Looking Back

It had to come eventually. Yep, this is my very last blog post. The accumulation of all of the past school year of work. I will admit that it got a little stressful at times, as it always does. I was teetering on the edge of being overwhelmed by all that I had to juggle at some points, but it all worked out in the end. Honesty and sincerity are the best policy, for work or for school.

I learned quite a lot this year, including many technical programs, many technical machines, and a few lessons. I started out with the ArcGIS program, adding some file manipulation techniques to my technical repertoire and a brand new software under my belt. I then went on to the scanning, learning a total of three scanning machines as well as PDF manipulation through adobe professional. I can now scan with the best of them.

Most of the year I did stick between these two subjects, and as a result I think that I became quite talented at them, learning many obscure shortcuts and commands which improved my efficiency immensely. However, I still did much more. I took field trips on multiple occasions and saw many other aspects of city employment. I shadowed a coworker as they did water basin surveys, which was quite interesting, and I saw the science side of the city when I visited the city water treatment facility. Fairly recently I distributed pamphlets for the city and a while back I even took some customer service calls. It was all quite enlightening and gave me many interesting perspectives on city employment.

In hindsight, I have learned quite a lot, and the sheer experience of being employed will go on to help my pursue my career goals, whatever those my be. So, my faithful reader, remember my humble beginnings when I am rich and famous.

Retracing My Steps

This week was a continuation of the georeferencing of the street light layout files that I have scanned. I have made good progress, but there is still a way to go. My goal is to have it all done by the end of the school year, leaving something new and exciting awaiting me for the summer months. However, to get there, I will have to keep on rolling through for now.

In addition, this week I have a special treat for you. As a final for my internship class, I have compiled a sort of documentary video of my experiences from my internship and what I learned from it all. And if the video is not working, it is titled "ONW Internship Presentation" on Youtube. I hope you enjoy it and feel free to comment.

Voice of the Government

I took a field trip this week to spread the voice of the government. As I said last week, I had printed off, folded, and banded many informative pamphlets last week for the purpose of correcting some improper lawn grass dumping from a certain neighborhood. Curious as to why this was a big deal, I asked about it. I had thought that because it was just biological material to begin with, it would only benefit the streams that it was dumped into.

However, I was wrong-- this dumping results in the imbalance of water nutrients often leading to an overabundance of algae. In addition, lawn grass has the chance to carry fertilizers and weed sprays added to it, which is definitely not beneficial to the stream ecosystem. Now fully educated myself, my next job was to educate others. I spent one day of the week on a road trip to attach these pamphlets to doors of the area surrounding the incident stream. Now we can only hope that they get the message and keep the streams clear.

Otherwise, the rest of the week was very similar to the last. I continued to georeference the ".tiff" street light layout files into ArcGIS, and just kept chugging along. This is one of the larger projects that I have been given-- it will be a while longer until I am done because I can only chink a little bit of it off at a time, but don't worry my dear reader, I will find other things about my workplace to tell you about.

More Referencing

As the title suggests, these past 5 days have seen to more georeferencing, but I have also picked up a few more tricks. Not all of the ".tiff" files necessarily show the plat that they are referencing, so after some troubleshooting I found that I can also search the database by street name or intersection. This allows me to find some of the more tricky documents and really should allow me to find any of them if the more convenient plat searching function does not work.

In addition to this business, I closed off the week by folding some pamphlets that I will also distribute to parts of the city next week. Apparently a certain neighborhood has had some problems with dumping in a stream, so this pamphlet is essentially a specialized informative paper to educate the area that this is an issue with. Not quite sure how many houses this entails, but a road trip will be nice. My beloved reader, prepare for exciting tales next week.

Georeferencing

I haven't learned something new in a while, but this week saw an end to that. Turns out that I was incorrect when I previously said that I would be using all of my scanned files to mark out the street lights on all of Olathe. What I am doing is sort of similar, but it does not include marking lights. It is something called georeferencing, and initially it was complex enough leave me dazed for a while. However, I am happy to tell you that I got the hang of it after a few days and many questions.

I will walk you through the steps. Now that I have all the ".tiff" files extracted, I then pull those separately into the ArcGIS map program as previously described. This creates a map layer for the each picture file that I draw in. I then read the document to see what Olathe "plat" (small plots of land) it lies on, then select that plat from a menu. This brings me to it on the main Olathe map, and I can then do the actual georeferencing. I then compare the picture file and the main map and pick at least two easy to spot overlapping landmarks. This locks them overlapping each other showing the exact same plot of land, but with the picture document showing the street light layout. The next step is to save, and then I am done. That ".tiff" file has been georeferenced to the map.

It all took a while to get used to and make meaningful progress, but these files are of undeveloped plats as well, so I can see the layout of all the roads and homes before they are even built. I may be weird, but there is just something satisfying about that.

Playing with Files

This week was a shortened week due to the upcoming FIRST Robotics Regional. I only had two work days this week, but they were used hard at work first putting all of my scanned street light ".pdf" files into separate folders, naming them, and then removing the specific page that showed the street light layout on each document into its own ".tiff" file, although the exact process for each one is slightly different. For the ones that were scanned before me, all the folder has is ".tiff" files and I need to combine them into a ".pdf". Others are only the ".pdf", while the best ones are both the ".pdf" and the ".tiff", so all I need to do is delete the unnecessary ".tiff" files. Unfortunately, I had about two hundred of these to do as well, which still took me a deceptively long time.

However, all of the folder naming and placements are done for them, and I am now starting on removing the ".tiff" files on them. As I said last week, it is at least some solace to know that all that I do is compounding on itself and becoming a part of something bigger.

Putting the Pieces Together

Well, this was an interesting week. With all of the street light plans done, I began work anew. However, I found out that this next job is a culmination of the last. For my new work, I would be going over all of the street light PDF files that I had created, and copying the street light plan file in the stack into a ".tif" picture file. This picture file will then be used in the future to post over the ArcGIS program map so that we will be able to reference it to  the ArcGIS map and then mark of the street lights and circuits for all of the streets of the city. I may be mistaken on the exact process to get there, but it will be satisfying to have the street light points on the ArcGIS map be a direct result of the work that I have done. Now all I need to do is get there.

Until next week my avid reader.