Inflatable Parrot

New Semesters are Exciting!

As Max would say (from Sam & Max): Oh Boy!

So new semesters.  Well, they suck.  I got jerked around by the people at GMU by moving classes and then at the last minute cancellin a class.  Which turns out not to be a big deal, since it turns out that I didn't want to take one of the classes anyways :)  So I'm in 671 now (School & Culture), will take 674 in the summer, do my internship in the fall, and 675 in the spring - and graduate with my masters in Spring 09!

Hooray!

So this blog has now transferred it's focus to my class EDUC 671 - Schools and Culture :)

If you're looking for my GIS type mapping stuff, it's a lot lower down than this :)

Hope everyone enjoys :)
~Brad

Changes abound!

So yeah.  After ditching the Prisons vs. Schools idea, I came up with the one you all saw in class.  Now my only problem is getting more better photos to use.  I'll post up my .pdf here in a while, I've had a pretty interesting second half of the week that I really don't know if I should post up the details online :)

Anyhow, my project is coming along, just a little bit slowly, I think.  I still haven't figured out what caused CS3 to explode in a fit of licensing fury, but I will, and when I do, the letter that gets sent to Adobe will put the fear of the holy hand grenade into 'em.

SO yeah, nothing big to report, life as usual.  Looking forward to chili next week!

~Brad

Schools vs. Prisons.

Ok.  After doing a little bit of research, and talking to the administrators at Chantilly High School (who are much more talkative about building design than the administrators at prisons, I might add!), I found out a good deal about the rhyme and reason for the modular, block layout of the school.

It was constructed during an "open classroom" phase - where all the fad were classes without walls, supposedly to encourage student thinking, and whatnot.  Anyways, Chantilly was built to be temporary, lasting about 5 years.  It's since stood 20 years longer, so it's obviously had some renovation done.

But that's off topic.  Chantilly's modular "blockish" design was centered around how the students were supposed to be organized, by subschool in the original "open classroom" design..  This organizational pattern is kept to this day, with four seperate subschools, and instead of geographically dividing up the students by where they are in the building, they're divided up alphabetically into four groups, with a fifth subschool running the Special Education department.  Each "sub-section" of the school is responsible for a particular activity, or type of activity - fine arts in one section, vocational in another, special ed in a third, etc.

Here's what it looks like, Graphically.

On the prison front, I haven't found most prison administrators too willing to disclose a lot of information about their prison.  I suppose it's for security, which is in fact a valid concern, but I'll have to find a prison that really fits the bill, and then really plead with them for generalizations :)

On the plus side - I've found that there is a company, called "Modular Building Systems, Inc" (MBSI) that manufactures modular units for both schools AND prisons, which confirms the myth that companies who design/build schools also build prisons.  Especially since Chantilly HS was built as a modular school.  Jackpot!

I'm searching for prisons that are as equally (and nicely) divided up into sections as the schools I've looked at.  There are a lot of prisons in the US, which makes the search a little tougher.

Anyways, B out!
~Brad

OMG!

WoW!  Somehow I missed a week or two of blog postings.  I have no clue how that happened.  Actually, I do.  Between having family in the hospital and doing all the work for my classes, and the stuff I've had to do at home for work, and the Fiance, I've been so tired!

Ok, so here's the post to make up for it all!  For the rubber sheeting assignment, I posted a picture a few posts down that satisfies the requirement - where Chris responded with "wow, we really are lying with maps!"

Heh.  This whole post is gonna be short too, unfortunately. On the flip side, i finished reading "how to lie with maps" - it was a really neat book shedding light on a lot of ways maps can be used that I hadn't really thought of before.  I'll try and keep that in mind as I'm working on the spread for my final project :)

In other news, it's really neat to play with google earth and sanbourne maps and sketchup all at the same time, though the terrain gets a little wierd when you put the sanbourne images on top of the goggle earth, and then click "terrain" - it doesn't rubber sheet as well as you might think, unfortunately.  At least, it doesn't in really mountainous terrain.  I know that for flatter areas it works pretty good!

But yeah!  Fun times :)  I really enjoy playing with sketchup :)

~Brad

Rubber Sheets aren't just for kids with bed problems...

Heh.  I couldn't resist the title.  Gotta have a goofy sense of humor, it keeps life seeming reasonably sane.

Anyways, to cut to the chase, here's the rubber sheeting exercises I did.  I'm posting up two - One's a shaded relief (with a problem) and the other is a "picture" view.

Notice how the DRG doesn't fill the whole mapping area.  I downloaded both the DEM and DRG from the USGS, both were the same "chunk" of area I'd highlighted in their Seamless Data thingy (that thing we all hate because it's slow!).

Anyways, Yeah.  I don't know what's up with the black band at the end, but the map is lined up pretty well.  I posted this to show what's been going on randomly throughout my mapping trials :)

Anyways, here's a lovely picture.  Choosing perspective is great because you can "hide" the ugly sections of map that didn't line up correctly or have big black bands all over it.  Remember about lying with maps :-D

Argh! I forgot!

I can't believe I forgot to post my Illustrator map last week!

AIYEEEEEEEEEE

Here it is.  it's the other continent from World of Warcraft :)

Oh, and I just got 70 this past week, along with mostly blue gear (a few greens left).  Check me out on the World of Warcraft Armory  - I'll try and get a link up, but armory is being slow today (when isn't it?)

