What’s with these laptops nowadays

It seems that everyday I open up my favorite blogs I hear yet another story of laptop discoloration
melting magsafe connectors, odd noises, and other ills. Most of these were related to the MacBooks & MacBook Pros but now I just read about an alleged Dell laptop exploding at a conference in Japan (Dell is currently investigating). I can understand the Macbook issues its Apple’s first debut of Intel based laptops and perhaps they didn’t think about a few things before rushing out the first batch. Dell on the other hand have been making Intel-based laptops for a while so what’s up with that. If you don’t think this is a big deal imagine if you were on a plane and this happens… Bad news all the way around. Hope that these two companies figure out what’s causing these funky issues and fix them. Until then I think I’ll stick to my desktop until the next edition of the MB/MB Pro line particularly.

Stipple Art

l will be the first to admit that I did not get any artistic gene especially with drawings and things of that nature. My brother ended up with that although he doesn’t do much art nowadays. I do appreciate art though and tend to like abstract art for the most part. Specifically I like Escher, Miro and Kandinsky. anyway, I came across some stipple art that I thought was cool so I decided to provide a link to some art by Noli Novak who does Stipple portraits for the Wall Street Journal. Anyway, check them out, there are some good ones in there…

Back in the Fingerlakes

So I’m back from Johnstown and the ArcSDE training course is over with. Got a nice little certificate with Jack Dangermond’s signature on it. It was a good course and I would recommend it to anyone who will be administering ArcSDE databases. My brain is a bit fried though and now I have a headache from the lack of sleep I got last night among other things. Its raining here and a bit hot. I can tell its been raining a lot coz everything looks really green around here and most of the trees are in full bloom now. Lets just say they all have that summer look about them. Well, I’m off to get some rest… Gosh its hot and stuffy here and the rain is making things worse not cooling things off as I would like. Oh well!

TCIMAP Updates

It seems that all I write about is work nowadays. Just wanted to say that we got a few more AcIMS web services up and running since the last time. TCIMAP now has a County Facility locator and some scenic resources. Use the view photograph map tool to check out the photos.

ArcSDE in Johnstown Still Here

So we finished Day 4 of 5 for that ArcSDE training course and my brain is pretty fried. I’m exhausted sitting there in that cold room stuffin info in my brain and eating bad foods. Don’t get me wrong I am very glad to have taken the course but we’ve been pushing it kinda fast all week and I’m a bit tired. Today we learned a bit about working with Multi-versioned databases. It wasn’t too bad except that I had a script error or two while trying to run the SQL query analyzer. It seems that I always get stuck trying to run these scripts. We’ll be talking about reconciling conflicts, compression and troubleshooting tomorrow and then we are done. Can’t wait for tomorrow afternoon… I did learn some cool stuff about editing that I didn’t know about before though like using the overview window to navigate in ArcMap. Had no idea that you could edit in the overview window without having to zoom to the feature. Also learned a bit about the proper use of the map cache. Cool stuff. All in all it was a fun day now I have to get off this thing and get some much needed rest.

Blogged with Flock

Flocking

I’m away from my Mac this week and was getting annoyed with IE 6 mainly due to the lack of tabs so I decided to give Flock a try. I have to say that its really growing on me and I especially like the Blog this feature which is what I’m using right now. You just select a block of text or image that you want to blog about on the web and it pops it in a new blog page editing window graphics and all. You can style your text, add links and even check your spelling. Its fast becoming my new blogging tool, I actually find it a bit easier than Ecto. You can download flock and give it a try. It does a lot of other sun stuff that I haven’t had time to try yet. Will be adding this to my Mac to replace Firefox. BTW the ArcSDE training course is coming along. We are still going at a fast pace and I learned more than I thought was possible about Spatial Index, tracing and dbtune today… Useful stuff though and it was a beautiful day. The instructor allowed us to sit outside for a bit and get some sunnage a while. Nice Instructor!

