modes of failure. I put blocks under the car wheels and moved them forward every few inches of pulling so that if something broke, the car would not lurch. I tried to stay out of the line of whippage that the cable might take, though that is hard to predict. I thought I had the car pretty far up onto the driveway so I decided to try driving it forward a bit. Nope, still spinny wheels. I wanted to re-extend the cable on the come-a-long, so I put the car in gear and set the parking brake. I loosened the cable and pulled it out and started pulling again. It got really tight and then the luvwagen started dragging its tires across the driveway at an angle. Oops, forgot the car was still in gear and parking brake on. That resolved, it pulled the rest of the way onto the driveway pretty easily.

All of that made me tired and so I came in to relax and write this instead of doing my taxes.

Righteous Epic Wave Ride

2008-11-27T12:29:00.000-05:00

What a perfect day for playing in the Pacific Ocean. It was unusually hot, about 90 degrees. With brilliant sunshine and almost complete absence of the usual chilly seabreeze. I don't remember the wind ever being that calm in the afternoon here. Brother Larry and I got in the water which I think was in the mid 60's of Fahrenheit temperature. Once in it, the water didn't feel cold at all.

I've always loved being in those big blue-green Pacific Ocean waves. Being lifted up off the sand by them as a swell passes by. Watching the distant horizon disappear and then return. In recent years the swirling salty ocean has always felt like it cleansed me of the sadness of seeing mom's decline, and let me just enjoy the time with her. As we began to wade out to the breaking waves, we were constantly being pushed toward Seattle by a strong current. So much that I wanted to get out on the shore and walk back to where we had parked our towels and stuff. Each time we would ride a wave in, we waded back out toward Mexico to counteract this drifting. Wading against this current and back out against the incoming waves was difficult. It reminded me of seeing Mom trying to complete simple movements like combing her hair or taking a few steps. The waves and powerful currents slowing her down and constantly buffeting her are a disease in her nervous system.

We rode the waves on boogie boards. It's like a little surfboard that you sort of lay on with your legs hanging off the back. You can raise up on your elbows for a different view, and you can steer by leaning left or right. That's about the extent of my expertise. I see boogie boarders who are far advanced and ride along the face of the wave like on a real surfboard. On this day I saw a couple of them manage to ride under the curl of the breaking wave and pop out on the face of the wave like you see surfers do in movies. I like to get as far out as I can where the waves are breaking but I can still touch the bottom. As a wave comes in and starts to fall over its own feet, the water in front of it rushes back and it gets suddenly much shallower. This is when I like to crouch down and then spring forward to ride on the white froth in front of the wave.

After a while, Larry decided to take a nap on the sand. I continued riding and increased my focus on the moment. I felt a part of that beautiful rhythmic ocean and waves and sun and air and the sounds of the water and feeling my legs push me through it and feeling it push my legs. I didn't have my glasses on, so the visual experience was impressionistic. The close-up view was sharp. There were these sparkly sand particles swirling in the water, glinting in the sunlight. They gave away the secret movements of the water. There was all manner of white foam on top of the water, appearing and disappearing and moving in lines and streaks and blobs. At one point I stood there looking down at a pattern of lines of foam moving toward me and out to sea. Faster and faster as the water moving past my feet accelerated and dug my feet into the sand. It was my whole field of view and the sensation of movement made me want to fall down.

Sometimes the wave ride takes me to the knee deep water and I just walk back out to catch another. On one of the rides I enjoy looking at the frothy breaking wave right next to me. The froth and I are cruising along at the same speed. It's a perspective I've never had before. I'm one with the boiling froth. I caught a series of long rides that went right up to the shore. The boogie board eventually grinds to a stop on the sand when the water is a few inches deep. I roll off in the sandy water and laugh. I'm smiling and laughing and happy in a childhood moment.

Solana Beach Sunset

2008-10-01T01:55:00.003-04:00

After the sunset with surfers at Solana Beach was Panang Curried Duck at Spice and Rice Thai Kitchen in La Jolla, one of my favorite restaurants in the world.

GIS Memories Nominated!

2008-09-22T22:11:00.004-04:00

Hey, turns out this here famous GIS Memories blog has been nominated to receive an honor at the Blog Asheville Extravablogiversapaloozathon! Wow. I am honored to be nominated in the category, "least likely to care about traffic" or something like that. It's true. I don't care about traffic. In fact, when I first read that, I thought it was talking about automobile traffic in Asheville. I actually don't care about that, but I think it refers to my not caring about the number of people who look at this blog.

I have noticed that the search engine "google" does seem to like my blog for some reason. I once wrote a post about an issue I was having with the GIS software from ESRI. When I went back to searching about the issue, my post was coming out above the entries from the ESRI company itself. Weird.

In response to this honorific nomination, I did a little digging in the stats about what search terms are popular among those landing at this blog from all search engines. Hey Shari, you're at the top of the list. Now you know why your photography is getting so much attention lately! (jk) The Cheerleaders are very popular, and many people are apparently looking to prune their overgrown rose bushes and use their electric chicken buckets. My statistics system is not that sophisticated since I really don't care about traffic. I'm not even sure what time period this covers.

Anyway, after you study the list below, check out all the other great nominated blogs here. If you believe I deserve to win this honor, you can go here and vote for me and the other deserving nominations. (Before Friday September 26, 2008.)

4.93% shari pastore
4.23% authalic sphere
3.52% gism blogspot
2.82% pruning an overgrown rose bush
2.82% geometric network
2.82% expense chart
2.11% how to prune an overgrown rose bush
2.11% gpsvisualizer or gps visualizer
2.11% vw vanagon water pump diagram
1.41% virginia creeper trail elevation profile
1.41% its such a pretty day cause i spent i with you
1.41% january
1.41% nc cheer photos
1.41% cheer photo post
1.41% diesel fuel chart
1.41% blogspot gism
1.41% wearever electric chicken bucket
1.41% stupid mommy asheville blog
1.41% diesel fuel charts
1.41% cheerleader photography
1.41% twin falls cheerleader photographs 2008
1.41% pete zah
1.41% gis class august
1.41% edward west asheville
1.41% the kat box asheville
0.70% prune overgrown rose bush
0.70% emories
0.70% french broad river goldsworthy
0.70% wear ever chicken bucket
0.70% picture of a child like cheerleader
0.70% pressure-fryer chicken bucket
0.70% wear-ever manuals
0.70% gis resumes
0.70% the puffs
0.70% young lovers painting
0.70% eratosthenes sphere
0.70% pressure fryer chicken bucket
0.70% g.i.s.m blogspot
0.70% resumes gis
0.70% g.i.s.m blog
0.70% greatest shot of a cheerleader
0.70% county
0.70% nc map project
0.70% cheerleading photo frames
0.70% cheerleader photo links
0.70% ever wear chicken bucket
0.70% cheerleader picture captures
0.70% great cheerleader photography
0.70% authalic
0.70% wearever chicken fryer manual archived
0.70% girls cheer photos
0.70% air conditioner update
0.70% contributions of eratosthenes
0.70% the arabic gism
0.70% gism concrete
0.70% really
0.70% wearever electric chicken bucket pdf
0.70% wassercooling
0.70% fuel expense
0.70% moon claycombe
0.70% wearever chicken bucket
0.70% hello kitty giss
0.70% sanitary sewer geometric network
0.70% car accident rt 1 kurt
0.70% g.i.s.m blogspot.com
0.70% birthday
0.70% sweetashvegas
0.70% fuel expense fuel expense
0.70% black cheer photography
0.70% overgrown rose bush pruning
0.70% wearever chicken bucket pdf
0.70% golfer kills hawk
0.70% twin falls state park campground
0.70% cartographing
0.70% west asheville
0.70% gism filings
0.70% august
0.70% december
0.70% diesel expense
0.70% electric chicken bucket
0.70% spinning tires a symptom
0.70% wearever pressure fryer
0.70% old arial veiws of colonial beach
0.70% class
0.70% twin falls state bike trail
0.70% colonial beach gis
0.70% puffs
0.70% blogger
0.70% rapid city gis job
0.70% gis class
0.70% kurt vanagan
0.70% tuesday
0.70% wearever electric chicken bucket manual
0.70% vanagon cooling chart
0.70% network
0.70% diesel atom chart

John A. Henderson

2008-09-22T21:20:00.002-04:00

Yesterday at church we had a memorial for one of our active members, John Henderson. I knew him mostly from church and his excellent presentations there. Here's his obituary with a summary of an impressive life of healing and helping. John wrote several interesting books which he discussed at our meetings.

At his memorial we read quotes from his books, and I kept this one which I especially liked, "We may not like the fact that random and accidental events determine our lives but that does not alter the reality of it. As we observe the unpredictability of life, we should realize that an intelligent, all-powerful, divine being does not control it."

You might gather correctly that our church is different from many others. John helped to make our group special and he will be missed.

River Rise

2008-08-28T21:37:00.002-04:00

Our local river was recently very low. I think it was the lowest in 112 years of record keeping. Check out the chart. It was down to about 200 cubic feet per second (cfs). The triangles show the average is a bit over 1000 cfs. It was so clear and low you could see all the rocks and fish and turtles and tires and shopping carts in the river. I developed a fantasy to walk across the river since it was so low. I waited too long though and the remnants of Hurricane Fay came through and brought a lot of rain. In about 36 hours, the flow went from less than 200 to over 8000 cfs. I should have walked when I had the chance.

Happy Birthday, Dad.

2008-08-18T21:50:00.001-04:00

Twin Falls State Park

2008-06-28T15:27:00.004-04:00

On the third day of my trip I woke up at Twin Falls State Park. The day before had been one of those exciting travel days when my eyes and head get so full of exciting things I have seen and done. This trip being during the long days of Summer, I had stretched the previous day very long and rolled into the Twin Falls campground in the drizzly dark. I saw no park personnel at the campground, and no campers. So I did the self register thing after finally figuring out which site of the many available I wanted. It was a little spooky being the only one there. I've been to this park before and it always seems under-utilized. It's kind of in the middle of nowhere in southern West Virginia, with miles of 2 lane roads isolating it from those who rarely leave the Interstate. I think it is very nice though.

The morning was a little cloudy and threatening rain. I decided to take a bike ride before enjoying the unpopulated shower facilities. The "Cliffside Trail" departed right from the campground, so it was my natural choice. I took my GPS with me and made the map below with the GPS Visualizer website. If you click it you can see it bigger. GPS Visualizer color coded my route based on the elevation.

The trail started out as fairly level riding on an old road. On the topo map it is labeled as "jeep road." Early on I saw a big flying thing which turned out to be a barn owl. It wanted nothing to do with me and flew off on big silent wings. The trail then started down steeply and I was thinking that I would not like the coming back up part. I almost fell down once. I was going down a steep section and tried to put my feet down and they just slid on the ground. So I crashed down on the crossbar and the pain was enough to make a shy bald Buddhist reflect and plan a mass murder. Actually it wasn't that bad because of my special padded bike shorts.

I reached the "cliffside" part of the trail and the scenery made the quick jump from rolling wooded terrain to much more vertical and dramatic as it seems prone to do in that part of WV. Above is an attempt at a panorama photo done with the tinycam. The weather remained changeable with occasional sun and light rain and low clouds skulking in the gorge as in the photo. The ride back was nice and followed by the hot shower. I packed up and left and still never saw any park employee or another camper.

Tenuous Arguments

2008-06-07T18:59:00.005-04:00

On my recent trip I learned that there are Virginians who are still mad about West Virginia's split from the state during the civil war. One of the arguments they make is that it was a violation of the US Constitution for a state to be created from the territory of another state. This seems ironic since Virginia had seceded from the United States at that time. I think that is also forbidden in the Constitution.

Hearing today about the trials now under way at Guantanamo Bay caused me to find similar irony. The media is sequestered away and listens to the trial over speakers that can be muted to prevent them from hearing classified information. One of the defendants was talking about the psychotropic drugs he was presently being given by doctors there. The speakers were turned off so that reporters couldn't hear what the drugs were. It was explained that it would be a HIPAA violation to reveal his health care information. The irony is that the trials are there at gitmo because the government says the US Constitution doesn't apply there. I guess HIPAA regulations reach farther than the Constitution? Now that I think about it, since the defendant was talking about himself, the question comes up: is it a HIPAA violation to reveal your own health care information?

