in google earth

with parking lots

homework

After dinner sat down with my homework tonight. I figure I don't know whether I need to go in to class on Thursday until I sit down and do it at home and see if there are any problems.

It went pretty straightforwardly. I'm not done yet, but I did figure out how to fill in the blanks in the fields, (oh, i have to be in an edit session). And now all my buildings have names and numbers. Now I just have to give them stories, which seems like it won't be too difficult. And do the parking lots. Not a big deal. No worries.

Here's a picture of what central campus currently looks like.

Campus geodatabase.

The top image is data frame 1. The bottom image is the geodatabase created from the CAD layer.

I created a raster catalog file, but it turned out blank. I'm not sure what this means, nor how to use it to move on to updating the buildings layer and heads-up digitizing.

progress

Got my husband to somehow uninstall and reinstall the software. Seems to be working now.

another why i wasn't in class post.

just got home from animal control board meeting. had to go to this one. a lot has been happening in the animal control world.

Project 1

Not sure what to say about this one. People are telling me it looks good, but I think it's a mess. Thankfully the focus here isn't exclusively visual, and note that I managed to pull it off with as few labels and annotations as possible. Yay. That's a relief, anyway.

I did forget to add the real estate disclaimer.

"This map was created for Generic Properties LLC, as a visual representation, based on the best data available. It is not to be used as a property survey, a measure of your exact boundaries, or a treasure map. Do not try to find your way home with it, and do not base your home's site plans on it."

I was going to write a grand satirical real estate disclaimer note. It was going to be funny, unlike the above rather weak attempt.

Anyway, I'm not sure why the manhole covers don't go past AB Tech. No sewer for AB Tech. This is arbitrary and strange. But I figure my hypothetical clients don't care about the sewer lines at AB Tech. Just the ones in Kenilworth.

Subdivision angst

Yeah, I am definitely downloading "subdivisions" and definitely getting "zoning." It is, of course, Sunday, but I called the GIS office in Asheville and told their answering machine about the problem. (since the phone number was handily in the righthand corner of the web page). Maybe they will even fix it tomorrow and then I can make more progress on homework...

Now in GIS 215

Every time I try to download the subdivisions file, I end up with the same thing as the zoning file instead. I guess I will try again.

Missed the first day of class. Had some kind of weird stomach virus. Left work early, threw up my lunch, went home & slept a lot.

I'm not sick that often. It just always seems to happen on the first day of class. Which is insanely irritating.

Explanatory Notes

In exercise 1 I didn't have a hospitals layer, so I just labelled the cities as if they were hospitals. I figured the point of the exercise was that I could display the H symbol, not that I could find the right layer and put it in my map.

Similarly, in exercises 2-4 I didn't have any watershed data, so I used precipitation zones. I'm sure it looks sort of different, but the things I did to symbolize the layers are the same.

Also, on the challenge problem, the assignment said "show the major roads using the same symboloby as in the South Dakota map we used earlier in this chapter." Since I didn't have the SD_Roads.lyr file, I used the USA layer file that had a particular way of depicting roads on it.

My intention is not to be sloppy with the work, but I figure this is one of those times when being a perfectionist is overrated and the point is to prove that you can display stuff in different ways. and since I accidentally went out of my way and Followed Every Single Step of the entire chapter, when apparantly we were only supposed to do the bits labelled "Exercises" and "Challenge Problem", I feel pretty not guilty about the whole thing.

as far as journal entry goes, not too many thoughts from anna for the moment. just that I'll try to work on that whole paying attention in class thing when the professor is saying something important. ;) Hope your day gets less ughghghgh.

journal entry

journal entry and explanations forthcoming, but for now, going to sleep.

When you're sitting in class taking a lab quiz is when you remember all the things you don't know how to do.

Pete had showed us the best way to snap an annotation to a wiggly line. It was one of the drawing tools. He made it look easy, but I couldn't find it last night. This is me taking note so I find it in the future.

That's all I can think to put in my journal for now. I didn't think to put my map in the journal last night. Journal wasn't exactly one of my big priorities at the time.

Utter Nerdiness (and a projections assignment)

so i downloaded the wrong data last week, that's why my map looked funny. but it was the data he told us to download, so it's not my fault.

nice to know that all my troubles this summer and all the gis angst could have been alleviated by one simple tool in arc toolbox and a little bit of understanding of projections.

... so my latest cartographic daydream is all the nifty data i have access to on city of Asheville.

roads
zoning
slope
schools
parks
hospitals
fire stations
airports

... See when I was a kid, SimCity came out. My all-time favorite computer game ever. Yeah, these were the days before World of Warcraft. My brother bought it with his allowance, and I reaped the benefits, and spent many hours poring over maps of Asheville, wishing I could figure out how to reproduce Asheville using SimCity. But the zoning mystified me, and I didn't really know how to tell the difference between commercial and industry, so I shelved that dream.

And now, holy s--t, as an adult I realize all these layers are fully downloadable, complete with coordinates. I could totally do it with accurate zoning, accurate roads, the whole 9 yards.

Projections, Transit maps

map from projections project
I've been reading a book about the graphic design of urban rail and subway system maps. There was a gas shortage so all the libraries were closed one weekend, so I had to go to the bookstore, and I saw it and thought wow, how interesting.

Anyway, it's totally counterintuitive. The less accurate and topographical these maps become, the clearer. The book talks about 45 degree angles a lot. all the angles in a particular subway schematic might be only 45 degrees or 90 degrees. This is of course very different from the actual angles in real life.

