Too tired to write much. My ass hurts because I am not used to sitting all day. Lot's of neat stuff for me to do. Everyone in the office seems very very nice. My boss took me out for a nice lunch.

Tomorrow is also the first day of my last GIS class at NIU. Between that and this internship I should be Mr. GIS by May.

The building I am in has about 40 people in it, and most of them are civil engineers. My boss is a CE.

My boss sat down with me today to discuss my upcoming projects. I have a non-GIS project that he assigned me to do first because of my database background. He wants it done in a month, but I think I can have it knocked out in a week or so.

I also have a longer term project to correct and fine tune the roads center-line database. It initially was digitized from the center of right-of-way, and then it was updated to center-of-pavement, but during that transition a lot of connections at road intersections got corrupted. I have to go back in and fix those. Tedious, but it will be a good way for me to get my hands dirty. This database is, among other things, used to route emergency vehicles.

Those are the tasks that he is under pressure to get done. He then laid out four additional projects that he said I can pick from, or do all of them. These are the fun "Hollywood" projects. (At least for a GIS person.)

One was to conduct analysis on where to locate a new salt bunker. I would analyze a number of layers including existing snow routes, accident data, average daily traffic counts, etc. and find the optimized location.

Another project related to that is creating optimized snow routes. Each plow has a GPS recorder. I would analyze this data looking at when plows return for fuel and salt. Average speed. Number of times plows traverse the same route. Distance from fuel and salt depots.

Another project is converting an older GIS application to the current platform we are using.

I forget what the last project was.