Project: Blog Presentation

After going to the Blog Presentation (see: The Intern: Day 11: MARC Blog conference) by Keith Kreiger, the interns at JCW were challenged to make their own presentation to the web committee here at JCW. Right now, it is still under construction. I’ll post the web exported version once we (the interns) have completed it.

Event: MARC Blog Conference

Today, I attended a Blog Conference at MARC (the Mid-America Regional Council) put on by Keith Kreiger of lab188.com. He explained the value of blogs in government and showed several examples of working government blogs. He also covered different blogging tools and trend tracking tools such as Technorati and BlogPulse. You can see the outline of his presentation and also a large page of valuable links on his site.

Opening of Second Blog

Recently, I've opened up a new blog called "ArcGIS Methods and Madness" where I post questions/problems and solutions to things I come across in ArcGIS.

Project: More Prairie Village GIS & GPS

-Today, went out to the Prairie Village area to take some more GPS data near 79th and Mission. Decided it was time to leave around 1:30pm, because the Satellite lock for the Trimble XH was beginning to fade, following the usual phenomenon (every afternoon is a poor signal compared to before noon) Jim and I noticed.
-Got back to the office and post processed (using Trimble's Pathfinder Office 3.10) the data collected and imported it into ArcGIS. Picked up on where I had left after yesterdays data loss snapping the sewer lines over to their corrected positions, including some of my data that had been collected & imported previously in the week.

A shot showing some of the Peridian GPS data along with my GPS data
-Also, thanks to some schedule switching, I will no longer be in on Fridays, how sad. The benefits of doing ten hours for the first four days of the week.
-Another note, today was Kyle Purdon's birthday, Happy Birthday

Event: MySpace @ JCW

I thought it was time to let people have another view of my workspace at Johnson County Wastewater. The last time I had put up office photos were way back in June of 2005 when I had just started and we were in the old Southcreek building. Old pic


A shot of my entire cube here at Johnson County Wastewater.


In this shot you can see my miniature Dell Optiplex SX280 hiding under the monitor, and the Trimble GPS unit (the Geo XH) on the right of the desk.

Project: Manipulating the GPS & Sewer data in ArcGIS

Today, I started lining up the existing sewer profiles with the GPS points using the ArcGIS software. The process is relatively simple, set the snap onto the three different GPS datasets and then snap each manhole and sewer line onto the GPS point. This process is visible in the picture below, the light blue/highlighted line shows where the currently selected sewer was on the map, and the thin green line is where the sewer will be after the software redraws the image. Down at the bottom, at manhole 38, you can see a set of sewer lines & manhole that are waiting to be snapped into place onto the green GPS marker. The green GPS markers are the data points collected by Peridian, while the not visible "salmon" and pink colored crosshairs are the two data sets that Kyle Purdon and I have collected over the first two days of this project.

Project: Prarie Village GPS day 2

Went out again today to do some more GPS locating and extended my area I covered out to Mission Road and as far south as 79th. Nearby some of the manholes I was locating, Insituform was doing a pipe lining. It was pretty interesting to see the little bit I did. This GPS project should lats quite a bit fo the summer, as some of the manholes are difficult to locate and may even require bringing out a crew with metal detectors, poke rods, and even maybe the line TV truck. Most of the morning had poor satellite reception, which made it slow to keep progressing, because the GPS reciever kept pausing to gain enough satellites to keep logging data.

Event: Computer Upgrade

Today the RAM on my Dell Optiplex SX280 was upgraded from the factory 512mb to 2 gig to aid in speeding up working in ArcGIS which is both a memory and processor hog.

Project: Prarie Village GPS

Today, Kyle Purdon, the new intern in the engineering department, and I went out to Prarie Village in the 77th and Belinder area to do some manhole locating for the GIS database. Initially of the first 6 we attempted to find, we found 1. After that it became significantly easier to find the next few manholes. A few attempts had to be aborted because of angry dogs, etc. The area has been partially covered by Peridian Group, and we are going in to locate the manholes that they couldn't find.

This map is just some of the area we/I will be covering in the next few weeks.

Project: Learning GIS

Besides the training I've been recieving from Jim, I've been looking up tutorials online for different aspects of ArcGIS from the basic to the complex. From a tutorial I read this morning, I learned how to create new data files and more specifically create shapefiles. I used this new knowledge in a map plotting out the different locations of Taco Bells nearby as reported by google maps. Hopefully, I'll be able to start doing the GPS/manhole aligning in ArcGIS soon, its a huge project.

Event: One year at JCW

Today marks my being here with JCW for one year.

see: "My first post on the 'Life of an Intern' blog"

Project: Coupling GIS with GPS

Today Jim Bills placed ArcGIS 9.1 on my computer so that once I start bringing in the new GPS data from the Leawood sewer area I can go and correct the old manhole positions to the new GPS plotted points. For now he has my expirementing with GIS, adding and managing layers, working on varying label types with the Maplex label engine, getting layer data, changing the point label/symbol and more. I thought I'd post a screenshot of some of the data I had imported.

Imported into this view are the following layers:
-addpt - includes the address point database, can bring up house #'s property ID's, etc
-co_cent - street centerlines
-indx_arc (off) - 10 foot topo contours
-co_cov -"section" markings
-soils (off) - soil quality/type map data
-Ortho2005_NE (off) - includes the aerial photography for the NE part of the county
-Ortho2005_NW (off) - includes the aerial photography for the NW part of the county
-Ortho2005_SE - includes the aerial photography for the SE part of the county
-Ortho2005_SW (off) - includes the aerial photography for the SW part of the county

The reason several of the layers are off is that everytime you move the map it has to redraw all the layers (you can set zoom thresholds, one is set for soil, but soil is off anyways) so if your zoomed out at the city level and move to the side just a little bit it redraws thousands of polylines, points, etc which can take quite a while.

Project: ID Badge production

Today I helped Carolyn out with producing ID badges for the Public Health department. The project consisted of going through and completing already started database entries and creating new people in the system. Publich health employees then come in and get their picture taken and megred with their tag data, and then sent to the badge printer where it uses a ribbon printer to put all three primary print colors, black, and a varnish on the badge.