So Much Pollen

2008-05-31T13:27:00.002-04:00

There's a B-17 visiting the area this weekend, giving people expensive rides. Flying the B-17 in battle in WWII is an example of extreme terrifying machine drama. It makes me shudder to imagine the adrenaline/excitement/fear of the guys who crewed those planes in war. There are some of these veterans left, and they come out to see the plane and relate stories like this: After one mission, Knight had to land his B-17 with a shot-up tire and one engine out. But he kept his 11-man crew safe. “The co-pilot and I, we really had to manhandle that thing to a stop with brute strength,” Knight said. “But those are tough planes. I’ve seen some that were nearly shot in two come in and land, and the belly would just be bouncing up and down, the ball turret and the gunner gone, of course.” This reminds me that Memorial day has just passed.

So I've had my ears tuned for the sound of huge flying piston engines. I spotted the plane a few times on my way to Arden this morning to pick up some free firewood, and noticed the sky was hazy and yellow. I was parked in the person's yard for about 20 minutes loading up the big old logs. When I said thanks and got back in the car, the windshield had a noticeable new film of pollen on it. On the way back I took the parkway, and the long range views were also now yellow and hazy like the view of the plane. Then I looked at the car ahead of me and saw that it was kicking up clouds of pollen as if we were driving on a dirt road. Amazing. I've never seen that before. That's a lot of pollen.

Summer Trip 2008

2008-05-28T20:30:00.004-04:00

Remember last year? I had plans to do a lot of interesting blog posts about my vacation, but only a few came to fruition. It's a new year and another interesting trip has filled my cameras with images and my head with ideas. So I'll try to whip up at least a few posts from all the information stirring around in my head.

This trip became my "Industrial Heritage" tour of southern West Virginia. It did include plenty of scenic splendor like you see above in the panoramic photo from Pinnacle Rock. The theme of the trip though, was about coal mining and the sudden, dramatic industrial development that resulted. Sounds like thesis material doesn't it? It is a rich history with so many compelling stories. Amazing wealth rapidly descended upon a very cash-poor area of the south. An influx of European immigrants and African Americans from the deep south mixed with the locals, and strangely, they mostly got along. There was lots of incredibly hard and dangerous work to do, and these people were up for that opportunity, American style. Their descendants inherited that spirit and applied it to life outside of mining.

The Industrial Heritage theme also put me in close proximity to a couple other genres I love. As I mentioned recently here, I have a strange attraction to old buildings and derelict structures. Let's just say that this is a very rich area for that type of scenery. I am also a fan of "machine drama," like trains, big cranes, bridges, dams, and basically all things that would appeal to a little boy. I also got to do some bike riding on rail-trails, my favorite type of bicycling.

The End

2008-05-26T21:08:00.003-04:00

It's the last meeting of the last GIS class for me. It's sad. I enjoyed the classes and learned quite a bit. Our instructor Pete Kennedy brought a lot to the material for me, by relating it to real world applications. I feel this is critical in technology instruction. Above is the group photo of us. I'm going to miss going to GIS class, it was fun.

Variety Pack

2008-05-14T19:51:00.003-04:00

photo by Shari Pastore

(I started this post weeks ago, and now it is finally ready to release.)

This week's GIS class was a variety pack. I remember on special occasions, maybe 3 or 4 times in my whole childhood, Mom would get the variety pack of cereals. All those cute little boxes of different types of cereal. (Do they even exist anymore?) It was special. Mom didn't go for that kind of extravagance very often. Her argument to me was that I wouldn't eat all the different types of cereals in the package, which was probably true. She probably also saw the lack of economy with all the extra packaging and higher cost. Mom grew up in The Depression.

That paragraph above brought back some memories of shopping trips with Mom to the grocery store in the small town we lived in when I was about 6-12 years old. It was Colonial Beach, Virginia. A town of about 2000 people on the Potomac River, near where it meets the Chesapeake Bay. It's a big river there, 3 or 4 miles across. It was a special place to live for those years of my life. Lots of cool things for a kid to do like swimming, fishing, boating, biking everywhere, and developing a powerful curiosity about the natural world and how things work. The grocery store we went to was the A&P. It seemed huge. Over the years, I've had dreams of being in a grocery store, and vaguely feeling like I was a kid in the dream. I always thought it was just a generic grocery store, but the variety pack memories got me thinking about that A&P and I realized that it has been that store in my dreams.

All the memories of the A&P got me wondering about the store and what became of it over the years. I remembered seeing at one point it had become a hardware store whose proprietor was one of my classmates from those childhood days. Some googling showed evidence that the whole little strip of a shopping center has been somewhat updated and is now for sale. I could find no decent photos of it on the net though. There's a talented photographer I know from flickr named Shari Pastore. I found her work on that site doing some searches for Colonial Beach photos some time ago. I asked her if she had any photos of the little shopping center and the old A&P building. No she didn't, but offered to take on a little assignment to go out and shoot some especially for this blog post! The subject matter is less than inspiring, but the photo she got, at the top of this post is pretty nice, I think. I mentioned remembering that cupola on top of the building, and asked if she would shoot anything that looked like traces of what the building used to be. If you click the photo and look at the larger version you can better enjoy its beauty. You can also see how the roof is all patched up and the end of the building is just bare plywood. Colonial Beach has always been like that. It probably has more than its share of old derelict businesses that did once thrive, but maybe it was a long time ago. Or new ones that were never really going to get off the ground and just folded and ended up sitting to slowly decline. I've always been attracted to that kind of stuff, and maybe that attraction comes from those formative years in Colonial Beach. Those sad old stores and houses and cars and boats and towns seem to have a lot to say to me. I just keep thinking about all the lives they have seen and the stories they might tell. This may be one reason I keep taking vacations in West Virginia. It also has a bounty of derelict structures, along with dramatic natural beauty and a tough, hard-working spirit that appeals to me.

(We now rejoin the original GIS class blog post from several weeks ago)

I did some work on a map that will be featured in an upcoming blog post about the kite powered message in bottle release project I recently completed. This involved assembling a map of the North Atlantic with some continents on it and drawing a 1000 mile long line at a particular angle.

I did some more work on my geodatabase. Pete says we should concentrate on the geodatabase part of it and less on making maps. That sounds good, since the last 2 courses have been more about making the maps. I worked on creating a geometric network out of the MSD data I got last week.

We got our tests back. I've been getting grades a little lower than I would like on the tests this semester.

I had a near disaster when I almost shut off the computer before copying my work back off of the hard drive. When you shut down the computer it erases all the changes you have made, so it is very important to copy your work to removable media so you don't lose all you have done. I was ready to hit the last key in the keyboard sequence that shuts it down, then remembered. Really close. That would have really sucked.

Neighborhood Disconnects

2008-05-04T07:38:00.004-04:00

It was Saturday afternoon and the perfect time for a nap. I had been hearing loud music from outdoors for a while, and trying to figure out where it was coming from. The nap idea quickly evaporated as the music continued to drift in my windows. So I decided to do some GIS class homework and find out where the music was coming from at the same time. I went by bicycle and found the music to be at the Rainbow Mountain Children's School which was having some sort of festival. To the right is an overview of my trip.

Once I determined the source of the music I decided to explore some disconnections in the neighborhood. Below is a detail map of the 2 "disconnected" features I wanted to explore. Dale Street comes to an abrupt end, though there is now some infill housing being built there. Nearby as the crow flies, but much farther by road, is the Fairfax Ave stub. I have noticed for years that it appears this was planned as a continuous road, and even had been cleared at one time. It's pretty obvious from the aerial photo data.

The other feature I have wondered about is a huge culvert that emerges from under I-240 and empties into the French Broad River. It must be about 48 inches in diameter. On Virginia Avenue there is a neihborhood low spot that is backed up against a very large fill that appears to have been created when I-240 was constructed. It seems to me that this drains an area of a couple square miles. (further anaylsis required) I thought that the other end of the giant culvert by the river might be here. But judging by the GPS data that I captured, it is more likely that the other end is near the Fairfax Avenue stub. This is the same type of area as on Virginia Ave. A large drainage comes to a low point that is cut off from draining to the river by I-240.

I also visited the ruins of the hydroelectric plant on Hominy Creek which once powered Asheville's electric street cars. It was an interesting afternoon of data collection, and even more interesting analysing the data afterwards.

GPS and Making Out

2008-04-22T21:34:00.005-04:00

Tonight we started learning about GPS, which was very interesting. Pete took us out on a field trip around the campus so we could learn about collecting data with the handheld recreation grade GPS units. Then we came inside and downloaded the data from the GPSs and manipulated it a couple different ways. First, there's this:
That's a screen shot from Google Earth, into which we imported our data. You can see our route and several waypoints we created along the way. One waypoint I created is called Make Out, where 2 students were kissing hard in the student lounge. At the top of this image you can see part of Asheville High School. I have found that girls from Asheville High are some of the very best kissers.

Next we used something called GPS Utility to download the data from the GPS and work with it. This program is much more flexible. We created a shapefile and pulled it into ArcMap. We had some higher resolution aerial photo data, so you could get a better idea of the acuracy of the unit. Below is a detail from the map I created in ArcMap.

Geometric Network Errors

2008-04-15T20:58:00.003-04:00

I was working on my Geometric Network tonight. It was interesting and shows a lot of potential, but I didn't get too far. I was applying attributes to points on the network, sinks and sources, and establishing direction of flow. I had problems when I got to doing more complex areas, such as the branching sewer lines where there would be multiple sources.

I also explored the errors which were occurred when I created the Geometric Network. Below is the map with the error points noted.

Hello Kitty powered Message in a Bottle

2008-04-13T17:31:00.008-04:00

All photos will enlarge if you click them.

This was an interesting experiment to send a message in a bottle out into the ocean, pulled by a kite. The kite cost $1, and featured a bold Hello Kitty design. It also came with 75 feet of cotton string. The Hello Kitty kite flew pretty well on the beach but tended to veer down to the sand in strong winds.

Monday March 24th 2008 dawned stormy on the coast of South Carolina. There was finally an offshore wind. Typically the winds are out of the south or southeast, which would push Hello Kitty back toward land or to the north and onto the North Carolina coast. Above you can see Hello Kitty fully deployed on her 75 feet of string.

To the right is Nell with the HKpMiB ready to deploy. The note was written on paper with an ink pen. Some sand was added to the bottle to give it some weight.

After deployment, the message system sailed out into the Atlantic Ocean on a 160 degree heading. (Photo at left) The estimated amount of sand appeared to be just about perfect so that the bottle dragged along the surface of the ocean. This kept tension on Hello Kitty's string so she could continue flying, but also allowed it to pop out of the water and release excess tension when a stronger gust was encountered.

We watched HK through binoculars until it was no longer visible.

Below is the map of the Atlantic Ocean showing the trajectory of the HKpMiB if it continued in the direction it left the coast. The line represents 1000 miles of distance and lands smack dab in the middle of the Dominican Republic on the island of Hispaniola. The path also takes HK very close to several of the Bahamas. I created the map using a projection which preserves direction, so the shapes may look distorted. If HK alighted in the ocean, the message system may have ended up in the Gulf Stream and headed toward the UK. So far, there has been no response to the message in the bottle.

Map of Proximate West Asheville Vanagons

2008-04-11T22:56:00.002-04:00

View Larger Map

Do not eat pizza during a test.

2008-04-01T20:06:00.006-04:00

It was very nice of Pete to get us some pizza tonight. After the pizza was on the way we started working on the 2nd test of the Semester. Then the pizza arrived, and I had to eat a piece because it was hot. This was not a good idea. First it was drippy, and I couldn't write on the test and hold the pizza at the same time. So I looked over the whole test whilst eating on the pizza slice. Soon I reversed hands so that I could write and nibble at the same time. My handwriting was still affected though, and it is not so good to begin with. Then I think the pizza carbs began to surge into my brain, and make it dull and foggy. I wallowed my way through the test, and hope I did better than last time. I was better prepared for sure.

Pete was surprised that he didn't already know that the first word I could read was Schlitz. He thought he would have learned that from my blog. My Dad used to take the 5 year old me to the tavern on Saturday afternoon, where I would read Schlitz on the coasters. There's a photo of an old Schlitz coaster, but it is not exactly like the one I remember from Dressel's Schiller lounge in Elmhurst, IL circa 1969.

Below is the latest version of my county map of many colors. I now have some perky sewer data thanks to Pete's significant efforts to get that from MSD. That's the purple lines. I also refined my census data so that it calculates population density based on how many people are in a given census block of a given size. That was pretty easy to do that powerful manipulation.

