One thing I can say about owning your own business is you get tied up in a lot of different things. Some fun and some not so fun. This was something fun.
I found myself the first full week in June at a Clean Water Kids Camp. How did I get involved -I got there because of the Caribbean Sea….no it wasn’t in the Caribbean. It was at Audubon Acres. I met the director of Caribbean SEA about a year ago at another even and helped clean up a map they had of St. Lucia (in the Caribbean). So this summer they ramped up the TenneeSEA portion of the non-profit and held this camp. Kids got to spend a week outside learning the basics of clean water and watersheds. I went out for three days. The first day I scooped critters out of a creek.
My second day out I spoke about maps. As you can imagine that went over well with 21 kids who have the attention span of a gnat. So after the talk and in the middle of a thunderstorm I started the second portion of my presentation: Geo-caching. I lucked up – with the work that I’ve done on Open Street Map and thanks to the generosity of Cloudmade they shipped us some GPS’s. It’s actually quite amazing, 1o years ago I struggled a bit to explain to people in English what I did. Now – you can stand in front of 21 kids and find that 25% have GPS’s on their phones (the may not fully understand what it is) and just about all the parents have an in-car navigation device. Oh yeah – and about half the kids have used Google Earth for something. So it only took about 15 minutes to get them up to speed on what they needed to do.
Now – Audubon Acres is one of those hidden/forgotten parks around Chattanooga. They much like everyone else have been feeling the crunch. I spoke with the Caretaker and she handed me a map. A 19 year old hand drawn map of the facilities. So I decided that I’m going to help. Thanks to Hamilton County Water Quality (a sponsoring organization) I received orthoimagery and some parcel information for Audubon Acres. I used ArcGIS to lay out the caches and used that information to load the GPS units with some pre-defined points. This wasn’t geocaching as those of you who are familiar with geocaching know it. We made it a bit easier. Kids used the GPS to walk to the points. They also got a papers with coordinates and the supervising adult in most cases got a map. If you look at the map below the red dots are caches. Notice the placement.
Audubon Acres
As I said – Audobon Acres had a 19 year old map. I turned on Tracking on the GPS Units. I put the Caches on Trails. So about 5 groups and 3 hours later – I should have multiple tracks on all the usable trails (they’ve lost a lot of trails back to the forest). From this – Audubon Acres should make Open Street Map and have a really new map for visitors (I hope). So this upcoming weekend I will be mapping Audubon Acres. The kids seemed to enjoy themselves. I made sure that they had to traverse the whole of the park. They had an option to cross at a bridge or to take a short cut across the creek. Once again proving that boys operate on about half their available brain cells they took the creek and made a trail. The girls crossed the creek and found the trail.
Back to the Kids Camp – they made the local news. If you have a question about the camp or want to hold one in your county – email Mary Beth Sutton at marybeth@caribbean-sea.org.
I should be posting the new map of Audubon Acres up shortly.
Oh yeah – Finally – My last appearance at the Clean Water Kids Camp.
Canoes
We all jumped in the water and paddled like maniacs down South Chickamauga Creek. This was taken from my Canoe – or as I call it North River Geographic System’s Aquatic Unit 4.
Unfortunately since things are things I haven’t gotten to announcing this yet….but I guess better late than never.
The Bizarre Map Challenge – It’s on and running now – in fact if you have one it’s time to register. I have often claimed that GIS is part art anyway – and this challenge is push in that direction. You use realworld data with a twist to get your point across.
Here you go:
It appears that there are about $8000 dollars worth of Prizes………Go for it.
If you live in the southeast, you should have noticed by now that it has been raining – a lot. Which for me isn’t that big of a deal.
Well – I had my first map delivery in the rain the other day and it turned into a big deal. They couldn’t get wet….and it was on a Sunday. So alot of stores that I could have went to get a map tube were closed. I had had a fairly long conversation previous to this day with people about Map Tubes. You have them at art stores, you can order them online, some of the A&E blueprint firms here in town sell them (actually now that I think about it – they may not be in business anymore). If I bought one I really wanted a cool looking Indiana Jones Leather Map tube with an optional bull whip.
What to do?
I’ve had a love hate relationship with plumbing. I live in an old house and have had my fair share of plumbing problems. I have plumbed water lines, septic sewer lines, dug in poo, and stood in water because of plumbing. I’ve used pvc to keep water in….why not out. So for right at $15.00 dollars I have a map tube with a screw on lid. I didn’t glue it – there are still come things I need to do like put foam in both end caps to keep the edges of my maps from getting folded. Other than that……not too shabby. The maps were delivered and never got wet.
I have no idea why the New York Times would make a map like this….but you have to love it.
So my first trip to the ESRI Users Conference in Palm Springs I snuck out of the conference and went to a park next to Palm Springs. So I’m out walking through the desert enjoying the springs under the palm trees. I top a small rise and there is a group of Minnesotans….or is it Minnesoda-uns….Anyway, I digress, I top the rise and run into a group of people. They are three shades of sunburned and sound funny – kinda like the movie Fargo (that had yet to arrive in theaters). I say “Howdy” and they launch into a tirade about how funny I sound and check to see if I was wearing shoes and if I had married my cousin. I launched into a tirade about hockey, tooks, and Minnesota in general.
So I say all that to say this – I can marry my cousin. In North Carolina there are conditions. What conditions? Who knows. I’m not surprised that Alasaka was on the list….was surprised Mississippi and Arkansas were not.
