It doesn’t surprise me that my last post was from April. Working in mining usually means you’re working long, grueling hours. A 10 hour day is normal, but add on the commute time to the mine you’re working (if you’re not out at a remote site) and that 10 hours turns into 12. If you’re really working you’re doing a 12 hour day at the mine, 14 with the drive. No paid time off if you’re a contractor, no holidays. I liked the work I was doing and all of the people I worked with. You go to school to study rocks and hey, all of the sudden you’re looking at rocks all day every day and sometimes you spend time at an outdoor camp, hiking every day. That’s not too bad. During a typical season you get some winter months off from work, which is when I started this coding process earlier this year. I like love to travel though, so we spent a fair amount of time outside of our home last winter before I had to go back to the mine. This winter we were looking at several months in Peru!
And then I got a job offer.
Hey! I’m a geospatial analyst now. I wasn’t sure what that would entail. I’ve worked with ArcGIS and have done a little bit of programming for school. It’s been 3+ years since I did a lot of that though, so I’ve been stumbling a little. However, I’m taking the small victories.
First, I’ve had to copy and transfer several terabytes of data from decade-old hard drives to new ones. After waiting entirely too long I realized the transfers were going at a turtle pace. I reconfigured the hard drives which worked for one of them, the one with USB 3.0 port. The other, I came to realize, was configured for a USB 2.0 out to 3.0. Not really sure why the 2.0 to 3.0 was necessary because I wasn’t getting anything faster than a 2.0 transfer rate if I was lucky. We tested the SATA cable. Theoretically this was supposed to a be a little faster but it wasn’t. I messed with a couple more settings, stopped all other file transfers, and let them run overnight. Success, I should have documented more of what I changed for later reference. It was a frustrating but valid lesson on data transfer. I learned how to use FTP and was introduced to all of the intricacies of Globus too. I learned more about network firewalls than I ever thought I would.
Okay, first couple weeks was research, gathering data, and moving large parcels of said data.
The first resource I had to work with was NASA ICESat elevation data. The default data type you can find for ICESat is in HDF5 format. I still don’t know how to work with that, so I chose to download manually using ASCII tab-delimited files…
Actually, this was another saga, so I’ll post it in another entry.
Rocks to Web 