This week Jill returned from her jaunt to Tuscany over Spring Break. She said it was her first vacation in 5 years, so I guess in that case it should be a deusy!

I wear a County of Many Colors

2008-03-18T20:29:00.004-04:00

Tonight I worked on my Geodatabase. I found some data for water and sewer pipes from the NC One Map project. www.NCOneMap.com I clipped them down to just Buncombe county. Pete is going to continue trying to get some better sewer data from MSD for me. I also got census data from NC One Map. It is quite detailed. I was working with symbolizing it based on total population for each block. I think I will further refine that by also using the area of each block to get a better idea of the population density. Above is one version of the map which I used the very bright color ramp on. That's how I got the county of many colors, which reminds me of The Blue Nile albumn called A Walk Across the Rooftops.

NB: Don't start your feature class names with zeros. Probably not starting them with any numbers is a good idea. ARC not like that, don't do what ARC not like, OK?

Diesel Fuel Expense Chart

2008-03-17T22:19:00.002-04:00

My typical driving driving routines have not significantly changed over this period of time. The spikes are times I went on trips. This represents about 105,000 miles of driving.

GeoCoding Again

2008-03-11T20:29:00.004-04:00

Tonight we got globalized again. This time it was much less intense as we just briefly visited the blog of Pam Silvers who is Pete's boss and my friend and IT mentor. She is in India on another sort of exchange program like the one that sent Pete to Mexico a few weeks ago.

Next we learned about Geocoding and watched Pete demo the process. It's a way to turn text data into a location on the map. It is a powerful technique. Usually it takes an address and converts it into latitude and longitude and sticks it int he right place on the map. It is the way that you can put your address in an internet map site and have it find where your house actually is. We did this exercise:
We created an address locator for the whole state of SC and then used it to digest a big list of student addresses from a college in the Upstate. You can see most of them are clustered up there around Greenville. Sometimes parts of the data is not accurate and it can't figure out where to put an address. Then you can painstakingly fix the problems. Fortunately, we didn't have to do that for this exercise. That looks quite tedious.

Since I was all in the SC Street Centerlines file, I zoomed in on the sea shore area where I will visit with my sweetheart on spring break. I'm excited about that.

Golfer Kills Hawk

2008-03-09T14:33:00.002-04:00

A professional golfer named Tripp Isenhour killed a hawk a few months ago, and it has hit the news this week. Read an article here. Or another one here.

He apparently was upset with the bird for making noise while he was trying to make an instructional video. He said, "It was unfortunate, but there'll be plenty of time for me to tell my story," and that it was foolish for people to believe he could have realistically hit the bird. "That's obviously people who don't know very much about golf," he said. "To say it's a one-in-a-million shot for an accident like that to happen, you know, and when it did happen, I was very remorseful, very upset that it happened." Another quote has him again referring to what happened as an accident.

An Accident? I could see this as an accident if he had hit the bird in the course of playing golf. Witnesses said he drove a golf cart toward the bird in order to hit golf balls at it from a closer location. "He was just going strangely out of the way to go after it," said Jethro Senger, a sound engineer at the shoot. "And it was almost, the whole thing was basically like a joke to him. The balls were getting closer and closer. 'Haha, look how close that one came.' 'That one was even closer.' "I yelled at him," Senger said. "I said, 'What did you expect was going to happen?," Senger said. "I said, 'You're a pro golfer, you're hitting line drives right at it.'"

He said he was only trying to scare the bird, so I guess he was trying to have the golf balls go really close to the bird to scare it away and the accident is that he actually hit the bird. I know intent is an important concept in the American legal system, so maybe he got some legal advice to comment only in ways that he never admits that he intended to hit or kill the hawk.

2nd Geodatabase Project

2008-03-04T21:33:00.006-05:00

Pete returned from his school related trip to Mexico this week. Very interesting stories about the sister city to Asheville, and a sister school to ABTech. There is the potential that there will be a GIS collaboration with the school and/or local agricultural agencies. He visited the Mayan ruin called Chichen Itza. I remember from taking the class called "Architecture, Design and Society" years ago tales of the long, tall, wide stairs that lead up the pyramid of Chichen Itza being covered with the coagulated blood of human sacrifices to the extent that they looked like a smooth slope rather than stairs.

Then I got to work on my 2nd Geodatabase project. Check this out:

That's just the county map with some zoning data on it.

Pete also turned us on to maps.live.com, a microsoft mapping product like google maps. They have a feature called "Bird's eye view" which is aerial photography, but not looking straight down. Instead, it is at an angle, so it gives a much better 3 dimensional view of buildings, trees, vanagons, etc. The data for Asheville was just recenlty added. Below is my house, with it's fancy new roof and the Golden Luvwagen in the driveway.

First Test of Spring Semester

2008-02-12T21:39:00.000-05:00

We had a test tonight and it was not too bad. I think it was not as long as previous tests, so it didn't seem as bad. It was still kind of hard, and I got some things wrong. I think I did well on the hands on part of the test because I had just done something very similar for practice last week.

Over there on the right is something from the exercise I was working on tonight, which was really in the nitty gritty of creating a geodatabase. It's all about subtypes and domains and default values and constraints on the data that is entered. It was kind of tedious but informative.

Blogger, blogger. I...

2008-02-12T07:52:00.001-05:00

Blogger, blogger. I am calling Blogger. Nuts, how many nuts are good to eat? People are going too bad. Too many nuts, people are bad can cause a stomach ache. I am sending this post to the blog from Jott by talking into my cellphone.

Powered by Jott

Super-Phat Tuesday

2008-02-05T21:25:00.000-05:00

It is totally Super-Phat Tuesday, and I'm back in GIS class after 2 long weeks of absence. I missed out on an attempt to do some sort of long distance participation from my vacation in California one week due to the fact that I forgot what day of the week it was. I guess that could be expected on vacation.

Next week we have our first test and I have some serious catching up to do after missing 50% of the classes so far. I also did the project from one of the classes I missed tonight instead of the current project so that I would be ready for the lab part of the test next week. So there is the result, above. We took a CAD file that had drawings of a lot of features around campus and georeferenced it to a map file of the buildings on campus. In my version I made Pink Roads, Red Sidewalks, and Yellow Buildings with tight black borders on them. The buildings look tight, which is good on a Mardi Gras Super-Phat Tuesday.

Air Pressure Changes

2008-01-27T14:35:00.000-05:00

Above is the chart of air pressure changes I encountered yesterday in travelling by air and car and recorded by my watch. It takes a reading every 15 minutes. Click the chart if you want to study it in greater detail.

GIS Class Resumes

2008-01-15T20:59:00.000-05:00

This time it's GIS 215: Data Models. Wow.

Class started out with a discussion of some interesting things we are going to study this semester. Lots of stuff about the databasular workings behind the GIS data we work with. Later, we will do some GPS work which I am very much looking forward to. We will train on an expensive professional grade GPS unit the college has.

Then we had a lecture on databases in general and dove into some work on a step-by-step tutorial on using Access 2007. This was tedious and not too valuable to me. It did get me a little deeper into Access 2007 than I have been, and would have definitely been valuable for anyone in the class who had never used Access.

Above is a little screen capture from the exercise. All those fussy little data fields and labels and property sheets.

There are 7 people in the class, including Josh and Ben from last time. I miss Mary. Where is Mary?

Hawk at Work

2007-12-27T20:18:00.000-05:00

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.

Return to Geocoding

2007-12-11T22:37:00.000-05:00

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.

Where is Everybody?

2007-11-28T21:34:00.000-05:00

Last week I came to class, but there was no class. I was confused because the community college where I work had class, but the community college where I study did not. It was so freeing to arrive here and find all the parking lots empty and buildings dark. I went home and was all geared up for an arduous class, and thought I would use all that energy to get all this stuff done at home instead. Then I sat down and my momentum spun down and I went to bed at 9:30, which was nice also.

This week we got our test back, which I though was so hard when I took it, but I got a good grade on it. Maybe I just didn't feel confident but actually knew the material. Pete did some interesting lecture on the use of type on maps. Now we are working on our final projects, which we only have 2 more classes to get them done. I'm doing an enrollment mapping project for my work that I'm pretty interested in. I'm already hitting trouble though, as the carrier route data is not available online from USPS like I thought it would be. I'm not too worried about that; I think I can find another source through our bitchin' PIO. I'm also now clipping some street data that is taking forever... Oh, it looks like it might be done now, after 40 minutes and 12 seconds! Glad I got that done tonight, so I can start fresh next week.

Pete kills us with test #2

2007-11-14T21:16:00.000-05:00

Pete, what are you trying to do to us with that test? I hope there is a lot of partial credit on those answers.

Fortunately, we got to do Pete's evaluation *after* the killer test. {evil laughter}

Below is an image from the project we worked on in class after the test. It was the old fashioned hands on stuff we did last semester. It was kind of fun, and that lab work is a pretty informative way to learn.

The map above is from Africa and has the digital elevation model and hillshade combo that is so popular with the kids these days. Below is the whole poster thing that all this work contributed to. It is sized 44 inches wide, so it is severely shrunk in this image. Everything about Africa makes me think about the movie War/Dance which I saw last weekend at the Asheville Film Festival. I bought tickets for the winning documentary and student films not knowing what they would be. I wouldn't have picked War/Dance to go see based on it's description, but I'm so glad I did see it. It was a very well made doc about such a moving story. I see now it's about to make its theatrical debut and also won best doc at Sundance.

NC Map Project, Part 4

2007-11-05T22:20:00.001-05:00

Above is the map as it is shaping up into an actual map document. Still a ways to go, but it is exciting to start visualizing what it will look like being on a page 40 inches wide. They have a big, sexy new plotter there at ABTech. Printing that large you really can get quite a bit of detail onto the page and still have it simple and meaningful. I want to have something to print out for GIS Day, which is this Friday, November 9th 2007, there at ABTech in Asheville, NC.

NC Map Project, Part 3

2007-10-24T21:50:00.000-04:00

Remember to save things to the flash drive earlier before the end of class comes. I'm still struggling with the issue of managing all these large files. I was working away and then it was 10 minutes before the end of class. So I went to save my files from the hard drive to my flash drive. and it says it's going to take 35 minutes, then 17 minutes, then 194 minutes. Pete wants to leave on time, and Haven is there, and she wants to leave too, because of the mouse situation at their house. She's all consumed with the mice as far as I can tell. As the minutes tick down, it's clear that I'm not going to get my files copied to the flash drive any time soon. Pete intervenes and puts my files on his portable hard drive. Why is the actual hard drive faster than the flash drive with no moving parts? Seems like the archaic whirling metal disk hard drive would be slower than completely motionless memory. I guess flash memory is just not that fast.

Below is the image I was working with tonight. The elevation data is in raster format. It's really quite beautiful. Raster data is something I'm pretty familiar with from working with digital photos. Where each pixel in a photo has qualities, like it's color and brightness, each cell in the elevation data has a quality. That quality is it's elevation. In the case of the image below, the elevation data for each cell is just converted to a shade of gray, with the highest being white. You can display it in many different colors, and process the data to simulate 3 dimensional views and stuff.

WNC Map Project Expands

2007-10-17T19:10:00.000-04:00

Tonight class started out with some recovery work. I had a pretty bad data disaster on my fancy new (cheap) 4 GB flash drive. I think it happened when I was working in ArcMap with some of that stupid giant 5 foot contour data, and things got all frozen up and it went shizzly bad. After that the flash drive was never the same. If I worked it too hard it just disappeared from the computer, like, *blink*, your drive could not be found. I ended up using a data recovery tool on it and I think I got most of the data back, but it was all over the place in folders with names like [29FF] instead of more meaningful names like "GIS Final Project". I ended up reformatting the flash drive, and it now seems to be working better.

I pretty much gave up on the data I recovered and decided to start anew on my project. I also decided to avoid the stupid giant contour data that has vexed me for several weeks. Pete sort of opened up what the project could include, so I also opened up my map to cover the whole state. It will still generally be a General Reference Map showing mostly major roads and municipalities and elevation data. I did figure out some cool stuff tonight. First I wanted to automatically label the roads based on data that is in the file. I decided to only show Interstates and US Highways so that the map would not be too busy. So I had to exclude all the other roads. Then I figured out how to automatically label the roads with the different little shields for Interstates and US Highways, and to put the appropriate route number in each little shield. After that I started working on doing something similar with Municipality Names. I want to not show the tiny town names, and show the larger ones with increasing font sizes based on their population. I'm well on my way to making that happen. Pete said he had never done that. I was surprised at that since he is uber GIS guru. Uber guru, that's fun to say. Please see above my map in its current state of development.

