Yesterday was spent working with MapInfo at Record. I am now pretty much dedicated to using my GIS skills whenever I pop in, which is fine by me as I don't mind a bit of GIS (for my friends, it means geographical information systems). The last time I was up there, I spent the day digitising site boundaries. Yesterday I spent the day creating citations -- documents about wildlife sites, essentially. Not enthralling work, but necessary and good experience.
I'd totally forgotten what a pain GIS can be, however. Most of the day was pretty productive as I was taking the site data and layering the MasterMap tiles under it and outputting the images. But I hit a pretty big stumbling block by the end -- the upper Mersey Estuary. The map tiles contain a *huge* amount of information. I needed to load up 6 or 7 tiles to get the image I needed because water features cross tile boundaries. MapInfo kept saying no. Well, actually, it never said no. It said "in a minute" and "when I can be bothered" and "when I feel like it" and "yes, but I'm going to uncheck this box just to make it more entertaining for us both." GIS is a cruel master sometimes.
It took me four and half hours create the citation images and sort various queries for around 50 sites. It took me half an hour to sort just the image for the estuary due to its size. There's always one, isn't there?
After that, I had a wander around the zoo again, stopping at the Roman garden for a bit before failing to see the otters but finally seeing the warthogs. They've stopped hiding from me, which is nice!
I'd totally forgotten what a pain GIS can be, however. Most of the day was pretty productive as I was taking the site data and layering the MasterMap tiles under it and outputting the images. But I hit a pretty big stumbling block by the end -- the upper Mersey Estuary. The map tiles contain a *huge* amount of information. I needed to load up 6 or 7 tiles to get the image I needed because water features cross tile boundaries. MapInfo kept saying no. Well, actually, it never said no. It said "in a minute" and "when I can be bothered" and "when I feel like it" and "yes, but I'm going to uncheck this box just to make it more entertaining for us both." GIS is a cruel master sometimes.
It took me four and half hours create the citation images and sort various queries for around 50 sites. It took me half an hour to sort just the image for the estuary due to its size. There's always one, isn't there?
After that, I had a wander around the zoo again, stopping at the Roman garden for a bit before failing to see the otters but finally seeing the warthogs. They've stopped hiding from me, which is nice!
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