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.

Short but Successful

This week, only a 3 day due to a FIRST Robotics Regional, was nonetheless productive as shown by still completing folders 10-12 in this time frame. They may have been less full than the others, but the macro is the important part. These files are nothing that I haven't described before, just some more of them.

In case you have forgotten, what I am doing more of is street light files on roads and intersections all over our fair city. What this boils down to is a stapled stack of about 6 large papers outlaying the entire region, then the following pages show closer and more detailed drawings of separate sections of the area or of the specific streetlight design forms. There is more than that, but I cannot decipher much more than that. I haven't looked at any closely in a while, but it is interesting to see how much the city has on file, and how I could essentially find and layout every utility in my neighborhood from the files that I have access to. I don't exactly plan on it, but I now know that I have the ability.

Tour of the Water Testing Laboratory

Same work load this week. I finished another three of those drawers, and will be jumping into #10-12 next week, which I believe to be the final three. On another note, there are no hidden meanings in the title this time; this week I took a tour of the City of Olathe Water Testing Laboratory. This was about a week and a half in the works, and completely due to the benevolence of Dewayne, the laboratory manager.

This tour was very interesting. The building consisted of a series of labs, some stereotypical, some not, but each with the purpose for testing both drinking and sewage water for different amounts of different things. This could range from bacteria, to oxygen, to organics, to pesticides, to minerals, as well as many things that I have never learned about. They did some of the tests by hand, seemingly fairly similar to the labs that I do in science classes, but the macro testing was done by very fancy machinery definitely not seen in my science classrooms.

I must say, not only did the amount of tests for this water surprise me, but even more so was the quantity of water that they had to test each year. If I recall correctly, they had to do over 1,400 samples in a year, with a staffing of only about 7 people running multiple tests on each sample. A large amount of it has to be done by the machinery, but from what I saw everyone was still hard at work continuously, especially with all of the documentation and compliances that have to be met. I only scratched the surface, but the amount of paperwork and pencil pushing seems to be even more massive than the amount of testing.

Overall, it seemed like quite laborious work, but the kind of work that is scientifically interesting and significant to the continuation of society. In conclusion, I now know where my water comes from and how it got there.

Scheduled Fun

This week saw the completion of 2 of the 3 file folders. Yeah, not exactly keeping up with my last week self, but there is good reason for it-- because this is conferences week my schedule was different, and I was not able to get as many hours in.

The namesake for this blog is derived from the fact that I have scheduled a tour next week of the water and waste water laboratory with the gracious Dewayne McAllister. One of my coworkers had found out that I was planning on majoring in Chemical Engineering, so they suggested that I get in contact with Dewayne, the laboratory manager. He was very open and flexible about the requested tour, and it is now scheduled next Wednesday, in the building nearby. I do not know quite what to expect from the water and waste water laboratory, but it is bound to be interesting to find what my drinking water goes through.

Like a Machine

I think that I made good progress this week. I feel that I worked at a pace that would make the scanning machine blush.  I continued on my second set of three drawers of files, and I knocked it out in two days. Yup, you guessed it, now the next three are on their way. However, due to some unknown reason, they have taken a few days to arrive, so I now have jumped into putting on letter headings.

Letter headings is a different job that I do for the secretary and general go-to woman for information, Bobbi. When the Public Works Department switched buildings last summer to the one that we are currently in, its envelope letter heads did not exactly switch with it. The letter heads hold the old address, so what I need to do is take boxes of these envelopes and put on adhesive paper in just the right spot that titles our new address while covering the old. But once again, I was like a machine.

Come and Gone

Yep, another week has come by, saw how tired I was, then ran away. I am at the closing of week 3 of the robotics build season, and all is going well. At least I pretty sure it is... through all this haze.

As far as work goes, there has been no major happenings, especially since it is within the confines of my 3 day work week. My new street light files have come, another 3 of them, and I have gotten about 3 of them done. From what they tell me, they have more than enough for me to do during this job cycle. I really do not mind actually. This kind of work I can do pretty efficiently, and it gives me a lot of time to think while I work, which is all I really ask for in a job.

Finishing Up the First Batch

Just another week of work following the same prescribed schedule as last week. I have finished the scanning of the street light files, well, the first three drawers of them anyway. I do not quite know yet if I will be continuing on that or going to something else new next week.

Otherwise, no real major milestones reached recently, but while I have the space, I might as well as describe what scanning these files involves. They come in a large drawer basically, large enough to fit files about 3ft wide and 2ft deep. I pull these files from the drawer, remove all staples or bindings, then insert one page at a time into this massive printer/scanner that is about as wide as my wingspan (no, I haven't actually checked). Then I remove one page at a time, and insert another page at a time. It isn't the most invigorating work, but it is cool to see such a large machine work.

Beginning of the End

The climax of my year has arrived. FIRST Robotics build season is here, and that means a lot of work, little sleep, and a great deal of grade fudging. The most significant difference is in scheduling. With the current robotics schedule, I will not be able to go to work on Mondays or Fridays. This leaves me with only three days, about 7 hours in total. I will need to make it all up after build season.

Now for the large files that I have been scanning-- I noticed that I never quite described what they actually are or who they are for. This is a job that I am doing for the Traffic Department, a building just a little south of the Public Works Department. The files that I am scanning are very large, CAD style documents that are of street light placement around Olathe. Basically a few intersections are shown per page, and the documents layout the street light placement.

Okay, I will cut the post off here, I need to hibernate before all of this really gets in gear.

Setting the Stage

As I'm sure you have been lamenting, this is my first post in a few weeks due to winter break. Just for you, I will fill in the gap.

Just about a week or two into winter break, Connor Weeks and I switched duties again. I had been doing the GIS mapping over Olathe sidewalks, and he had been doing some scanning to be put into the mysterious Application Extender program; basically, putting it on the Olathe database. However, there is a twist. I had not been taught Application Extender, and rather than go through all of that jazz, I received something immediate and within my knowledge base-- I now am scanning massive street light project files. They are not the size of the mega sheet, but they all get close, and they definitely must be done in the largest scanner. Some guys lugged in 3 large drawers of them, and told me that there were plenty more. Wish me luck.