Cartographic Frustrations

2007-10-10T19:51:00.000-04:00

We're continuing our WNC map project tonight. More computer frustrations dealing with huge data and... don't put any spaces in your file name or path! I just ran into that problem which we learned really early in the first class. My super 4GB flash drive acting weird too. Suddenly disappearing when I try to make it work hard, like saving a big file to it. These computer frustrations are really affecting my project. I haven't made much progress at all during the last 2 classes. I wish they would stop.

While waiting for the computer to work properly (or not) I have put some thought into what I want my map to be like. I think I will basically do a general reference map, with primary roads and towns and so on. I'd like to use the fancy elevation data to show the contours of the mountains, and maybe add some population data so that the viewer can see some relationship between Elevation and Population Density.

In shocking news, Mary was apparently injured in a fall from a ladder and required surgery! Mary, get well soon! That really sucks.

In the memories news this week, I had a dream. In this dream I was talking to a gearhead friend about the axles on the front wheel drive VWs. About how the one on the drivers side was shorter and solid steel and the one on the passenger's side was longer and tubular. They did that cleverly so that they would be the same weight. That much is true. In the dream, I went on to say that in the newer cars, they redesigned the transaxle so that the drive flanges were exactly centered under the car. This meant that the axles could be exactly the same length and weight. I'm pretty sure that is not true at all. I even had a name for what they were trying to achieve by making that change, something like thrust-centralysis. I explained that term in the dream to refer to the absolute lack of pulling to one side or the other under all driving conditions. Interesting how my brain engineers things when it is idle. Maybe I should have been an engineer like my Dad.

Cheerleader Photo

2007-10-08T21:46:00.000-04:00

Here's a great photo from Jason (aka SweetAshvegas), taken for the latest installment of "A Day in the Life of Asheville" photo project. I participated in the one in April of this year, but sat this round out. I think Jason is a great photographer of the photojournalist ilk. In my youth I worked at a newspaper with some great photographers, and learned the power of the photo that captures something about a person or relationship. That was also the time when I was a teenager, and shot football games on Friday nights and umm, "admired" the cheerleaders.

So here's what I love about this photo. There is this pair of girls hugging and smiling huge for the camera, front and almost center in the frame. When I first saw the photo in smaller form I almost thought it was a mother/daughter pair. The girl on the right looks so young and girlish and the one on the left so much more mature. It feels to me like it's about the transition we go through in the high school years from child to adult. Right away I was grabbed by everything else that is going on in the frame. There are these 7 other girls clearly visible in the picture, and they all seem to be in compelling individual portraits at once. None of them seem to be relating to each other, which is such a contrast to the pair in the front. They all seem to have their own space in the photo, even though some are in front of or behind another girl. Most are looking or moving in different directions. All the girls seem to be white and about the same size (skinny) and have the same color and length of hair. And this similarity contrasts again with how they all seem to be in their own "worlds" in the photo. Finally, they are almost floating on this inky black surface that pops their white shoes out like light bulbs. If not for the white lines on the track, which further keeps my eye on the move, they might have actually floated out of the frame.

Great shot Jason. It's always exciting to see what you've been shooting.

It's Jaime's Birthday

2007-10-06T14:52:00.000-04:00

Today is Jaime's Birthday, a very important birthday.
If she lived in Australia, I'm sure it'd rival Perth Day.

She's not very old, she was born when Todd got married.
I hope she has a chill out day, and doesn't get too harried.

She works hard all day, kickin' ass at the helpdesk.
She sometimes likes to get on stage and dance a little burlesque.

She can't help she is a milktard, she just can't eat no dairy.
When I have a java chiller, I can dance 'round like a fairy.

Her work area's tidy due to her organizational ability.
She not really getting old, so has no trouble with senility.

Sometimes people see her name and think she's a male Latino.
Sam once had amazing gas and now we feed him beeno.

Each month we see her new calendars, her favorite one has Shih Tzus.
She's not so good at sewing things so the pants she makes won't fit yous.

Pepe is her long lost dog, he was the cutest little Pug.
Some said he was half Doberman and other half was bug.

Now she has a new best friend, his name is Willoughby Bobbin.
When Ken throws up at exercise, the sound is Blaaa, Blaaa-bin-bin-bin.

She gets breakfast from the Best Burger King in the world, lately it's a chicken biscuit.
When people call with techy problems, she always helps them fix it.

Her luck with men is not so good, some even say deplorable.
When her curls are fresh installed, they do look real adorable.

One guy she met had a cartoon where he set himself on fire.
Her super Mini needs no spare 'cause it comes with run-flat tire.

One ex boyfriend got in trouble for saying she was pretty when she was really sick.
He sounds sweet to me, but I guess she thought he was a prick.

Now I end this special birthday poem, 'cause I can't rhyme no more.
I hope this will be her best year yet, and just the first of many more.

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Cartographing

2007-10-03T20:35:00.000-04:00

We're starting on a new project that will span several weeks. We will each make a map of Western NC. There is certain data that we have to include and other data that we can adapt to our own preferences. I think it will be interesting to see what each of us comes up with.

I have done a you tube. I've done 2 actually. Dude, I totally you tubed. I did it with 2 different pretty young women. Not at the same time. (Remember this reference to most of my friends being pretty young women?) I diverge into the talk of you tubing because it is taking so long to copy files around. Files that I need to make my map. It's currently saying it's going to take another 4.5 hours to copy a few MB from the desktop to my flash drive. Stupid computer.

I'm working with some cool LIDAR data here. It's the digital elevation model for WNC, which is quite high resolution. It is basically contour data, like you would see on a topo map. Where most topo maps cover a fairly small area, being large scale maps, this covers many counties. It also shows a line for every 5 feet of elevation change where most topo maps are at 20 foot intervals. So we're talking about a lot of data. That's why we're running into trouble dealing with it. The digital elevation model files are about 1.5 GB.

Below is my map so far. It's not much to speak of. It shows the whole state and the national forests located in it are shown in a sexy hot pink. It's a darker hot pink, which is what makes it more sexy. I did collect data from various sources tonight and learned about dealing with massive data files.Mary is back tonight, and feeling better, and took the test the rest of us took last week. Maybe we'll get our scores next week. Pete was demonstrating something on the whiteboard and drew a crude outline of NC. He said that it was not an airplane, and Josh said he thought it was "The Iraq." This gave me a good laugh, which was good. See also the iRack from Apple.

Map Projections

2007-09-26T21:37:00.001-04:00

Tonight we had out first test, talked about Mary, who wasn't in class, and learned about Map Projections. Actually, we didn't talk about Mary who was out sick and I hope she feels better so she can come back and take the test. The test seemed like a fair assessment of our progress through the first four chapters.

To prepare for the test, I spent a lot more time in the textbook, and am really beginning to appreciate it. I love good technical writing, and this book is pretty good. The older Bentley repair manuals for various VWs I've owned over the years were great reading. They had these really well written paragraphs describing the functioning of the fuel injection system or something else complex, which made it understandable. Nowadays there is so much complexity in the cars, which requires so much volume of information that they don't have space for such frivolity.

The Map Projections are pretty interesting. No matter what mathematical method you use to translate a sort of sherical shape (the Earth) onto a flat surface (a map), you are going to have some sort of distortion. The most disturbing distortion to me is distortion of shape. The most common projection we have seen since we were kids is the Mercator projection. It is really handy for sailing ships on the ocean because you can draw a straight line from your location to your destination and just sail on that compass heading. The Mercator really isn't so good for showing accurate relationships of the size of features at various latitudes though. It shows Alaska about the same size as Brazil, which is actually 5 times larger. Being a very visual thinker, I am now in crisis because the pictures I have in my head of the world may be all wrong. ALL WRONG! OMG.

Eratosthenes and the Authalic Sphere

2007-09-12T21:20:00.000-04:00

Tonight was some interesting material, and some of it was pretty dense. I'm going to need to spend some more time with our book. We're getting into the section of the book called "Earth-Map Relations" which I think is getting to the heart of what I like about maps. I'm thinking the core concept of representation might be what I'm attracted to. The Map represents a place on the Earth and as I said last week, it can help us understand and analyze complex data. I like things that represent other things in general, like Art in the broadest sense. Maybe it's things that not only (or necessarily) represent other things, but reveal something about them. Again, it's about the analysis. Strange then that most of my favorite Art is non-representational, or just about itself. Especially attractive to me about the maps is that they represent a place. For a long time I've had the experience of looking a road maps and having the locations or roads on the maps bring up memories of those roads or places. I also have gotten into looking at topo maps and trying to visualize what the area would look like if I was there.

We also did some interesting data importing tonight. We were looking at cellular phone radio transceiver tower information which we downloaded from the FCC. It was in a big 'ol data file that covered the whole country and was just in a delimited format. We imported it into excel and massaged it, which is also something I like to do. (I remember managing a mailing list for a non-profit entirely in WordPerfect 5.1. It was about 1500 people, and could pull out and print appropriate mailing labels based on criteria, on the tractor-feed dot-matrix printer.) Anyway, we had to eliminate the non-NC entries and then convert the Latitude and Longitude from Degrees, Minutes, Seconds notation to Decimal Degrees. That was kinda fun to automate the process, and doing it helped us learn how the two notations interact. Above is that map of NC with 818 cell towers, and we think that's not really all of them.

Back to Earth-Map Relations. I like the way that sounds. It partly reminds me of the Monica Lewinsky era, and I like the idea of the Relations among the Earth and its Maps. I better pull this political angle together with the title of this post now. I've been hearing for years that there are terrorists who "hate our freedoms." Like I also heard for such a long time way too many details about the Clinton-Lewinsky "relations." Tonight we learned about Eratosthenes, who in 250 BC came up with a way to estimate the size of the earth using a well and a post a few miles away. He got within about 4% of what we later calculated the circumference of the earth to be.
I think that was quite an accomplishment of conceptualizing and calculation. It makes me think of how the Arabic contributions to science and math are often overlooked in our Eurocentric
educations. Could that have led us to think they hate our freedoms?

Pete is not a Narc.

2007-09-05T20:15:00.000-04:00

Tonight I had a thought breakthrough involving the word "analysis." I have had trouble explaining what GIS is about to people. I tell them that GIS is about making maps and combining that process with computer databases. Tonight I thought that analysis is the word I need to add to my description of what GIS is about. The power of GIS is making maps that help us analyse complex information.

Our first exercise tonight was about a water contamination scenario. The "map" I made is to the right. I'm using that term loosely because it is pretty far from what most people would call a typical map. The pink and red areas represent contamination of an underground aquifer, with the darker red indicating higher levels of contamination. The blue lines are water wells. The top of the blue lines are the surface of the earth, you can see some are deeper than others, and reach into the contamination area. The sort of beige shapes laying flat on the top of the land surface are different facilities in the area. The brown shapes that extend upward are graphic representations of facilities that are at high risk. The risk is based on if wells for the facility extend into contaminated areas. The darker color shows greater risk for facilities whose wells reaches into an area of higher contamination.

We have an interesting group in class this time. Josh is providing interesting information about Forests and chemical compositions. Some types of food that taste good can penetrate all the way into the nucleus of our cells and mess with out DNA. Yikes! Mary and I continued to eat this good-tasting but dangerous food and shiver in the overly air conditioned classroom. Mary brought us a sweater this week, but insisted on wearing it the whole class period while my fingers became so cold I could barely drape my 2D data layers onto 3D models.

It's true about Pete not being a narc. Apparently some of the Asheville sk8 culture had this impression of him. I can confirm that he is far too busy with GIS work, and blogs, and finding new features on google, to do any policing.

I will pick up batteries

2007-08-31T07:35:00.001-04:00

I will pick up batteries this morning & be In About 830.

Class Number 2

2007-08-29T21:30:00.000-04:00

Did a lot of wheel spinning tonight trying to see if I could find GIS data for the area of the Virginia Creeper Trail, which I will visit this coming weekend. I had limited success, and eventually abandoned the idea of doing a map related to the trail. I found some more landslide data in Buncombe county to work with. And am now working on that. But it's time to go home.

