Job? School stuff, game stuff.
I woke up this morning to the phone ringing. The message on the machine was from the nonprofit I interviewed at last week for the GIS position, telling me to call back. I left messages for both the GIS people there, and haven't received a response... so I don't know if I got the job. On the one hand, they called me, but on the other, they haven't gotten back to me, so I'm obviously not a high priority. I'm not sure what to make of it.
Taking notes and writing the geology paper over the weekend almost made me preemptively nostalgic for the undergrad experience. Though my printer now only prints in pinkscale. I actually got the paper done and in on time... it wasn't very good (though I'm historically terrible at gaging such things), but it's finished. I churned out a mediocre powerpoint presentation for yesterday's class. The topic was something of a full-circle notion... after all these years, I finally read up on and reported about the bedrock geology of the Washington DC area. I found that there's a shear zone in Rock Creek Park (specifically, in the National Zoo), and a granitoid intrusion somewhere within walking distance of the house I grew up in (must investigate!). I like it that my last geology project in college was about the first rocks I ever saw.
So classes are over. The only thing I have left to do is finish my GIS project. Reading over the paper touting the merits of one dataset, I'm beginning to suspect the author told me the wrong file to download. The authors seem to have done very detailed and extensive research, and should have a lot of information associated with the data. But the data itself is just blobs on the page-- no attribute fields except the ones ArcGIS and the geodatabase assign internally. All that beautiful work on inverse-weighted buffers and land types is utterly absent from the final product. It's just a bunch of polygons.
When not writing the paper, I did some great tabletop gaming over the weekend. One of Micheal's friends hates D20, so he converted a D&D game to D10 using the new World of Darkness rules (using Mage for magic and magic items), with a little bit of Exalted thrown in. He also un-gimped character creation and reinstated bonus points. I made a badass swordsperson, since my badass swordsperson from the almost five year long Wheel of Time campaign is about to be retired. That game got frustrating at the end... most of the party spent most of the big ultimate battle twiddling our thumbs, unable to act. The other game we played over the weekend (same day, in fact) was a really interesting game using Aberrant rules. I wish they'd make a second edition of Aberrant... rules-wise (forget the setting), it's the best superhero game system out there, but it's deeply flawed in many ways and could use some attention and revision.
I hope I hear about that job tomorrow, one way or the other. Also... no more classes.
Taking notes and writing the geology paper over the weekend almost made me preemptively nostalgic for the undergrad experience. Though my printer now only prints in pinkscale. I actually got the paper done and in on time... it wasn't very good (though I'm historically terrible at gaging such things), but it's finished. I churned out a mediocre powerpoint presentation for yesterday's class. The topic was something of a full-circle notion... after all these years, I finally read up on and reported about the bedrock geology of the Washington DC area. I found that there's a shear zone in Rock Creek Park (specifically, in the National Zoo), and a granitoid intrusion somewhere within walking distance of the house I grew up in (must investigate!). I like it that my last geology project in college was about the first rocks I ever saw.
So classes are over. The only thing I have left to do is finish my GIS project. Reading over the paper touting the merits of one dataset, I'm beginning to suspect the author told me the wrong file to download. The authors seem to have done very detailed and extensive research, and should have a lot of information associated with the data. But the data itself is just blobs on the page-- no attribute fields except the ones ArcGIS and the geodatabase assign internally. All that beautiful work on inverse-weighted buffers and land types is utterly absent from the final product. It's just a bunch of polygons.
When not writing the paper, I did some great tabletop gaming over the weekend. One of Micheal's friends hates D20, so he converted a D&D game to D10 using the new World of Darkness rules (using Mage for magic and magic items), with a little bit of Exalted thrown in. He also un-gimped character creation and reinstated bonus points. I made a badass swordsperson, since my badass swordsperson from the almost five year long Wheel of Time campaign is about to be retired. That game got frustrating at the end... most of the party spent most of the big ultimate battle twiddling our thumbs, unable to act. The other game we played over the weekend (same day, in fact) was a really interesting game using Aberrant rules. I wish they'd make a second edition of Aberrant... rules-wise (forget the setting), it's the best superhero game system out there, but it's deeply flawed in many ways and could use some attention and revision.
I hope I hear about that job tomorrow, one way or the other. Also... no more classes.