Graduation!

Graduation! Just here with my fellow Geography grads at the NIU graduation ceremony. Me, Andy, Kris, Alex and Trevor.

Spring

Spring has sprung! With warming weather the snow and ice has basically all gone now, and we even had a thunderstorm last night.

The warm weather has also brought more people out walking and running, and of course shopping. I am sure that mall carparks are more crowded in the warmer weather. It's nice to be out in the sun though!

Let it snow

So a week back I posted on Facebook that DeKalb's winter so far had been, well, a bit weak. To be fair, for the last 18 months my colleagues have been warning me about the bitter cold, the mountains of snow, the general bleakness of winter here and it just hasn't been the case.
Today it started snowing, big flakes of it, resulting in a couple of inches on the ground by the time I was heading home. About time!
So here are a couple of views of Davis Hall for you to enjoy.

Davis Hall

The view from the second floor

The DeKalb Navy?

Strange ships have turned up in various small ponds and lagoons around DeKalb, and I snapped a few photos with my phone to share them. The first ones I noticed were in the West Lagoon at NIU campus, and consisted of what appear to be small submarines.

Submarine in NIU West Lagoon

Nobody in the Geography Department seems to have any idea what they are, apart from the Department Chair who suggested they may be an art project. Other ideas were some sort of monitoring equipment, or to keep the geese off. While the geese don't get too close to it, it certainly doesn't scare them away.

Out by Lowes however there are more of them in a small retention pond, and they seem to represent a small navy... in the photo below you can see that one is partially sunk.

Possibly the result of a battle, or an aggressive goose

Large Battleship on patrol by Lowes. Submarine in the background.

So the art project seems to be the most likely option, although why there are only submarines by NIU is a bit of a mystery. I would expect less people would see them down by Lowes where they are below street level and beside a car park. There seems to be some sort of tugboat in the Lowes pond as well, I couldn't get a good photo but it is painted red in parts.

The blogger android app sucks

It showed me a duplicate of my post, making me think I had posted it twice, so I deleted it. Of course it wasn't duplicated!

Where does the time go?

Busy, crazy busy. As I write this, realising that it has been ages since I posted here last, I am installing Autodesk 3DS Max, Autocad Map 3D and AutoCAD (hooray for student deals!). I have also installed UNITY and Google SketchUp. So far I have only used SketchUp, but there is still time.

To procrastinate and have a break from all this work, I have been out bass fishing. Really, it's chucking plastic worms around in a muddy waterway that's bigger than a pond but smaller than a lake. As you can't see the fish (or even your own lure most of the time) it's not particularly exciting, and unlike fishing in say, Queenstown, the views aren't exactly stellar either. Of course the first time I catch one of these bass might be a whole other story...

I did play around with doing a timelapse of clouds though, thanks to Stephen the met master. Ridiculously easy with the timelapse movie function on the G9, might have to do some more. Once I get my tripod I can also try it the old fashioned way with the 40D and my new intervalometer!

We did get one last blast of snow in January before winter gave up with a whimper, the last few weeks have been toasty warm, shorts weather for the most part and the grass is green and the trees are budding and blossoming like crazy. Hence the fishing and picnicing.

One last view of the winter, bye!

2012 goals

So the new year has started, and even though my first day of it consisted mainly of sleeping (a result of partying until 5 am and half a bottle of 18 year old Johnny Walker Gold), a few thoughts began to surface around what I wanted to achieve this year.

The first thing that sprang to mind was improving my Spanish. Even a couple of weeks here in Arequipa being basically immersed in the language hasn't boosted me as much as I'd hoped, which I suspect is mainly due to a limited vocabulary (I am better than I was though). It's time to start getting serious about it and doing some structured learning and workbooks. Luckily I will get to practice it at home.

The second thing is improving my coding skills. I started with VBA, building MS Access front ends and small Office tools. MapBasic came next, learning by doing and by trying to fix a broken application at work. The next step was converting VBA code to run in ArcGIS10, deciding on VB.NET for ease and speed reasons. I also built a few add-ins for ESRI products. I also played around with Python, mainly in ESRI again (data driven pages etc). But with such an informal path I feel like I am missing some solid background, so will be addressing this first. I may also look at learning C#, which seems to mark a person as being a more serious GIS developer type than VB.

Both of these should have immediate benefits and feedback, which hopefully should go a long way towards keeping me motivated. Plus the coding aspect (esp Python) will be important for my thesis work which is an added incentive with specific timeframes included. And writing it here gives me that much more reason to stick with it!

print "Happy New Year!"
print "¡Feliz Años!"