Lecture from our book, first published in 1953 and latest edition in 1995, was interesting. I think it is a good book. It has a little bit of a retro feel to it. The design and layout looks like 1970's. Pete says it is more of an overview of Cartographic concepts and technique. That seems like a good idea at this point in our GIS education.

Watch this space for an update...

Friday Night Bike Ride

2007-08-24T21:51:00.000-04:00

The last 2 weeks at work have been very stressful. Very likely the worst ever. There was a management override of sensible priorities for preparing for the new semester. Yeah, it was bad. But we did the best we could, and continue to do so, and are making steady progress. Just a bunch of long frustrating days.

So I couldn't work my regular bike rides/exercise routine into the week. Finally it's Friday and traffic was ultra smooth on I-26 so I got home earlier than I'm used to. Nap time! Nice nap, but a little on the long side, so I groggied myself up and out for the bike ride. Pretty normal ride, but then I stopped to get a rock out of my sandal and noticed the gate was open to the old EDACO junkyard down by the river. It's all empty in there, as it is slated to become more parkland. I rode around inside the fence that I've seen for many years and never been inside of. It's a large space covered in cement that was dumped there by cement trucks with leftover loads to get rid of. The junkyard had an agreement with the cement company to accept the extra cement so that their ground was nice and covered and the cement company got rid of the excess. Apparently it is 15 feet thick in spots!

The other excitement was at the dog park, where I often stop to watch the dog antics. I stopped along the fence and noticed that someone had a Mountain Express newspaper and a library book lying there at the edge of the dog zone. I watched some dog action and then decided to get going because it was already getting dark. I got out my flashing light which I clip to my butt when I ride in the dark. As I was doing that a woman walked over, inside the fence and said, "hey, what's going on? You want to look at my Mountain Express?" I said, "no I just like to stop here and watch the dogs on my ride." What followed was about 10 minutes of very interesting conversation. It started with her pointing at what I thought were some trees along the river and saying, "you want to see something really cool?" Well, yes I did. "Look, if you look at this just right it's a perfectly formed baby frog." I'm looking at the trees for some form that looked like anything other than a tree. "NO! RIGHT HERE, ON THE FENCE!" Oh, OK, I see a tiny spider that appears to be dead hanging on the fence. And yes, it does indeed resemble a baby frog. She says, "I showed it to the girl over there and she told me, it does look like a frog but it's the SPIDER!" Several times she referred to it as *the* spider. She said she got right up to it and it didn't even budge. Yeah, I don't think it's budging at all anymore.

She then stuck some fingers through the fence and introduced herself as Christy. I made a greeting gesture by sort of holding and squeezing her fingers, since there was no possibility of shaking her hand. It was firmly wedged in the wire fence. I think it was about this time that she told me about the "little baby buzz" she had going from a beverage she was holding. It was wine, in a recycled package that was basically a juice box. Just 2 days ago, I told Jaime and/or Ken that they should put wine coolers in those juicebox containers. The conversation was one of those that is a bit of a challenge to keep up with as it bounces here and there in a totally unpredictable manner. I was trying to figure out how much of the erratic form and content of the conversation was caused by the wine-in-a-box-little-baby-buzz, and how much was just from a really outgoing and offbeat personality. I didn't really get too far on that analysis because I had to really hang on just to keep up with where the conversation was going.

Christy was a pretty woman with a sweet lilt in her southern accent. She was really friendly and seemed to be trying hard to keep the conversation going and develop it into something. My man-brain went on alert. It was thinking the situation was an opportunity. Man-brain has been on alert for opportunities for 3/4 of a year, but is in transition right now. I know why it's in transition. N is why. But knowing why doesn't change that it is still a rare and interesting experience to feel that change taking place.

I began trying to extricate myself from the conversation, I really did need to get going as the light was fading fast. I explained this to Christy after she offered to read my horoscope from the Mountain X. I told her that I needed to get going because it was getting dark, and gestured to the flashing light I had attached to my butt. She hung on and had to tell me a few things before I left. She told them with great energy and sincerity. First was the MOON, which was looking at least as fetching as Christy, about 90% full, and fuzzy and pink through the post-sunset haze. The moon she exclaimed, was 240,000 miles away, and took THREE DAYS to get to on a NASA rocket. Next, she pointed me to the North to some pretty PINK CLOUDS, and told me they were ALL in the troposphere. And that the milky way galaxy was 125 light years across, and there are billions of galaxies. And also that the earth was 15 billion years old. She pulled all these things together to say that we were small and had limited time on earth. Good points. When I first mentioned the flashing light and riding in the dark, she said something that sounded like she thought that if I was meant to be hit by a car the light wouldn't protect me. I decided not to engage her on the topic "the only fate is what we make."

She said I was neat, and I said she was neat too and finally rode off. She yelled to me that she could see my flashing light really good and I waved back. I laughed about Christy on and off for the rest of the ride. Several times out loud. It made me glad that I live where I do, so I can meet interesting people like her. Later in my ride I made my way down the relatively busy Friday night Haywood Road. Cars with loud stereos, and bikes passing me in the opposite direction. A bike passed me and I didn't get a good look at the rider. Then I started hearing, " Edward! Edward! Edward!" in increasing volume. I first thought the person on the bike was somebody I knew, but no. It was Christy driving up beside me, yelling out the car window about some other bikes with flashing lights and saying hi, and have a good night and so forth. I waved and laughed and said similar things back to her and tried to not get hit by her car. I laughed some more after that second encounter and made my way home.

Return to GIS Class!

2007-08-22T21:21:00.000-04:00

Yes, I'm back in GIS class again, so beware that there will be new posts every week about GIS stuff rather than other stuff. It may be a good thing actually, since my blogging has slowed in recent weeks.

Pete is still the teacher, and that's good, because he loves the GIS and that makes it fun for us students. And Mary is in the class, which is also fun, because she has a good sense of humor and we need that on these long Wednesday nights. Mary totally whipped out her mad GIS skillz first thing tonight with all the pretty formatting and such on her map of the dangerous landslide site on Tunnel Rd.

I had lost significant GIS knowledge out of my brain since the last class ended in May. But it started coming back pretty well once I got into the program.

The map I made is above. If you want to see it bigger, you can click it. Showing the parcels that are located within 1/2 mile of the landslide site. I was shocked to see that my dentist office is within the danger zone. Oral hygiene is important though, so I will brave the area despite what I now know.

Bargains at the Goodwill

2007-08-05T21:16:00.000-04:00

Yesterday I stopped at a church rummage sale and found something called the "Electric Chicken Bucket" made by the Wear Ever company. It is a pressure fryer. I couldn't resist it for $3. Apparently there is some market for these because they are no longer made. Apparently they are no longer made because people got hurt using them. 450 degree pressurized oil? I guess there would be some danger there. I don't intend to cook chicken in it, that's all I'm saying.

Today, I visited the Goodwill on my trip out of the house to avoid solitude delerium. It was also nice to get in the air conditioning for a little while. At the Goodwill I found another $3 treasure. It's the "Billie Jean King Serves You Right!" It is electric and hurls tennis balls at you for practicing. I don't play tennis, and that's all I'm saying about that.

As I carried the "Serves You Right" through the store a man asked me what it was, and I told him. He reminded me of the father in Big Fat Greek Wedding. He segued the discussion about the device, to the fact that I am young and I should have someone to play with, and then onto the topic of marriage. It ended with a few pearls of real wisdom. When choosing a wife or husband, you should not choose one that you will be scared of them leaving. You should choose one who is scared that you will leave. And since I am in my 40's, I may have a 15 year old child when I am 60, and they might resent me. I guess they would resent that I am so old?

Yeah, I think I'm skipping the kids altogether so there will be no possibility of resentment. And I kinda think it's possible to have a relationship where neither party is scared of the other leaving. I think that might work really well!

Bike Ride Route #1

2007-08-04T21:35:00.000-04:00

GIS Class is returning to my weekly schedule soon and so I thought I would play with this junior mapping program to analyze my latest bike route. If you click those maps they will get bigger so you can see them. The elevation profile feature at the bottom is nice and shows the killer hill I go up toward the end. It's really steep. I get in the lowest gear and can't keep my usual cadence, and the front wheel makes little hops off the ground with each push on the pedals. I do stay on the seat. I'm trying to figure a ride that is longer and avoids that really steep part.

The map program says the route is about 9 miles, but my bike says it is more like 10.5. It takes me about an hour to ride it, but I usually stop at the dog park and watch the dogs for a while. Sometimes I also stop for other things, like: interesting things on the road that I need to pick up and take home, to corral a snake off the road so it doesn't get squished, to look at trains, etc. The profile says there is over 1300 feet of elevation change on the route. Half of that is going down though, and that part is easy and just plain fun.

"I just had to hug her."

2007-07-31T18:52:00.000-04:00

Billiards and Games
Originally uploaded by shubener

It's the Haywood Rd. Ingles on Tuesday night, where I stopped to replace my sour milk and replenish my supply of noodles for workday lunches. I like that Ingles, though it does have its shortcomings. I love the wide variety of people I see there. I guess it is just the diversity of the neighborhood the Ingles and I live in. There's mostly White, Black, and Latino shoppers, with all ages and economic levels represented. Every visit seems to be a slightly different clientele. One visit, it was every-single-woman-was-some-variety-of-hot night. There were the skinny young upscale fashionistas with their tight fitted skirts, high heels, and groovy glasses. And the punk torn jeans tats and piercings, with similar boyfriend attached at hip women. And the case of beer toting, untorn jeans and t-shirt women of various persuasions. Above you can see this Ingles in the background of this nice nighttime photo by Asheville photographer Scott Lessing.

Tonight it was pretty quiet, maybe because I got there earlier than usual. I was making my usual path through the store, picking up the staples. I was behind a quite older woman with nice lime sherbert colored pants. She was severely hunched over, from orthopedic challenges I imagine. She was moving slowly and in the middle of the aisle, so I got mildly frustrated a couple times. I got around her and went on my way, but somehow was behind her again in the baking aisle, which was more crowded. She stopped with her cart in the middle of the aisle and was reaching over toward the shelves when a woman came with her cart from the other direction. I was thinking it was kind of like stopping your car in the middle of the road when you got to your friend's house, getting out, and going to visit for a while. When green pants lady saw the other woman coming, she backed up to make room. But the other woman, who was handsome and appeared to be maybe 50 years old; as she approached, she left her cart behind and came toward us. She looked emotional. Part happy, part sad, part excited. Her arms were up in an almost hug position. She stopped directly in front of the woman and looked at her. The woman looked back, and I thought I was seeing a one-way recognition of an old friend. I expected to hear, "I'm so-and-so, from blah-blah-blah." But no. The younger woman was tentatively moving toward hugging the older and then retreating. Finally she said, "can I hug you, you look so much like my grandma." I was stunned and didn't watch the hug. I wish I had. I saw the disengagement, and the younger woman was crying tears and had that same look of part happy, part sad, part excited. She said, "thank you so much," and something again about her grandma. Green pants lady was not as hunched over now as the younger woman made her way past me and responded, "that did me as much good as you." I was now starting to move past her and getting pretty emotional myself. The older woman was smiling and said, "wasn't that sweet?" I said it was sweet, and she completed the encounter with, "you meet such sweet people."

Well yes you do meet sweet people, and this was a good reminder to me of that fact. My head swirled with thoughts of what the lives of these two women were like. The older, obviously having some health challenges, yet so positive and open to this unexpected encounter in the Ingles. Good for her. The younger, missing her grandma and seizing a moment to revisit her in some way. Good for her. And me being collateral damage in this random moment of connection.

I ran into the younger woman again in the toilet paper aisle and she was still teary and talking to some people she was shopping with. "The woman down there, she looked so much like grandma. Did you see her? Yes, 2 aisles down." Her shopping partners seemed confused or embarrassed. "I just had to hug her," she said.

So I completed my shopping on autopilot with much eye blinking, throat clearing, and thoughts of my place in life. I'm just lucky this happened after the cereal aisle, where difficult decisions have to be made.

One of my favorite blogs to read, The Hangover Journals, also occasionally deals with this Ingles, and here are some of those posts.

Young Lovers Loving the Rothkos

2007-07-22T14:29:00.000-04:00

Young Lovers Loving the Rothkos

I was enjoying the Rothkos when I saw this young couple at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC. I suppose I took it for granted when I lived an hour or so from there, but I now think the East Wing of the National Gallery is quite a special place with a significant collection of some of my favorite art.

