Week 9 = 10/19/07

Today in class was a break in the normal flow of the class. The normal flow is we come in lecture on one or two chapters and then do some lab exercises with the remaining time. With the normal flow I usually have little to zero troubles after I get started. Today was not a normal day. When we came in we were able to finish our lab exercises from the previous class. For me I had already done chapters eight and nine and all I had to do was chapter tweleve. Not only was I able to finish chapter twelve but I was able to export some maps that I had done from the second and third week of class to a jpeg. Needless to say that those images are finally on the blog. After two and a half hours of lab the instructor started to demonstrate how to download files from the Buncombe County website. The link to the site should be located on the left side of the blog site. During the demonstration we started to lecture on chapter ten, raster analysis, because some the data from the county was raster based data. After about a hour of the lecture we were given an exercise from the instructor on finding a site for a new school in the stowe geodatabase. When I went over to my lab computer and moved the mouse to get it out of the screen saver something weird happened. The mouse pointer displayed by the rest of the screen was black. My fellow classmates and I tried several options like "ctrl + alt + del" and hitting any key on the keyboard. In the end I had to reboot the computer. Think goodness I had saved my data before we started the lecture. After the computer powered back on I started on the exercise. During step one the instructor informed me that it would be better in the long run to store the spatial data folder on the root of my flash drive instead of in my gis folder due to there being a space in my gis folder. After getting through the computer reboot and the step one error everything else went smooth. I was able to finish the lab exercises in plenty of time and exporting the maps went smooth as well. Above this blog should be the maps for chapter twelve and the spatial analysis exercise.