2010

So what year is it? Twenty-ten or two thousand ten? I think it's twenty ten, but then again, I thought it would be awesome to say twenty aught nine (or whatever year it was). That didn't happen very often though. Either way, people tend to like to use the easiest method and I tend to think that is twenty ten.

So far, 2010 is off to a good start. Nothing too exciting is happening but nothing too dull either. We got our car back from the shop, lucky for us there wasn't too much damage and it was fixed for a reasonable price. The timing belt broke while Laura was driving down the Interstate - lucky for us the '97 Contour is a non incorruptible engine otherwise that car would be done! Although, it did get us thinking about looking into other vehicles. Our feeling is we are nearing the mini-van era of our lives. I tend to believe you buy a vehicle and drive it until it won't drive another inch - then you tow it to the junkyard and that's that. So, our feeling is we need a relatively nice vehicle to use for all the driving and traveling we like to do, and vehicle with lots of cargo space is what we need - summon the mini-van. So, we are keeping our eyes open for a good deal.

My winter project at work has been to digitize about 600 historic aerial photos of our district from the 1930's. I actually worked with these photos before, back in college I spent a summer indexing them for the University - little did I know at the time, I would be doing much more work! Although I have only finished one county, (1/3 of the district) I feel like I made a major accomplishment to get that done. 200 photos, and each photo requires me to find landmarks in the historical photo and match it up to a current aerial photo. I then 'pin' the landmarks together and that stretches the photos to match each other. It's a long process, I usually try to pin at least 8 and as many as 12 locations on each photo (a photo is about 3 miles x 2.5 miles roughly). So with 200 photos I have over 2,000 'pins' just for Phelps county. Here's a low quality photo to show my results so far. The photo is pretty big, so it will take awhile to download!Click on the photo and you can see some more detail. The red line shows the county boundary. It's pretty neat to see these old photos and see what the land once looked like. Just for reference, here is a current look of the county.All-and-all, 2010 is off to a good start and it looks to be a busy year - no surprise there!

Until again

-=Nolan=-