Mark Rothko is a name that rolls off my tongue when I think of my all time favorite painters. And here I will ramble a bit about him. His paintings feel like atmospheres to me. Really, they just feel like feelings to me. I find their simplicity so powerful. I don't really think they are about feelings, though some would argue about that. I think they're about nothing and consider them non-representational where the arguers would call them abstract. I think he painted them about nothing, or just about themselves, and I project the idea of an atmosphere or a feeling onto them. And I think good art has a lot to do with that.

I was excited to find a show there at the National Gallery about some of his commissioned mural work. What I liked were some "studies" for the murals that showed a little insight into how he worked. The studies were sort of "sketches" testing out ideas for the murlas. These "sketches" were actually large paintings, bigger than the ones in this photo. But I don't really care for his mural work as much as his paintings meant to stand on their own. I made a pilgrimidge to the Rothko Chapel in Houston about 10 years ago, and was underwhelmed there too. It was nice to see the paintings so dominant in an environment designed for them, but the work itself just didn't inspire me. Maybe I should go back to Houston and look again.

The young lovers came through the nice room where I was relaxing and enjoying the Rothkos. They seemed to have a serious appreciation of the Rothkos that surprised me given their young age. I think they were puberty-cusp-riders.

Twelve Mile Road, the day after...

2007-07-07T11:22:00.002-04:00

The day of Twelve Mile Road was a very exciting one in many respects. In addition to the "TMR" adventure, there was a bear, and a stand of virgin hemlocks, waterfalls, campfire cooking (interrupted by thunderstorm), intense rainbow, nice bike riding. All of that will come in future posts. Now we need to do a little follow up on the effects of the off road adventure on TMR.

The next day, I got up and took a nice shower and got going in the morning. First odd thing I notice while driving is that the shudder under braking had increased. I have mildly warped front brake rotors and that's the symptom. Brain goes into gear, what has changed that could cause that? A few miles later I hear a big bang like I ran over a stick and it hit the bottom of the van. I look in the rear view mirror to see if I can see a stick or a part that has fallen off the van. Nothing. Hmmm. More thinking. I implement a few mild test swerves. Hmmm. I decided to actually pull off and see if there is something serious wrong. Look at the right front wheel area and immediately notice the top of the shock absorber is missing. Yeah, that could cause a bang, and the increased shudder under braking. I grab one part that is still bouncing around in there and keep it for later. I grab and shake and kick the wheels to make sure nothing else is broken.

I drive on and confirm I have no shock absorbing on the right front wheel. I start taking turns to the left slower, since they load that wheel and I don't want to crash. I also started using a cruise speed of 55 instead of 60 because there was a vibration that started above 55. West Virginia has a lot of curves on its roads. Seriously. A LOT. They are labeled with signs advising how fast you can safely go around the curve. These signs are remarkably accurate and uniform. I developed a correction factor for how much you could safely add to the advisory speed. In the Vanagon, I came up with about +12mph, and this is assuming good sight lines. I hate coming around a curve to a surprise, and the van needs more room to deal with surprises, so I couldn't always add 12mph. I first discovered this phenomena back in the early 80's when I often drove across WV on US 50 to visit my GF Anne McQuary who was going to school in Ohio. That was in my '76 VW Scirocco, a much better handling car than the Vanagon. That car was +20mph, with less regard to sight lines.

Anyway, I stopped at a DIY car wash in Elkins and gave the underneath a good cleaning, and checked the suspension better to make sure there was no other damage. When I got home and started working on the shock absorber I was surprised to find it was completely intact and not even damaged. It appeared that the nut holding the top of it just came off. (Click the photo on the right to see the exploded view of the suspension if you want to follow along.) On further inspection, I found a few pieces missing. A metal spacer and a rubber bump stop. Both of these were in a place that they would have to slide off the top of the shaft of the shock, and it would have been hard for them to do that. The metal spacer is under compression when the missing nut was tightened. My theory is that during the bouncing and severe suspension travel on TMR, this spacer fell apart or got crushed. This took the tension off the nut and it just backed off and went bye-bye. Then the top of the shock fell down into the spring and sat there. I had spare parts from another van, swapped them in and now it's fine again.

Twelve Mile Road

2007-07-02T21:55:00.000-04:00

One of the most exciting times of the Summer 2007 Vanagon trip was when I went down Twelve Mile Road. This proved to be an unwise choice. I love to drive on backroads as much as possible. I use a GPS navigation system to aid me in this preference. I tell it to find the shortest route and it does that, which almost always uses the smaller roads. Then it guides me so that I don't have to constantly look for the next turn, and read a map. I can enjoy the scenery and driving and know it will tell me when it's time to turn. It has a setting to avoid unpaved roads, and I usually leave that turned off because I don't mind unpaved roads. As long as they're actually roads.

I was toodling along enjoying the scenery, like you see above. It was a beautiful crisp summer day in northern West Virginia, with sun but not too hot. I continued from Snake Rd onto Twelve Mile Rd. at a place called Sell, and I think this photo is near that place. If you are that interested, you can click the little map below and see what it looks like. The road was quite good and smooth and level, with nice fresh looking gravel on it. One could actually go pretty fast on the open sections where there were no blind curves. Fast meaning about 30-35mph in the Vanagon on gravel. A few miles down the road, a few driveways turned off, with "Private" signs on them, and the nice fresh gravel disappeared as the road went into pretty deep woods.

There's kind of what it looked like in there. (This is about at point #1 on the map below.) The road was pretty straight, following a small stream, and descending with it through the woods. Also you see in this picture the first obstacle I came to: The Sippy Hole. At this point I figured, I was just going to turn around and get out of there. I got out to take this photo and got a stick and probed the big puddle, and found it to be very firm on the bottom and not very deep. So I figured what the heck and went on. No problem with the sippy hole, and the road continued descending. I made note of places where I could turn around as I passed them. The GPS showed it was not far to where this road started having other roads branch off of it. I knew that it would probably be in the worst condition where it was used the least, I would pass that point, then it would get better, and I'd be out the other side.

Then I made a few decisions about continuing that were not so smart. Stupid really. I went past some things I was pretty sure I would not be able to go back up. A steep rocky down hill section was one. At one point the little stream was basically running down the "road" I was driving on. Here's the story on the Vanagon's off road abilities from my experiences. They can be really bad to lose traction and get stuck. I've gotten stuck on wet grass several times on hills that weren't really very steep at all. The good things about taking the Vanagon off road are that they have quite a sturdy suspension capable of withstanding abuse. And they have good ground clearance and short ramp angles front and rear. This means they can go over tall things without those things hitting the bottom of the van and making it stop.

So that wet section with the stream running down the road seemed like I'd never be able to do that uphill. Here's another section where a small tree was down and I think just out of view in the foreground was the broken culvert pipe I drove over. I also got out here and moved a big branch off the "road" so that I could manoeuvre over that small tree in the easiest way possible. The thing that made me decide to keep going was that I had passed these obstacles I wouldn't be able to go back up or over, and the fact that I knew I was close to where the conditions would improve.

It got worse. There were stumps in the "road" soon. There were big holes and mounds where other vehicles had been stuck and dug out or spun their tires. The terrain got flatter, and soon it was just impossible to manoeuvre the van around the trees that were increasingly *in* the "road." There had been a fork in the road a ways back that I think was actually Twelve Mile Road, but involved a stream crossing that was really hairy looking.

I had been thinking about how I would get my stupid ass out of there. I had cell phone, I had my bike and could easily ride out a couple miles. I came to a stop and got out when it was clear I could go no further. I was quite anxious. Excess adrenaline pumping made me feel like I had drank a java chiller or 2. I walked ahead about 100 yards and found the place where the road was nice and level and gravel. I couldn't get to it though. I was at about point #2 on the map below.

So I took my anxiety and excess adrenaline and decided to at least try to get out of there. I scouted a place to turn around 20 yards back the way I came. It was difficult. I couldn't see where the rear wheels were and they would hit a rock or stump and stop moving. Trees were close on both sides which prevented easy jockeying to the sides to clear those rocks and stumps. The ground here was softer and more soil and vegetation. I got the spinning tires thing going a few times and had to use momentum to overcome the slick spots. A big branch threatened to rip off my newish side view mirror. But I got the thing turned around. Going forward is much better for traction in the van because the weight transfers rearward when you accelerate giving more traction and less spinning tires. I started back up the "road" thinking to stay calm and keep the momentum up. It turns out the "road" was pretty rocky, and it was a sandstone that had a lot of friction. Even the wet parts were not very slippery. That tree across the road presented a challenge though. The uphill approach to it made it a much larger "step" from the level of the road. First try, the right tire hopped over it, but the left one hit it and the whole van slid to the left as the tire slid along it. No trouble backing up off of it. I got out and built a little stairway of rocks for the left wheel to get over it. 2nd try and it was just up and over. The right wheel took quite a bounce there though {foreshadowing}. After that it was surprisingly easy. The steep part came and went with little trouble as the sandstone rocks provided a lot of grip for the tires. When I got to the Sippy Hole I couldn't believe it. I was out of there. I was really surprised that I made it.

I learned a lesson on Twelve Mile Road and got that lesson cheap compared to what it could have been. There I am kissing the beleaguered rear wheel, who so gallantly propelled me out of harm's way.

Here's the Map of Twelve Mile Road if you want to mark it off of your route.

The Puffs are Here!

2007-06-29T21:43:00.000-04:00

I planted this tree in front of my house a couple years ago. It's a Mimosa. They grow fast and are kind of weedy, and are actually an invasive species here in NC. I like them though, for several reasons. I like the form the branches have in the winter when there are no leaves. I like the tiny little leaves they have in the summer, and the way they open during the day and close at night. I like those tiny leaves again in the Fall when they need no collecting. They just dissolve into the soil and are gone. And the Mimosa tree has Puffs! Delicate Pink Puffs. This is the first year mine has had any. I though maybe I got a boy tree and only the girl trees have puffs, but no, the puffs are here this year!

The only problem I have with the Mimosa is that the branches tend to droop low in the summer when they are heavily laden with leaves and interfere with passersby. So I have tied some of the branches to each other across the middle of the tree with strong fishing line to hold them in toward the center of the tree. After a year, I will take the line off and the branches should hold the position they are now tied in.

(click the photos to see bigger versions)

Most Scenic Dairy Queen

2007-06-28T20:59:00.001-04:00

Yes, it's the most scenic Dairy Queen in the world, located in Hinton, West Virginia. Above is a panoramic view of the dining room which overlooks the famous New River near it's confluence with the Bluestone River. If you click the picture you can see it in larger splendor. If you think there is a more scenic DQ, I want to hear about it.

Also notable at this DQ is table service. You order at the window, but they bring your food out to your table and call your number. The menu is somewhat expanded also. On a previous trip, I had the fried oysters. Why I thought that was a good idea in the middle of remote WV, I can't tell you now. The oysters were amazingly uniform in shape, parallelograms as a matter of fact. Oyster-llelograms is what they became known as. My advice is to stick with the staples that would normally be good at a DQ.

I visited on this trip on Friday night and it was nice scene of Summer. The sun was getting low and pretty after a beautiful warm day. One of those crisp West Virginia days with low humidity and long clear views driving on the beautiful back roads. Sliding right through little towns and people's front yards, catching fleeting glimpses of what's important to them, and what isn't. And there at the DQ were a variety of people ending their day and week with a little outing. There was a group of 10 or 20 people in one dining room ending a dinner of some significance with hugs and some people still lingering and talking. Well dressed white haired couples ask what kind of fish they serve, and cause confusion behind the counter while research on the fish is done. The young woman comes back and answers, "Cod?" in a question, as she apparently has never heard of a fish with that name. Older teens in rugged 4wd pickup trucks that look like they actually go off-road congregate and chat non-threateningly. A few bikers come and go with loud revving engines.

So I did a little audio recording while I was there, with my ISDV2+ and I'm going to try to edit it into something so you can get a flavor of the scene there at the most scenic DQ in the world on such a pleasant Summer Friday evening. One of the most interesting things I heard there was one of the young women behind the counter. In an effort to keep people flowing through the ordering process, she frequently said, "can I help someone?" Nothing too strange about that, but it was the way she said it. She had one of those naturally strong voices that carries way down the road. And her intonation had a pleading quality to it, like she REALLY, REALLY wanted to help someone. The other thing to listen for is the retro musak playing in the dining room, and the excited patron who lets out a YeeHaw when his order number is called. OK here it is, an mp3 file about a minute long.