This has been the year of changes for me. Personal issues and not business unfortunately have dominated my life for the last few months. As a result, I quit watching just about all TV. I still tune into the Simpsons and a few shows but overall TV watching is down 80%. So when I do watch TV, I end up watching the commercials. I like commercials – plus being a business owner I’m intrigued over advertising. After all – you can sell anything with the right ad. So I about choked one night when I saw the “There’s a map for that” Verizon add campaign. It’s all about the 3G network or essentially how fast does your phone get on the internet. The interesting thing is that the campaign focuses around a map. For me (and maybe it’s just me), you have a map with the word coverage and what happens – equate it to cell coverage. So it’s a bit of a two edged advertisement: Att has weak coverage and slow coverage. Anyway, the two of them are engaged now in a slap fight over the ads. I don’t really care who wins, but it’s another look at how maps can affect the way we look at products.
Up until now plotting was a bit of a chore. Much more than it needed to be. I’ve had to use friends and businesses to make prints of maps. Really I’ve went in to most projects leaving printing up to the customer. After enough requests and questions – I grew into a plotter.
I introduce the Canon iPF 750.
I’ve had a long history of printing – I will say that it runs in my veins. My dad and is brother came to Chattanooga almost 45ish years ago and worked for a printing company doing silk screened prints – yes both shirts and signs but really a majority of their life was doing signs (My dad continued in this business until last week). After few years working with them I swore to never mix ink/worry about color again. A life in Geology should keep me away from computers.
When geology didn’t turn out to be all it was cracked up to be, through a series of events I ended up in the world of mapping. My first claim to fame was A.) Enjoying Arc/INFO alot more than I should have and B). the uncanny ability to make a plot in ArcPlot. The plotter of choice was a Versatech (?) plotter. That was eventually replaced with an hp650. Which was accompanied by a hp750ps, Encad Novajet Pro50, and a hp3500ps . So I am well acquainted with plotters…and ink..and colors. I became the default answer man for all things plotting. So I was almost right back in my dad’s shoes – printing.
At a conference this spring I saw and played with the big brother to this Canon. HP Plotters have had a stranglehold on the GIS printing market for years. Rightly so – they are good plotters. this one was a tad more affordable and a little bit cheaper on ink. Plus it’s a lease – so in three years I trade it back and upgrade.
My issue now – price per square foot for plots. I’m not in the printing business – I’m in the GIS business. So if it I can get it self sufficient (Prints pay for the paper and ink) in the next few months I will be extremely happy.
This is not a reference to my first jeep that looked like a rolling accident. Although I loved the car it did little for my self esteem when people would come running up and attempt to rescue me.
<onlookers>: “We’ve got a guy trapped behind the steering wheel – Doesn’t look good – call a priest.
<me>: “Get away. I just armor all’d the dash – you’re scaring away the women”.
Worse than that – and yes there are worse things (although at the time I wouldn’t have thought so) are poorly designed maps. I’ve made my fair share of bad maps from horrid color choices to even missspelling words in the title (did you catch that).
I stumbled on this website the other day. It’s a great place for public humiliation of bad maps. I’ve read through several of the articles and chuckled. Check it out.
I’ll leave you with this. One of my former colleagues (who has since shuffled off this mortal coil) couldn’t make a plot to save his life. It was just too much to get through. Granted at the time you had ArcPlot with which to contend. For those of you who didn’t have to trudge through the pain of making a plot resplendent with a north arrow and a scale bar in arcplot you’ve truly missed out.
I lucked up enough to get school’d in cartography from a few of the old manual cartography crowd that still existed in the department. Although I still have a lot to learn – I try to put as much effort into a final map as possible. In many cases the entire GIS project comes down to what is on a printed map.
I digress. I come back from somewhere that day many years ago and there’s this godawful train wreck of a map laying on the table. The colors are all wrong, fonts are terrible, and the scale is all screwed up. Of course the first thing I did was launch into a tirade on how this map for QAQC or as a final product was unacceptable. My former colleague looks up from the table and said “It’s my first plot – I was able to make it in arcmap and it just came off the plotter…”. I felt about this tall -> | less than 1 inch|.
So just beware in your critique of bad maps. You could take out an innocent well-meaning bystander in the drive by.
So I just finished up blabbering about NeoGeography. Here’s another great map:
This is a map from and Company/Website called Tips and Strategies. They’ve taken job loss data from the Bureau of Labor and Statistics over the last 5ish years. This screenshot shows job loss at the time of the November 2009 Election. To me, the interesting time frame is New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina in August 2005.
One thing that does strike me is how many Adobe Flash Maps are out and about. I’ve never really paid attention to them but I guess I should start.
Kudos to a excellent map made for a specific purpose that gets the message across to the user.
So – There’s a problem in East Tennessee as reported in Newspapers and the Intertubes. Essentially 3 types of songbirds (American Goldfinches, Purple Finches and Pine Siskins) are dying from an apparent salmonella outbreak. I saw this first sitting in a restaurant flipping through the newspaper. So after filling up my bird feeder this morning I decided to get online and look to see where the outbreaks were occurring. I know that the outbreak of bird death is probably larger than gets reported since the bird has to die somewhere you can find it.
I think I literally did about 30 – 50 searches on Google looking for a county name in East Tennessee. I learned two important things.
No one reports the news anymore – 1 to 5 people report it. 500 others just link or copy to the original article. I would at least try to change the wording a bit as was suggested by High School Teachers.
No one has a map of the affected counties because of my reason above and no one lists all the counties in one article. I found 6 of the 7 to 9 affected counties in 3 articles.
So I’m not as far as I can tell I’m not in the affected area but I did wash out my bird feeder.
Since the news has become entertainment more than anything else someone tried to link the salmonella outbreak to Peanuts since Peanuts are in bird food. Except the birds that are dying don’t eat Peanuts. But don’t let facts interrupt a good story.
Anywho – My 15 minute map using ESRI’s Data and Streetmap data layers. Please excuse the poor cartography. I wonder if this is a migration route.
