MeghanIsMe

The next step in my continuing journey toward acquisition of skillsets that most people have learned by now; how to meet people and network at conferences.

it's nice to finally be in a position where I'm socially confident enough to that, and to be enthusiastic about it. I wan't once. But I do have to both acquire the skills to do so easily and smoothly, and find work-arounds for my facial recognition deficit. Business cards and written notes on them are a big help.

Madison was a great experience, and AAG has been pretty spiffy so far, too. I'll write more when I have time again. For now, I'm going to email a couple people, get some dinner, figure out what sessions I'm seeing tomorrow (apart from my own presentation of course!), and try and get a little school work done. My semester is ending in a couple weeks and it feels very weird to not be paying much attention to my term projects. I feel like a stereotypical slacking senior. Except my slacking consists of professional career development work....

I'm so tired today. I'm glad I slept in this morning even though I missed the first time slot of panels. I was having a hard time staying awake at times as it was.

I am dressing up to present my poster at the Central States Anthropological Society conference.This is my first time wearing a tie in at least ten years. Also, the first time I've tied one myself. It took about forty minutes of repeated effort.

Lastly, if you don't like my poster, I may well smite you with this ball of holy lightning. Fair warning.

I just downloaded 1.2 gigabytes of cartographic data that I'm using to model the Pike Creek watershed, since it's smaller than the smallest level of granularity of the USGS hydrologic survey data.

The data I'm downloading was created by flying a airplane around over most of Wisconsin. That airplane was equipped with LIDAR remote sensing hardware, which uses a laser to create a high-resolution, high accuracy elevation model that I can plug into a GIS program and do all sorts of things with.

This is the kind of data that makes a huge array of important research possible. Generating it takes very expensive equipment, great expertise, and significant time. It's not something that a typical university or even city would be able to arrange. And it's available to the public, for free, from the Wisconsin State Cartographer's office. This is the kind of thing that I'm happy to see my tax money supporting. Public access to data means public support of projects for the public good.

----

I got part of my history mid-term written. I did laundry. I wrote a brief paper for my yoga and pilates class (a part of my grade now that the class is done). I made some notes about ideas for my poster for AAG (the geography conference).

My poster for AAG is going to be bigger; 48" by 42", and it's going to be seen by a bunch of geographers, including faculty from my program at Syracuse. As well as historical comparison, I want to highlight the importance of Pike Creek to the community by showing just how much of Kenosha is within its watershed. (This LIDAR data lets me determine the extent of that watershed myself; how cool is that?)

I've also been making some progress with overlaying historic Sanborn maps on current satellite imagery of Kenosha. These maps are simply a treasure (Whose availability is more tax dollars at work!), and my work with them is going to be part of both my GIS term project and my AAG poster. It's nice to kill two birds with one stone.

So things are getting done, and that's how I'm spending my exciting Thursday night.

Tomorrow I'm hoping to have dinner with Lisa​. On Saturday, I'm doing a day of thrifting in Chicago with my dad and possibly more folks. On Sunday, I'm meeting up with a few people for some draining here in Kenosha. (I hope the water is low enough for my rubber boots to be effective.) And through it all, of course, there's more schoolwork.

But that's ok. I'm feeling happily relaxed and productive right now. Things are proceeding.