I Didn't want to see that.

2007-06-28T20:42:00.000-04:00

There are my friends Terry and Ellie. I've known them a long time, but had kind of forgotten about Ellie since I hadn't known her that well before the 22 or so years elapsed since the last time I saw her. I did remember her significant resemblance to Jessica Lange back in the 80's, and it's still there.

I was mentioning my use of craigslist.org to find eligible bachelorettes, and so we set to finding Ellie a possible date. She was lukewarm to the idea. I warned them about what they might see in the men seeking women ads, and to be especially careful of ads that say they have a picture. Well, one stray click, and we ended up seeing a 60-something guy in his underwear. Or was that a speedo? Does it matter? No.

Trip Blogging Preview

2007-06-23T20:01:00.000-04:00

Just a teaser of what's to come, so get ready. I'm back from an exciting 8 day trip and hope to blog it to bits! Here's the kind of excitement you can expect:

Lost keys! First I lose the key to the gas cap of the van and can't put more gas into its empty tank. Yikes! How did I overcome that major obstacle? And now that I'm home, I can't find the key to remove my bike from the back of the van. Yes, my bike is stuck on the van!
Reunion Hijinks: the last time I saw her was 31 years ago, when we were 12, and now she's upset.
The most scenic Dairy Queen in the world.
Hot driving: it's in the high 90's in the van, and that's when I'm underway with the windows down.
Wind Farms.
Vanagon Tech-talk
Excitement boils over: climbing a steep grade is interrupted when a cloud of smoke and oil appear in the rear view mirror!
Off-road excursion: The GPS says it's a road, I think not! I was stupid, then lucky, and part of the lucky was that I was smart.
Limping home: with a compromised front suspension and transmission, I make it home.
Old friends: It was good to see them.
Lots of photos and maybe some video too!
BBQ.
Frozen drinks near and far.
Scenic Splendor.
Modern Art.
Urban Sprawl.

Watch this space.

Summer Trip Planning

2007-06-09T20:33:00.000-04:00

Sometimes planning the trip can be as much fun as the trip itself. Currently have 13 stops planned over about 8 days. If you click the map you can see it in more detail. Any guesses as to what any of those those numbered stops are?

What is that?

2007-06-07T22:25:00.000-04:00

Behind the Patton Building?

Watch this space for future developments...

Summer Sunday Night

2007-05-29T21:17:00.000-04:00

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

2007-05-13T11:53:00.000-04:00

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

2007-05-07T21:34:00.000-04:00

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

2007-04-25T21:37:00.000-04:00

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

2007-04-18T21:39:00.000-04:00

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.

Farewell Lynn, Farewell Kurt.

2007-04-12T22:19:00.000-04:00

Lynn was killed in a car accident this week. So it goes. She was my brother's ex-partner. Ex for a year or so, and partner for over 10 years. There's a picture of the two of them from 2005, the last time I saw Lynn. You can see in the photo they were already moving in different directions. Lynn was a beautiful woman with radiant skin. She was very creative and full of an energy that often seemed to be directed in a somewhat erratic manner. She was 56 and leaves 2 kids in their late teens and early 20s.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr. also died this week. So it goes. Like many people, I read his novels while I was in college. I borrowed them from my brother, who I worked for at that time. Vonnegut was born the same year as my mom, in Indianapolis. My family also comes from the midwest and there was something that felt familiar about his writing. One book referenced a person named "Moon" Claycombe. My aunt and uncle have that same last name, and my uncle grew up in Indy. A little research and I found out that Moon was my uncle's father, and he had gone to HS with Vonnegut.

I liked the science fiction aspects of his books, and his seemingly free flowing writing style. I think Breakfast of Champions was the first I read, and it had the crude little pen drawings in it. I thought that was pretty neat. I should probably read him again now that I'm older and smarter and would probably get a lot more out of them. In one of the inevitable posthumous radio pieces I heard, it referred to him as a secular humanist, and then within a minute or two quoted him as saying that he felt music was proof there is a god. Curious. I guess secular humanists can have a god too. Vonnegut said something about us humans being animals whose brains just got too big for our own good, and I have to agree with that. So it goes.

Before and After: Spring Freeze

2007-04-09T21:15:00.000-04:00

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

2007-04-04T21:34:00.000-04:00

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.

Custard Pie

2007-03-31T12:37:00.000-04:00

I enjoyed very much seeing Custard Pie "unplugged" at Jack of the Wood last night. If you aren't aware, Custard Pie is a Led Zeppelin tribute band based in Asheville. The thought of that doesn't really sound all that interesting, but this group is really talented, and does a very nice interpretation of Zeppelin's material. I always think of music performance in terms of technical expertise and "feeling." I thought all 4 members scored really high in both areas. Lead guitar Woody doing really nice acoustic interpretations of electric guitar, David on bass seemed to never miss and put a lot of feeling into it. Really, all 4 members of the group were doing a great job last night. I think maybe the drums needed to be mic-ed a little better or something, but what do I know. I was staying close to the stage inside the direct blast of the PA speakers, where I like it. Despite being an "unplugged" show it was plenty loud, and has my tinnitus up a notch today.

Here's the paragraph about Rhett, the singer, who I fell a little bit in love with last night. I'll try to keep it to one paragraph. Rhett is a woman of course, compared to Robert Plant who is not. She often sounds very much like Plant when he gets into the higher ranges, or Plant with a little sweet southern (US) accent. Rhett certainly has the voice to handle the technical aspects of the vocals, but I think really excels at putting the emotion into it. Those two things come together in those long plaintive, sensual moans of lyrics that seem to always end in "baby" or "me." I found myself holding my breath, or moaning along and running out of breath long, long before Rhett did. I guess some might say she has quite a set of lungs. Which brings me to her comely countenance. A very pretty face that reminds of Kirsten Dunst, and a very realistic figure in a pretty sundress, which I'm always a sucker for. Rhett must be about Liz Phair size, still looking petite atop 5 inches or so of shoes. Sexy, yes, but I thought it was mostly from the inside, in attitude, and not overt. The confidence of performing so well, a catalog of music that feels like sex, even when the song is not explicitly about it. Rhett dances around a little, smiles demurely, and connects with the audience, which is always nice for us. OK, paragraph ends here.

Now to the Led Zeppelin memories. It was 1978 and I was a freshman in HS. Led Zep was quite popular among various circles at my school. There was an older, cooler, upperclassman in my math class, who frequently intoned, "Led Zep, man. Miss Tanner's a bitch." Miss Tanner was one of his teachers, and I have no idea how those 2 thoughts got linked, but anyway, he was cool. There was quite a bit of Stairway to Heaven on the rock stations back then. Too much probably. My serious appreciation for LZ didn't come until much later in life though.

Good Times, Bad Times came around last night and now that I'm a grown up man, I always think this when I hear that song:
In the days of my youth
I was told what it was to be a man,
Now Ive reached the age
I try not to do all those things.
So that no matter how I try,
I won't find my way into the same old jams.

Rose Bush Pruning

2007-03-31T12:27:00.000-04:00

Before and After photos of the overgrown rosebush that I pruned.

Canton

2007-03-28T21:41:00.000-04:00

Canton. I love it.

This editing exercise was frustrating. I couldn't get it to complete my sketch, and then it disappeared. Argh. I hope to learn more about this editing stuff. It wasn't so hard last week and everything seemed to work properly. Brain very fuzzy now.

WasserCooling

2007-03-24T20:39:00.000-04:00

Like the caption says, that is the magical and mysterious cooling system for the 86-91 VW Vanagon (except Syncro.) Today I replaced #24, which required taking off #23. I also replaced #14 and flushed the system. No major problems encountered. I was worried about taking off #23 since it is often a challenge to get bolts loose from the engine after 21+ years and many heat cycles. I was afraid of stripping things and then needing to make difficult repairs outside the scope of the repairs I was attempting today. Tomorrow I will flush the system again and then refill it with coolant. The refilling process is also magical and mysterious due to the complexity shown in the diagram above. It involves raising the front of the vehicle, and filling the system with coolant while the engine is running at 2000 rpm so that the water pump can force the coolant into all the nooks and crannies of the system.

And now, news from the irony front. I was helping my church set up a table at the peace rally. I overheard a couple conversations while I was there. One person made reference that it would be best to start completely over with a new government here in the US, and that the state of the union address would be a convenient time to do away with the current one. Another suggested that he could only kill someone in self defense, and that W was putting him in danger. Then I went back to my WasserCooling repairs.

Thursday Night

2007-03-22T21:58:00.000-04:00

What did I do tonight? I came home and did several things. I cleaned up a biodiesel accident in the area of the clothes dryer/biodiesel lab. Then went out for some satisfying rose bush pruning. I like that more than I ever thought I would. I generally like pruning plants, and think I am pretty good at it. I also have been known to enjoy plucking women's eyebrows. There is a similarity to those activities. I never pluck on the first date though. The rose bushes haven't been pruned since I have lived here, 10 years. I think they will really like the pruning, and grow better and look better. Or they may die...

While pruning, neighbor elizabeth came over and invited me for dinner. That was really nice, especially since she had some fresh bison burgers from her friend in Weaverville. It was delicious. elizabeth likes the e to not be capitalized. She was really hungry and I could tell. Then she had some of the delicious food and got a nice placid, smiling look. That was nice to see. After dinner I set something on fire. I like to do that, but don't do it all that often, which probably makes it even more special when I do it. I had a bunch of biodiesel soaked newspapers left over from cleaning up the above mentioned biodiesel spill. I had sort of just wadded them up and put them in the garden. So that's what I set on fire. It was nice and e and E watched it burn and noted the stars, and moon looking like a nice bowl directly above a bright bluish looking planet. e is a talented jewelry artist.

Then home for telephone calls including nice brief conversation with Tracy from the internet, who actually did sound quite nice, smart, and funny. And not like an internet psycho.

Editing and Rapid City Memories

2007-03-21T21:39:00.000-04:00

Tonight we worked on Editing. We edited Points and Lines and Polygons. It was fun. I liked making the shapes and moving them around and stuff. It was also a little window into the world of what is some probably some pretty tedious GIS work. editing data and making all these fussy little changes to make the data more accurate. Pete made it sound like in the GIS job world you might have to do some fussy editing, especially when you are new in the field.

Above is some editing we did. This is GIS data from Rapid City, SD. The upper section with the green lines was already done, and then we did the lower section with the blue lines. The blue lines represent parcels. For the outermost edges, we used the pavement edge layer as a guide. We drew in the shapes of the houses based on what we could see in the orthophoto layer, which is totally raster data.

At one point Mary said that I needed to say something funny so that she could get through the arduous book exercise which had something like 60 steps to follow. I consider myself funny, but, can't really do it on demand, it's generally a sort of topical, situational humor. Fortunately I was able to pull out of my ass something about her belt-sander-blog, and that worked. I think I better have some material prepared for the next class though.

I remembered being in Rapid City, and Mary asked what I did there and I told her that I did my laundry. I hadn't really thought about Rapid City in a long time, even in reference to that picaresque. But that memory of doing the laundry there really brought some old stuff back. It was 1985 and I was 21, and my vw van was 14, and we took 2 months and 12,000 miles, and somehow only $1100, to travel the US and southern Canada. Most of that trip was by myself. It was a significant, formative time for me. I think it was before Rapid City, I think it was Custer State Park in the Black Hills were I was camping. I was sort of lonely and felt ungrounded but couldn't put a name like that on the feeling at the time. One evening the sun was setting and the temperature was cooling and the light was beautiful orange on the the rocks. I was out wandering and climbing on some of the beautiful rocks. I got into the climbing around and jumping from rock to rock and stuff like that. I was climbing too high to not be on a rope. At one point I jumped from one rock to another and started to fall off the far side of the second rock. I was doing that swinging-the-arms-attempt-to-catch-my-balance thing. It worked and I didn't fall off the rock. That was a little bit of a wake up experience.

After my laundry was done in Rapid City, I went to a hot spring outside of town. There was a developed hot spring in the town, with water slides, and stuff. But a local pointed me to the wild one. It was full of a group of teenagers of a church group from Kansas. And that's about all I remember about that.

