Good Morning! A Rainy Friday.

Another day off to work, as we work our ways into the weekend. So be it. The weather by evening is supposed to get really nasty, but as long as it's nice by the weekend, I don't really care. Rain this morning, there was a little snow and sleet at rush hour last night. Possibly more snow tonight, but the forecast for tommorow looks delightful. Hopefully this is all nice fresh snow for the weekend.

Looks Like Delightful Weather for Saturday.

It's going to be warm and sunny. Not sure what I am planning to do, but it would be nice to get out of town, especially because I have my doubts I'll have my pickup back from the body shop by the following week. I am thinking about heading up to the Adirondacks, though I could also think about hiking up to one of the fire towers in the Catskills, though I'm a little bit tired of doing Overlook Mountain and Hunter Mountain..

Maybe just out to Partridge Run. That would be close by, and a relatively quick drive out there. I've been wanting to see the Hurricane Irene storm damage to Partridge Run Road. I suspect it won't ever be passable by motor vehicles again, but it will be interesting to check out once again. That said, it's my birthday, and I won't have the truck probably for a couple of weeks while it's at the body shop, so I should think about doing some fun this weekend.

Sunday's forecast doesn't look as nice, but I have a lot of things I want to catch up at home, uncluding a bunch more library research.

Been Working On Getting More Data Into PostGIS Server.

PostGIS is really outstanding for loading large amounts of data for statewide coverages of things. I have been slowly but surely uploading data to it, most recently the Wetland Maps of NY State. I was having a lot of problems getting avcimport to convert the E00 files to ARC/Binary coverages to loading into the PostGIS server. After some work, I finally got it to work, which is good, because I wanted to have statewide coverage of all of the wetland maps, for making my own maps.

I've really gotten into using OpenStreetMap data.to make maps. That data is quite good quality and very useful, and generally better then the TIGER/Line products. Combine that with DEC Trail Data, DEC Physical Assets data, DEC Land Boundaries, and contours and hillshade derived from the Digital Elevation Model. I am still having "collar" issues with the Digital Elevation Data, but I will conintue to research that, and figure out what to do next.

I also got to figure out wat I want to map next. I am literally running out of places to map in the eastern half of the state, and I've hit up a lot of Western NY. Then again, there probably is a lot of potential in doing smaller parks and other interesting smaller parcels with the Digital Elevation / Open Street Map products.

I'm also thinking about doing some more mapping in other states, like of the Green Mountain National Forest and the Allegheny National Forest, though I'll have to get more data (and upload it into the PostGIS Server) before I proceeed.with doing those maps.

Being Playing with the Proposed LATFOR Maps.

So the proposed new Assembly and Senate Districts.are out. I have downloaded the block file for the Assembly and Senate Districts, but with 330,000 blocks in NY State, and a rather slow and mathematically complex process in joining them to the Census TIGER/Line Shapefile then dissolving them, it is taking a while. I think for all the parts of New York State that are not cities, it will be a lot faster to just manually enter in the Assembly District or Senate District to the County or County Subdivision Shapefile, then disolve that into districts.

I would like to do all of the eastern half of Upstate NY, but a lot will depend on how much time I want to spend, and how divided up the cities are. The block file is really slow, but managable (10-20 minutes CPU time per county), but certainly if I am just joining whole county subdivisions (aka Towns) and counties, that shouldn't be so slow. I have already done Albany County, along with some of the other local counties using the block list. I also made an Albany County KML / Google Map, and plan to post that to the internet shortly.