Anyways, my main's name is "Karamin" on the Hellscream server :)

Here's the picture! - Oh and before anyone says anything - There are three zones that Blizzard (makers of World of Warcraf) have not implemented yet (or plan to, from what players can tell?)  They're left blank on my map.  So don't give me grief about "you forgot to label three things"  And also, there's a zone underneath Silverpine Forest labelled Gilneas - which you can't get to in game (or you couldn't in the past, haven't tried recently)

That's all
~Brad

As for the post for today, well...I'm still working on "how to lie with maps" - So I really can't post a finished deal on it...but it's interesting...I never thought you'd be able to lie with a map...but at the same time, it's a graphical representation of data, just like statistics charts.

Kinda like this: (note how it says "a true map"!)

Hand drawn maps

Woo.  So I decided that for my hand-drawn map enlargement, that I would choose the continent of Kalimdor from the Video game World of Warcraft.  I choose Kalimdor because my final project won't have anything to do with big macro scale maps, and Kalimdor seemed a MUCH more interesting choice than trying to scale up (or down) a classroom setting.

Anyways, the picture in the link was the original.  I printed it out full size on a piece of .25" graph paper.  I had to adjust the gamma and exposure in photoshop in order to be able to see the graph papers lines, but this is what my map looked like :)

I apologize for the map being so...well...crappy.  heh.  I can't remember where I stored my scanner when I stopped using it.  If i can dig it up you'll get wonderful high-res pictures in the near future :)

This is the resultant.  A glorious 4 pages of Kalimdor, colored as close as I could to the original Warcraft artwork, as each "zone" (like a mini-country) has it's own unique terrain and color scheme.  I tried to use color as appropriate - Winterspring, in the Northeast, is a full-year arctic style climate (and so I left it white!), whereas the Barrens and Durotar, in the center of the continent, are much drier and arid.  I used two shades of green for this map because many of the zones in Kalimdor (and the whole world, named Azeroth) are forested or plains-type, so it made sense.

Again, I'll try and find some high-res way of scanning and/or getting it into my PC - this is just to show that I did it, and how cool it is :)

This is the two maps side by side, so you can see that I really did enlarge them :)

Pen tool practice/proof to be posted later, I can't find my image, and I have to leave for work in 5 minutes!

Natural Scene Designer

Wow.  This is one cool piece of Software!!!

It turns out it wouldn't recognize my CD for it (for some weirdo reason) so I made an ISO image and mounted the image.  Guess what - it worked.  GG for companies to require CD's in the drive to run.

Anyways...I made some designs with it...tell me what you think!

This one is a 1920x1080 resolution image of the area where my parents have bought a parcel of land, near Harmon, West Virginia.  Harmon would be located in the green triangular bit in the valley, their parcel of land is just about 100 feet from the top of the mountain, where this rendering's viewpoint "starts" if that makes sense.  Most of these renders will start from about this location :)

This image is at 1152xwhatever and shows the topographical elevation lines from a Tennessee  Valley Authority Digital Raster Graphic (DRG) file overlayed on top of the USGS NED-Digital Elevation Map (NED-DEM).  It's kinda neat.

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These were my two favorites.  I haven't played around with Vue yet, perhaps I will this week.  Oh, and the neatest part?  My new PC will EASILY handle 1/9th (high res) DEM's covering large areas, and has no trouble dropping the full resolution DRG's on top of them - total time from clicking the overlay command at full res to getting the image preview?  About seven seconds.  Also, the Render at 1920 took approximately one minute.  I did a render at 1920 with Natural Scene Designer's trees, but...they didn't work quite the way I'd hoped, though, they do look nice from a distance :)

~Brad

So this freehand map thingy

So.  I know this thing isn't due until *next* week.  Or actually, the week after?  But either way, I've got a pretty good handle on how I'm going to do it, I'm just looking for the perfect map, right now.

I'm going to find a smallish map (about half a page, portrait) and I'm going to print it out on 1/8" graph paper, and edit it until I get it to the exact number of squares on a piece of 1/4" graph paper.  Then, I'll have two pieces of paper, that scale up easily and will be a 2:1 enlargement.  Heck, I could do it the other way too, print a big map and reduce it, like I was getting ready to scan it into a textbook or something.

Either way, this week's post is short.
~B

DEM's da Stuff! (Ok, bad pun)

Alright, I know that was horrible.  Forgive me.

So, the exciting news is that I'm about to get all sorts of new computer parts!  I'm building a pretty quick rig - it should make rendering 3d structures and Birds-eye-views a breeze.  Brief specs:  MSI Mainboard with an nVidia 570 SLI northbridge, AMD Athlon 64x2 (dual core 64 bit processor) @ 2.6ghz (so like a 2.8 or 2.9 dual core intel, or a 5.8ghz single core intel), 2 gigs of ram with a CAS latency of 4(for starters), an nVidia GeForce 8500GT based graphics card with 512mb onboard dedicated ram, and 600 glorious gigabytes of  SATA hard disk space.

So yeah.  DEM modeling, and rendering?  No problem.  On my current rig (1.8ghz single core P4 with 1gb ram) I could render digital pictures in bryce 5 @ 1024 resolution in about 5 minutes (these weren't super-high polygon count things or anything, just cool scenes I liked and built as backgrounds!).  Now?  Yeah, should definately take about 45 seconds :)

So that relates to class!  I'm SUPER EXCITED to get this new machine built, it'll be my first *brand new* computer since 2000, as I bought my current rig off of a friend about two years ago.

Anyways, I liked the page about the making the birds eye views.  it gives a general overview in a read that's not overly technical or boring - a perfect primer with little tidbits to remember when we're doing our work in class tonight!  Hooray for NPS!  Not a whole lot to say about the other page we were supposed to visit - i downloaded the practice JPG file and when I opened it in Photoshop, it said it couldn't parse the data, or some such, which means i either need to try it with PS-CS3, or they uploaded a corrupt image that I can't work with :(

Brad out!