Now We're Geocoding

2007-03-14T21:24:00.000-04:00

Right on the heels of last week's Geoprocessing adventure, we jump into Geocoding, which also sounds cool. Below is a result of our first exercise/adventure. Pete found a list on the internet of the advisors for FFA Clubs in high schools in NC. He saved it in a table with the addresses and name of the school, etc. Then we took that and ran it through www.batchgeocode.com, which is a very cool API interface a guy made to YahooMaps. It spit out a nice YahooMap with dots for each of the 100 locations in the table we fed it. It also produces a new table with all the data we started with and adds the latitude and longitude to it. We then took that data and fed it into ArcMap and created this map.

Our second adventure in Geocoding was local. We made an excel table with all the classmates addresses in it and then geocoded it onto a map of Buncombe county data. The green dot on the map below is my house, or actually, where it thought my house was. My lot is actually up and to the right, the one with 5 sides. The blue lines you see running down the streets are the street centerlines, which are the basis for this geocoding. The segment where the green dot is runs from 38 to 64 for even number addresses. It sees my address is 58 and plots that on the line based on math. So it's not terribly accurate.

Finally, Mary was missing tonight, and that just made the class less effervescent than usual. Perhaps she was really involved in some project with her new belt sander and forgot about class?

Geoprocessing

2007-03-07T21:42:00.000-05:00

Tonight we learned about Geoprocessing. That's a pretty cool term I think. I could see myself as being a Geoprocessor someday.

To the right is something I did as part of the class exercise. It is a land use map of Buncombe county. We had to combine several maps, and they didn't use the same coordinate system. Since ARCGIS projects on the fly, it automatically converts the data to display it, but we actually converted the data in the landuse layer to the state plane projection. That's where I crashed 3 computers because my flash drive was full. I initially blamed the problem on my proximity to Mary, and that was wrong. I apologize for that.

This image is a section of the map I made and in which I selected Martin Branch and applied a buffer of 500 feet. I thought it looked like internal organs or intracellular structures. See the kidneys?

Bloggin' Women

2007-03-07T17:59:00.000-05:00

Originally uploaded by EMaglott.

In GIS class we are required to make a blog. Here are Robin and Mary, working on theirs.

No Doughnuts

2007-02-28T20:02:00.000-05:00

Tonight Pete revealed something to us. Something disturbing. There can be no doughnuts. Fortunately, it is not as bad as it sounds. He was referring to polygons in the older ARC coverage files. A doughnut in this sense of the word is when you have a polygon object, but there is an area inside that polygon that has different attributes. For example, a city may have an area within it's larger boundaries that is not incorporated by the city. That is the hole in the doughnut. The coverage files apparently had a lot of trouble with these. The later shapefiles and geodatabases are totally cool with doughnuts though.

Over there on the right is an example of some of our exercising tonight. It was about association tables to each other and to spatial data. Pete had a good example of a desire to make a campus map showing which buildings were served by which security guards. In this example, there was some map data of the campus, and the chief of security guards also had a spreadsheet with a list of his officers and which buildings they covered. So then we related those 2 datafiles and were able to automatically generate the map showing the buildings and the names of the security guards for each and even color coded them by security officer.

Romance is in the Air

2007-02-14T20:57:00.000-05:00

There's the map of counties in the United States which lost population in the period from 1990 to 2000, and who also had more male than female residents. We studied queries in this chapter and it was really getting into the analysis power of GIS. It was interesting, and I was impressed at all the possibilities for analyzing spatial data with SQL statements. Mary didn't find it so interesting, but maybe if she were working on a more real life scenario, she would like it better. I also determined that Mary did not contribute to the lost population trend seen in the map to the right. All the talk about queries reminded me of a fellow student in a previous database class who pronounced that word more like "quiries" with a long "I" sound in the first part of the word.

Since it was valentines day, it was a special day at GIS class. There was an air of electricity and anticipation as we all worked on our projects. The boys and girls exchanged long looks and sideways glances. Some couldn't help themselves and burst into singing romantic songs.

It was also a special day because it was on this day in 1989 that the first GIS satellite was launched. That doesn't seem that long ago when I think about the fact that I have a GPS in my car and almost take it for granted as a navigation aid. I also remember the time of the launch and thinking that GPS sounded so exotic that regular people like me would probably never get to use it.

Lost in Translation

2007-02-10T10:13:00.000-05:00

for clicking the image if you better and larger to see it. your hands will be free moving.

It's Time for Tables

2007-02-07T21:15:00.000-05:00

We had our first test tonight. I thought it was a very fair assessment of the material we had covered. I know I got some things wrong, I hope not too many.

Tonight we worked with tables. It was a lot of fun. Well, not really. It took me back to database classes I had in the past, and was a good refresher on db concepts and how ArcGIS uses tables. The exercises got intense with linking and relating tables, and talk of cardinality. I remember those relationships in MS Access and how they could get pretty messed up. Good thing relationships in real life don't get messed up like that. But then, in computer databases you can usually click yourself around and straighten things out. I made this map, which didn't export very nicely, about how many federal elected officials each state has. Later we did some more advanced data manipulation in the tables that was impressive, but yielded no spatial data output vectors to sho on here.

Air Conditioner: The Final Chapter

2007-02-04T14:31:00.000-05:00

It is out of the bedroom!
It has gone to the basement
to be with friends.
Other air conditioners
in my collection.

Anticipating Snow

2007-01-31T21:34:00.000-05:00

This is the snow day map I made, with data from Buncombe county. It was fun working with real local data, and the ArcMap software is so powerful it is almost hard to figure out what to do with it.

Then it was time to work on the problems in the book. Things went downhill, as there was a problem with one of the data files we all were using. Pete got us a corrected file, but it was complicated to get it and put it in the right place and get ArcMap to starting working with it. It was kinda frustrating, but I found it a good learning opportunity also.

Here's how far I got on the classwork from the chapter.

Nature's Mysteries & the Curious Brain

2007-01-29T20:38:00.000-05:00

I found this little blurb on a trail brochure in the Okefenokee swamp during my sullen, peripatetic, & pensive xmas 2006 trip. I really like that circled part. Yeah, that's why I circled it. My brain is really curious, and a big part of that trip was to give it plenty of mysteries to keep it occupied.

Air Conditioner Update

2007-01-28T19:08:00.000-05:00

The Air Conditioner.
It has been reassembled!
I feel sick and it's really cold out,
otherwise I would have removed it,
to the basement.

The Air Conditioner

2007-01-26T18:47:00.000-05:00

It's true there is a disassembled air conditioner in my bedroom.
I need to do something about that.
I'm hoping putting this in the blog might help.

Filing for Chapter 9

2007-01-24T21:16:00.000-05:00

Yes, here is my post for chapter 9. We made a fancy map tonight, and learned a lot about how to do that. How to format every little detail to make it really nice looking and easy to understand. Greg was the teacher tonight, and he was very knowledgeable, like Pete. Greg really likes the North Arrow. He says it should be at the top, because it is so important to him. I'm pretty sure he was talking about the top of the map, but it may have been a metaphor for life. The North Arrow orients you, and without orientation, you really can't do much of anything. Greg saying the North Arrow should be at the top, I don't know, its almost like he worships the North Arrow. Or perhaps it is more of a fetish. Really I can't blame him for wanting to have direction in life, and to be well oriented. I may look into this North Arrow and see if it could help me too.

We also played a little with some real local data from Asheville. I tried to make a map that highlighted places where railroad tracks intersect with streams. I haven't learned enough to do that yet. I look forward to being able to do that in the future.

Greg also showed some impressive animated GIS things he did. One was a map of the riverfront of Asheville showing the river at 100 year flooding water levels. Well, it was not just a map, it was a 3D rendering with buildings and everything, and the POV was as if you were flying around the area. You could see how far up the buildings the water level was.

Pete

2007-01-19T21:55:00.000-05:00

Pete at work.

Save Early and Save Often

2007-01-17T21:33:00.000-05:00

I worked and worked and then ArcGIS encountered a problem and needed to close. It did apologize for the inconvenience. But I still am disappointed about my loss. Not that it is really a significant loss in the greater scheme of things. I am OK and healthy and safe.

Pete rocks! Really. I think he may be a rock-n-roll star from the 90's. More on that later. Pete is a very good teacher of this material too. A lot of energy and very knowledgeable. Those two things are very important to me as a student.

I was a little late to class and tired and hungry tonight. We had a massive lecture session and covered important information. I'm glad I got the book, so I can review the information again. I got the last book. So here is my map as of my last successful save. I had gone so much further... With my memories of the night I spent in Kennebec, SD in 1985.

Oh it's such a perfect day, I'm glad I spent it with you.

2007-01-13T17:44:00.000-05:00

Well, it was a nice day. One of the strange in-the-upper-60's days we have been having this winter.

I'm getting more comfortable with my single-ness.

This morning I heard a little clip on NPR from the Lou Reed song mentioned in the title of this post. Apparently about heroin; I did make some nice chai this morning, but that was the strongest thing I've had all day.

Did some yard work in the garden, and on the van. Investigating what 20 year old cooling system hoses are about to blow. Got down to just sweaty T-shirt in the warm sunshine.

I made an appointment to soak in the hot springs in Hot Springs on Monday. That should be very nice. I should bring a towel and a cold drink and clothing is optional, which is good since I often misplace my pants anyway. I'm going to soak alone, since most of my friends are beautiful young women, and relaxing in hot, bubbly, clothing optional water with one of them just seems like a situation I am not up for at this point. Yeah, not up for it.

After lunch Callie and I took a nap in the van as part of acclimating her to being in there, so that we may go camping together one day. She did her wandering around and looking out all the windows, then settled down and was laying by my feet when I woke up. It was a good nap, which was needed after that stressful week of hard working long days.

Next up was a nice West Asheville bike ride in the beautiful weather. (After setting mp3 player to record On the Media for later listening.) Rode from home to the little park at the confluence of Hominy Creek and the French Broad River. There I saw this nice stack of debris in the river that reminded me of one of Andy Goldsworthy's sculptures. I rode along the river on the unofficial trail that connects to the parks on Amboy Rd. It was kinda sloppy in places, and I got off the bike at the first sippy hole. The next one I came to was really quite long and looked less muddy. It was maybe 40' of water covered grassy double-track. I decided to go for it, and it wasn't too soft to ride on. It was deeper than I thought, and one shoe took on quite a bit of water. I laughed at the hazard not being what I expected. I then scared a quite large girl deer, who bolted through the brush at alarming speed. The parks on Amboy Rd were full of others enjoying the beautiful weather and in good spirits. Stopped by the dog park and didn't have tinycam out when the photo opp happened.

Ran into Laura and her quiet husband, out enjoying the beautiful day. Laura with such the bright eyes and countenance that I like so much. I ran into Matt at work the other day and the same thing happened, so it's not just smiling pretty women that seem to pick me up. Maybe just seeing happy looking people tweaks my brain waves. Yeah.

Up, Up, Up, some steep hill from the river to the high ground of West Asheville and past a lot of residential infill development. Nicely done little houses. Some rather close to the odoriferous MSD lift station, and many having nice winter views of the train yards. I recall again in '97 when I was WA house shopping, looking at the "cat pee" house on Riverview Dr. I still regret not getting that place. The house was small and smelled like, you-know-what. But it backed up to the slope down to the river and I had visions of sitting out there watching the trains and industrial landscape in the evenings, and making a trail down to the river. I found these houses on Riverview built on impressive steelwork overlooking the stuff I mention above.

That's how badly people want to live in West Asheville.

I was attracted to the dumpster by a wad of excess wire on the top of the trash. I always need to add to my spare wire resources. This wire was not of interest, but while I made that assessment, I found this big hunk of steel in the dumpster. I need that. So I strapped it on the back of my bike:

It was heavy and had an effect on the bike's handling, but I didn't crash.

Next a little trip down Haywood Rd to check on the latest price of Biodiesel. Not one, but two prostitutes wandering on the beautiful Haywood Road Saturday afternoon. The phrase, "Prossies need Biofuel too!" popped into my head for some reason. $3.00 for the Biodiesel.

Oh it's such a perfect day, I'm glad I spent it with you.

concrete poetry

2007-01-11T20:27:00.000-05:00

rain dusk fog walk
Originally uploaded by EMaglott.

Typing with a centered alignment.

There is no way to grow

an inverted

pyramid

here.

2007-01-11T20:04:00.000-05:00

There's the snow as it fell in front of the setting sun.

The first class

2007-01-10T21:36:00.000-05:00

I remember that first class. It was a cold evening, but I warmed up quickly at the potential of the subject at hand.