Blogged with Flock

Stuck in Johnstown Day 2

We were a bit late to class today coz my colleage had to troubleshoot some problems back in the office via VPN and the connection was slow from here. When we finally got to class sometime after 9 AM, we dived right into the tail end of a lecture and went off to do the first excercises for the day. We learned all about ArcSDE architecture and connections where we actually went through and created 3 types of connections (application server, direct, OLE DB). It was pretty straightforward. After that we monitored connections at the command prompt then dabbled a bit in SQL Enterpise Manager (Management Studio if you are using 2005). The next two chapters covered loading vector data and raster data which is pretty strightforward except for the parts where we had to write a few .bat files to do what we can do in the GUI. You see I’m not good at this type of thing and I ended up making a few mistakes and didn’t get the scripts to run the first time. This was in the challenge section so I didn’t feel too bad but I can see how this can be useful if you are loading more than a few large datasets. The quirkiest part of the excercise though was sitting there and calculating XY shifts and geodatabase centers. There is a calculator script out there for that and you don’t have to do this by hand. I understand the concepts but those long numbers just make my head hurt when I’ve been doing other things with my brain We left off with loading raster data and I’m on section 7 Using footprints in ArcMap. So far things are OK except that I wish we had a few more breaks in class. We’re a bit ahead of schedule and if we keep going at this pace we’ll get home at a reasonable hour on Friday. Albeit a bit brain damaged…

Blogged with Flock

Stuck in Johnstown

I'm writing this from ArcSDE Admin class in Johnstown, NY. Its day one of training and we just finished lunch and is about to start installing ArcSDE in our next lesson. I'm drinking some weird tasting tea from a machine. Its probably weird coz I put my own mate tea bag in there. Have to stay awake for the next section its very important. I just learned a whole lot more about raid than I care to know but its cool coz I learned alot in the process of discussing the topic. Really cool stuff hope I can remember half of this stuff when the week is over. For now I have to run its back to class…

Dangerous Cashews

I like cashews alot. Like em roasted, salted, raw whatever. Its a favorite snack of mine so imagine my surprise when I picked some up at the local health food store in Town and popped in more than a few of the nutty treat and was feeling just a bit sick afterwards. I left it at work for a day or so and was just feeling a bit drained and thought that I was coming down with something (a rare thing for me in the Spring time). I couldn’t shake this exhausted feeling off though and felt like lead for a couple of days. I ran through all the allergens in my head that usually causes me to feel like that. Let’s see, I wasn’t around any house pets (cats or dogs), had no dairy products that I could think of, no peanuts, nothing with MSG or corn syrup so what could be causing this bad awful feeling. Day 2 headaches started to set it… Sinus getting clogged up, I scour my place looking for any signs of mold nothing unusual. Air flow and air quality is good… Day 3 I picked up the cashews to have some and noticed some writings on the front. Usually I read the ingredients of everything before cooking it or putting it into my mouth except I didn’t when I bought those cashews. So I continue to read and noticed the big bad ingredient that was causing my malady. “ROASTED IN PEANUT OIL” Drats! How could I have been so stupid and missed that? Its a good thing I’m not deathly allergic like some people are to peanuts coz I wouldn’t be writing this today. I’m still feeling a bit drained though and this happened last week so I think I’ll remember to read those packages next time. Needless to say I’m taking a break from cashews for a while and gave the rest of them to my co-worker who has no problems with peanuts.

TCIMAP

Gosh can’t believe it’s June already my how time flies when you are having fun. I finally got the ArcIMS migration stuff finished up and have posted a version for public use we’re calling TCIMAP. To get to the map services click on View map services at the bottom. I’m just glad its done now we can add more map services (I’m itching for a service of County facilities since I keep mixing the buildings up ). Next up is get the help system that I slaved on all last week attached properly. If you click on help now it just doesn’t work but assuming all goes well that will be up and running by mid Monday. Then there is updating a bulk of the data with the latest and greatest, figuring out how to attach a hill-shade map to the background of that map up there and tweaking a few of the services… like the NRI app which is still not complete. I guess our work is never done.