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.

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.

Color

other exercises

exercises 1 & 2

Exercises 4, 5, 6

Exercise 10

Challenge Problem

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.

Terrain Analysis

Aspect, slope & elevation, Polk County. I chose Polk County because I think that's where the Saluda grade is -- that big steep hill that says you're re-entering the mountains.

Raster Analysis

note that these are in reverse order. 3, 2, 1

Last Thursday

Fixing to get started on the Spatial Analyst assignment.

Meanwhile, here's my map from class on Thursday.

It bothers me that I didn't center the title properly, and of course, the border to the locater map is too close to the title, but this are little layout issues and easily fixed.

Edit: Yeah, so it looks like I didn't install the spatial analyst extension. I tried to do it now but the only thing that happened is my computer crashed. It still doesn't appear when I go to activate extensions. I guess I'll show up in the computer lab tuesday after work to do this assignment.