I particularly like the Chicago one. Here's a copy.
http://www.yourcta.com/maps/maps/fwebmaptrain.gif
incidentally, when I googled chicago mta, I found a link to the image which was left by its own designer. wow! His words are here on cartotalk:

http://www.cartotalk.com/index.php?showtopic=840

Bike Map, finished version at end of class on Tuesday 9-23-08

Bike Map, more progress

Now we get down to the detail work, where I have this huge map, and it's impossible to see all of it at once, much less know if the labels look ok. one can zoom in, but how do you then know you aren't missing out on some place? i guess that's why we put graticule on the map, huh. so when I zoom in to B1, I can check that off some list and move on to B2. Dang, that's one of the 10 map elements that could be on every map that I didn't remember when I was taking my test. Graticule. What a cool word, maybe I'll remember it now.

Today I remembered my jump drive, but forgot to bring a pencil and my text book. I am not always this crazy. It is really just Tuesdays.

Here is what I have at the moment at several zoom layers. My roads annotation seems to have disappeared again. Sort of weird. It had reappeared last week by the end of class.

Really it looks much the same as it did two weeks ago. Actually I think it looked better two weeks ago. Depressing.

No Subject

well, I only got one dot when i attempted to add the x,y data. even though there were tons in the attribute table. does not make sense. nonetheless, my map is beginning to look sorta awesome.

The top picture is zoomed out to buncombe county. the lower one was at what arcmap claimed was "100%" therefore, i assume it best represents the scale that would show in my printed out version.

well, it's a work in progress anyway. light blue is asheville transit routes. purple is bike routes. red is highways.

LEAF, font advice

Here is my belated LEAF map. I know, it's ugly. I ran out of time to make it less so.

Re: Our lecture on fonts yesterday, if anyone wants advice on fonts, I do carry a lot of them around in my head. Have spent last 4 months trying to figure out what is a good font for a construction business? an ice cream parlor? a Mexican restaurant? a real estate business? a cattle auction business? a political party?

When I first started, I was totally intimidated by fonts, but if you use them, you'll learn them, and you'll learn what works and what doesn't work and messes up when you try to pdf it.

Just skimming off the top of my head, maybe not really very applicable to cartography, some nifty fonts:

delta hey max nine and zorba are two of my personal favorites. These are funky, playful fonts you don't get to use very often.

for a more professional looking font but still one that is artistic looking, I generally go for Californian FB.

for a solid, '90s feel, I go with one of the versions of Futura -- I forget which it is I'm thinking of.

A totally macho, plumbing and power tools and heavy equipment kind of font is Impact.

a classical neoGreek-looking kind of font is Papyrus.

There are a lot of loopy, pretty fonts meant to look cursive-inspired. You can find many of these by going through and trying fonts with French-sounding names. My personal favorite of these though is Marigold. But you have to have pretty large text for it to be properly legible. Another pretty one to sometimes experiment with is Centaur.

Of course, most of the time, (and especially with cartography as opposed to ad design) you are looking for a quieter more toned down font, something that looks professional but doesn't yell it. I don't remember the names of these as well, and there are tons of them. Gill Sans is what you use when you want something like Arial that isn't Arial. Blue Highway is one that is playful but in a quiet kind of way. Bookman and the Berhards and Bernhards are some that are similar to Times New Roman, but aren't Times New Roman, and they can be very attractive. Courier is a typewriter kind of looking font. Palatino and Garamond are nice.

The main thing with fonts is to just be patient. You can picture the font you want in your head. Something which fits your criteria is out there. There are tons of them. You just have to be willing to go through and find it.

Kigali angst

Finally figured out how to get the X,Y points into my map, great. Now I just have this small problem that Kigali, Rwanda shows up in Tanzania. I tell the points layer that it needs to be the same coordinate system as the rest of the map. Kigali, Rwanda is still in Tanzania. Also, Bequia is floating out in the middle of the Caribbean.

Oh well, good thing I have Labor Day off work, right. I've been having this sort of thing happen to me all summer, so I guess what else is new, right? If it happens with CAD layers and contour lines, naturally it'll happen with LEAF International villages. I guess I'll sleep on it and try to figure it out in the morning.

Squares, Columns, Visual Hierarchies, Trains

Since I've been a graphic designer for the past several months, (designing newspaper ads in Quark Xpress--my job interview was the day after the final project was due in 111 [I started reporting only this week, our reporter went on maternity leave and didn't come back]) the visual hierarchies and the white space and the dangers of boxes, end up being eerily deja vu - ish. I'm like, wow, I've been thinking about this stuff all summer (not to mention the maps for the real estate guy).

Anyway, have read the chapter. Haven't done LEAF map yet. Yes, missed the first day of class. Had a urinary tract infection. I'm sure you wanted to know THAT. Was late to class today because the Madison County Government's web site claims the Animal Control Board Meeting is the last Tuesday of even-numbered months. It isn't true. Madison County is teaching me to trust nothing I read on the internet. I sat on a bench in front of the courthouse in the rain for the first hour of class, watching the sky get darker and the rain thicker, listening to trains go by. Fortunately I'd brought a book. Reading "Half of a Yellow Sun" by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. So I was reading a fictional account Biafra/Nigeria in the 1960s as I sat in front of the white-columned courthouse with the confederate monument in front of it. No one had showed up by 7 p.m. so I came to class.

Those are my excuses. I'ma go figure out the LEAF map now.