The Office

December 9, 2009
Why does it have to be so cold? Typically Denver will have one cold day and then it will warm up but 2 or 3 really cold days in a row is rare. It feels like I'm back in Grand Forks, ND. Temperatures have been below zero and the only good thing about it is that I finally get to wear my extra super warm winter jacket.

This week at work I've been working on post processing GPS from the truck. The process involves quite a few steps. I take the raw GPS from the truck and run a correction program, which can take a long time to run depending on how many miles we collected. Then I have to import those files into a database and run 2 more programs to get the database the way we want it. Then I export the GPS table from the database and manually edit a route if needed. Sometimes we run a route long so I have to cut them off, manually delete points. After the routes are the way we want them I then have to merge each day's GPS together to get one GPS road file for each park. That file has to be put onto a delivery USB for the data processing contractor. I've been doing this for about 10 parks. That is just one thing I've been up to in the office this week. I've also been working on a geodatabase that allows us to visually see all of the parks we are going to in our next collection cycle. That in itself is pretty easy to make but I was putting some data behind the images so that took some more work.

On a different note I read that there is only one living person who has visited all 390 national park sites. I never really thought anyone would make that a goal. I made a rough estimate for how many parks I've been to and came up with 80...sounds like a small number compared to the total of 390! There are some really small parks that you wouldn't really think about like Ford's Theater in DC or the New Orleans Jazz National Historic Site. Those parks consist of one single building, no parking lots or roads.

As I write this I'm watching Wrecked on TV. I have to put in a plug for one of my favorite TV shows. It is on the speed channel and it is about a Chicago towing company called O'hare. If you want to see what tow truck drivers go through this is a great show to watch. Next time I'm in/near Chicago and my work truck breaks down I'm going to give them a call and maybe we will end up on their show :). I'm sure they don't tow many road analyzer vehicles. http://www.oharetowing.com/