A Whole Slough Of News
Mar. 21st, 2003 07:39 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
athelindI've been too damned BUSY this week to experience much MUCK withdrawl. More along the lines of, "Gee, I wonder what X is up to? I should log... nope, I should send him an E-MAIL or something." Of course, with a few folks, I don't HAVE e-mail addresses -- I just know'em on the MUCK..
Monday was gonna be a SHORT day -- I thought I just needed to head into the lab, burn a couple of things to disk, and call it a day. Wound up staying six-plus hours, which is my usual "full" day (part-time job, you know). Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday were all twelve-hour-plus-or-minus boat runs, running a new survey on my beloved Elkhorn Slough -- or trying to, anyway. A combination of hardware and software upgrades caused a succession of problems. Still, despite it all, we managed to get most of the forward half of the Slough surveyed -- which also demonstrates the efficiency of my "Do-It-In-Chunks" approach.
Oh, and I got photos yesterday! Wish I'd managed to get shots of Parson's Slough (where that railroad bridge is) on WEDNESDAY, when we were in there at low tide -- the erosion is MUCH more impressive when you can see how severely the banks have been cut back. But, dopey me, I forgot the camera until the last day. I should have the pics up at some point, and plan to work at least a few of'em into my Capstone.
This was really the first time that I got to SEE the Slough from water level. On our 2001 survey, I spent 99% of the time glued to the monitor, and we had curtains up in the boat to keep the glare off. Now, we have nice gray window-tinting, and we had a fourth person on board to run the nav system, so I could actually LOOK AROUND.
Combine that with almost two years of looking at maps, charts, aerial photos, and our own sonar data, and things REALLY started to come together in my head. I'd spot something, immediately connect it to its overhead view, and tie it in with the parts of Slough history that I knew. If I didn't quite have something down, I'd ask Da Boss, who would immediately relate an interesting anecdote about said feature. I have a CONTEXT now that I'd been missing.
So -- Busy Yet Productive, despite Coyote's amusing games.
Monday was gonna be a SHORT day -- I thought I just needed to head into the lab, burn a couple of things to disk, and call it a day. Wound up staying six-plus hours, which is my usual "full" day (part-time job, you know). Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday were all twelve-hour-plus-or-minus boat runs, running a new survey on my beloved Elkhorn Slough -- or trying to, anyway. A combination of hardware and software upgrades caused a succession of problems. Still, despite it all, we managed to get most of the forward half of the Slough surveyed -- which also demonstrates the efficiency of my "Do-It-In-Chunks" approach.
Oh, and I got photos yesterday! Wish I'd managed to get shots of Parson's Slough (where that railroad bridge is) on WEDNESDAY, when we were in there at low tide -- the erosion is MUCH more impressive when you can see how severely the banks have been cut back. But, dopey me, I forgot the camera until the last day. I should have the pics up at some point, and plan to work at least a few of'em into my Capstone.
This was really the first time that I got to SEE the Slough from water level. On our 2001 survey, I spent 99% of the time glued to the monitor, and we had curtains up in the boat to keep the glare off. Now, we have nice gray window-tinting, and we had a fourth person on board to run the nav system, so I could actually LOOK AROUND.
Combine that with almost two years of looking at maps, charts, aerial photos, and our own sonar data, and things REALLY started to come together in my head. I'd spot something, immediately connect it to its overhead view, and tie it in with the parts of Slough history that I knew. If I didn't quite have something down, I'd ask Da Boss, who would immediately relate an interesting anecdote about said feature. I have a CONTEXT now that I'd been missing.
So -- Busy Yet Productive, despite Coyote's amusing games.
