MapInfo at Record

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!

Mushrooms!

Today and yesterday I got a job-hunt related rejection letter both days.  I also followed up a speculative CV and ordered a book about how to get into ecology.  So I guess it balances out, right?

Outside of that, I decided that yesterday would be a fantabulous day to go out and brush up my ID skills.  And it was a fantastic wander... until the heavens broke, the thunder came and even my underwear got properly soaked.  Mind, my DMs kept my socks dry, so at least there's that.  That'll teach me to believe that the weather will hold.

Until I got properly rained on, I'd been having a good little walk.  Not only do I have a new GPS app on my phone that allows me to map things, but my mushroom ID was picking up.  So, because I quite like blackberries and raspberries, I mapped out an area of accessible bushes using the app plus Bing maps.  So if anyone heads out to Dyson Woods...

http://binged.it/PANoHn -- and it's exportable to KML and a few other formats, so you can actually look at it in GIS applications if needed.  How cool is that?  In the mean time, I'll be taking a wander and getting some blackberries for blackberry gin.  None of the few raspberries I did find actually made it home (again).  But they were *so* tasty...

Outside of that, I saw two different types of fungus.  One is Turkey Tail (Trametes versicolor) that was growing on a felled silver birch.  The growth was quite young so it felt velvety.  There were several pores per millimetre on the underside, which was entirely white.  The fungus is listed as "inedible" on several sites.  Which is fair, because it feels leathery and unpalatable:

The underside is a proper white colour on these particular Turkey Tails.

I also saw a Common Earthball (Scleroderma citrinum).  Scleroderma citrinum literally means hard-skinned and lemon in colour, more or less, which isn't far off the mark as they feel almost rock hard to the touch:

This little mushroom is also called pigskin poison puffball and isn't a puffball at all -- it's an earthball.  Puffballs have a single opening in the top through which the spores disperse; earthballs prefer to break up and release their spores.  Common earthballs have black spores and it's worth noting that the spores may cause crying, conjunctivitis, runny nose and nosebleeds in some people -- and you'd definitely not want to be eating them.  Gastrointestinal distress is the term used.  Even that's too colourful!

And then... there was rain.  All of the rain.  So, I may head out that way tomorrow as long as it's not, you know, a proper deluge.  My ID books hate water.