Studying Middle Earth

http://gozips.uakron.edu/~pb12/middleearth.html

The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien

The epic story of good and evil, a little like star wars, except no outer space and kind of magical. I fell in love with it when my uncle took me to watch the movies one cold night in 2001. It was very near new years and I really wanted to stay in, but he said he loved the books. We saw the first part (The Fellowship of the Ring), and throughout the movie i kept saying "Danny I love it" and he kept telling me "sshhh". I was enthralled. He then made me read "The Hobbit" so that I would have context, and it was by far the best, somehow! However they were all good. Slowly I became obsessed with all things Lord of the Rings. I wanted to experience it in every way possible. It grew deeper and deeper in me like a seed. I have highly active imagination, however I could never get my fill of the Lord of the Rings, then I found Lord of the Rings Online. It consumed me. However in Massive Multiplayer Online Games there tends to be drama, so we need to take breaks from them ever so often. Also recently they made it Free to Play, which means they make money through a shop, and it has been a big killjoy.

This time of year is full of Christmas music and this and that, but this time I wanted to fill it with something I loved, so I am rereading all the books, watching the movies, and may play the games (as I write, Boromir just got shot, in the movie, by the Urukhai, and geez what a scene. Merry and Pipin get carried away, and Boromir is there with 20 arrows in his chest).

Above is a link to a project I did on Middle Earth, sometime soon I will put up the power point also. It was a presentation for a Landscape class I took during my masters at Akron. This kind of proves, that you can almost study anything when you are doing your "higher education".

If you haven't read the books or seen the movies... go do so. It is not for everyone however, but they are still some of the best made movies ever.

Lexus like Texas

My father and my mom got their new Lexus (renewed the lease and upgraded, however the ridiculous deal works). So the guy at the Lexus dealership says "when you get the number plate try getting Lex 7345" (or something of the sort, however it did have LEX in it).
My father retorted "It's a Lexus, everyone can see it's a Lexus, why should the plate say Lex? I will get whatever I want for it".
Now notice many Lexus cars have Lex as a number plate? Do they want to iterate it so badly because the big L on the front and back of the car are not enough. Let's get our customers to advertise for us even more, yeah?
Tsh!

I will upload pictures I take of real silly plates etc soon.

Here's one!

Another one!

Winter Wistfulness

Everyone was saying it is an unusually warm November, but we Ohioans know the weather can be very erratic. So we cling enjoy the warm weather, and hide the fear of the long, bitter-cold, depressing grey winters. The first day of December brings us our first snow that sticks to the ground, just a few days after thanksgiving. The coldness begins. The trees are seemingly lifeless, the skies are grey as usual, and previously mentioned... the atmosphere is all round gloomy. Around the 5th the snow storm or whatever begins, and dumps snow all over us, not very kindly either. Hour after hour, minute after minute, relentless, no breaks, watching it is scary. We know the roads will be dangerous, commuting time will be longer, the traffic will be awful. It's holiday season so everyone will be out Christmas Shopping, inevitably there will be extra traffic. We can only hope for other people being mindful and kind during this time... we are all under stress, we are all in a hurry, we are all frustrated by the snow.
Outside the world is just white. Snow White. The tree branches are laden with white fluff, the roads are deadly, the cars are buried under, the Canadian Geese are huddled in the snow, they weren't expecting winter so soon either.
As beautiful as the snow is, it is destructive, deadly and dangerous, also very depressing. There is no color but white grey and black in the environment. Death's own creation, and thus the beginning is the end, is the beginning.
The bright spot is knowing there will always be a spring. Lush green will reside once again in the trees, the birds will come back and chirp their wooing songs to their mates, life will come back, and we humans shan't be the only ones bustling about the earth.
The little joys of this winter weather is that it is great for bundling up, spending time with loved ones and cuddling, and then some nice hot chocolate. On a side note, Cricket loves and hates winter, she loves prancing about in the snow and being utterly silly, however she dislikes the cold to the point she won't go out, and she won't sit on the ground outside (for her little butt gets cold).

Cricket enjoying a nice wintery walk with her little pink winter coat on. She was sticking her head and digging up the snow, like a silly dog! Also she seems more alert that its all completely white outside.

Watershed Delineation Using ArcInfo 9.2 and LIDAR Data

This watershed analysis was done for Cleveland Metroparks using their primary datasets. LIDAR was acquired from OSIP.

Watershed Delineation

1-     Add reservation boundaries layer. Select a reservation. Zoom in.

2-     Add Hydrology layer and detailed streams layer from H:\temp\Mosaics-10000\1-STREAM ORDER SHAPEFILES-10000

3-     Add watershed layer from

4-     Draw rough boundary of watershed around the reservation with draw tool.

5-     Load the DEMS first by copying into V: drive and then decompressing the files using the command lines.

6-     Mosaic the “filled” DEMS

7-     Create subset of the entire mosaic

8-     Use the special “other tools” watershed delineation tool. Set output destinations.

9-     This will refill the filled mosaic. It will take a long time to run.

10- Infer the rivers from the “streams” output

11-  Convert selected streams into new shapefile

12-  Convert watershed raster to polygon

13-  Use “select by location” or ‘select by attributes” to select the watershed polygons that contain the selected streams.

14-  Create hillshade from the mosaic-ed raster DEM

15- create 2 ft and 5 ft contours from the mosaic-ed DEM

16- dissolve the polygon layer

17- DO NOT delete any of the intermediate layers

18- To correct errors put shapefiles into Geodatabase and set topology rules. Run.

For Urban Areas, Sewers, Storm Water Data, Pipes, Culverts etc.

1-     First add the infrastructure network layer on to the map

2-     Then activate Arc Hydro Tools 9

3-     Under Terrain Preprocessing find the DEM manipulation

4-     Under DEM manipulation find DEM Reconditioning

5-     The Mosaic will be the Raw DEM

6-     The AGREE Stream will be the network

7-     AGREE DEM will be the output (name wisely)

8-     Stream Buffer -5

9-     Smooth Drop/Raise (DEM z unit) -10

10-  Sharp Drop/Raise (DEM z unit) – 1000

I will update this later with step by step images, fails, and final product picture later.

Shortcut Keys for Special Symbols in ArcMap

Character	Keystroke		Unicode		Notes
Degree symbol	Alt+0176	°	00B0	°
Minute or prime symbol			2032	′	Do not use quote key
Second or double prime symbol			2033	″	Do not use double quote key
Copyright	Alt+0169	©	00A9	©	Should not be used in a narrow or condensed font
Plus sign	+ key	+
Minus sign			2212	−	The dash key or the minus key on the numeric keypad should not be used
Plus/minus sign	Alt+0177	±	00B1	±
Tilde	~ key	~	007E	~
Small tilde	Alt+0152	˜	02DC	˜
Hyphen or dash	- key	-
En dash	Alt+0150	–	2013	–
Em dash	Alt+0151	—	2014	—