Tonight starts the GIS 101 class again. I always like the beginning of the semester when fresh minds are exposed (often for the first time) to GIS. Hopefully I won't begin to burn them out until the very end of the semester at the earliest. We are just going over the very basics of the software tonight (zooming and panning, the magnifier view (does anyone really use that ?), basics of layers and symbology). Later in the semester we will do some simple selections, more advanced symbology (quantiles), tabular joins etc. Then even later we will try some editing, and geocoding. Then near the very end we start in on spatial operations like clip, union, intersect etc. and then I'll have them do a project. Hopefully some of the students will take to this.

As a follow up to my post about the conference, I decided to recap my experiences at the conference this year.

What I'm talking about
http://www.esri.com/events/user-conference/index.html

So this summer I had the pleasure of attending my 3rd ever ESRI International User's Conference in San Diego California. My first Conference was in July, 2001 and my second was in August, 2004 In 2004 I entered the Applications Fair with my VB6 version of the Watershed Characterization and Modeling System (WCMS) most of which, my colleagues Mike and Jackie Strager developed previously in Avenue.

I'm excited to say that I'll be attending the ESRI User's Conference again this year (my 3rd ever). I'm presenting on Tuesday afternoon. The presentation is on research I'm doing with Dr. Brosi at Frostburg State University with Black Cohosh and American Bugbane (two plants that grow in the Central Appalachians). We have been looking at factors that affect flowering and we are also doing a risk of discovery evaluation (e.g. vulnerability to harvest).

Some folks thought they might have found the lost city of Atlantis using Google Ocean. However this article indicates that it just isn't so.

Hopes dashed as Google Ocean image of “lost city of Atlantis” proves to be nothing of the sort

I just added the Appalachian Laboratory (where I work) to a cool service called WikiMapia. It is best described as a mashup of wikipedia and google maps. It looks just like google maps but it allows anyone to add a location to the map by drawing a square on the map and then marking up what the area represents.

Funny story about burglars of GPS equipment. Know what you are stealing !

GPS Devices Lead to Suspects' Home

I dugg this one. Funny Errors from Windows Update, Nero, Remedy, Papa Johns Website, and Strange London Train System signs.

Funny Error Messages

Donna has been playing these for awhile now. Occasionally she sends me one. I did one with a little white dog, and I just did one that was fireworks for the 4th of July. The code to do this must be something else. It appears to be javascript ?

jigzone.com

Classed as “Tetrispawn” by the folks at Wired.com. I can see some Tetris-like qualities. A fun diversion.

Ringmania 2

I've been thinking about doing this for some time now. I finally broke down and paid for some server space through godaddy.com. I don't have much content there yet but I've set up two domains. The first will be my personal website jbchurchill.com. The second is westernmdbirding.com. This should be fun. Its a linux host so I plan to try my hand with some Perl and CGI programming. I've been playing around with Perl for a few months now (perhaps almost 1 year ?).