Day 18 Unfortunately today I don't have much to post because I took part of the day off to take care of things at home. But this morning, before I left work, I did work again on some permits finalizing the utility permits. Also, because of some new information related to the development for which…
A Day in the Life of a Civil Engineer – Day 17
Day 17 Alley reconstruction project Well I waited until later tonight to post because we had a public meeting tonight at city hall for an alley reconstruction project. The city has over the last several years replaced their alleys with concrete pavement, and this one is the last in this particular neighborhood. We completed the…
A Day in the Life of a Civil Engineer – Day 16
Day 16 Back to work after a weekend of working on a presentation I'm giving in September at the Illinois Association of Highway Engineers conference in Normal, Ill. I'm really looking forward to the event, and if anyone reading this is going make sure to say hi at the conference! Development Meeting So today was…
Glogging My Virtual Experiences
If you've been reading this blog since its early days, you know I'm a big supporter of the use of virtual worlds and 3D immersive spaces. Although I realize these technologies are not yet mainstream or even well accepted or understood, my experience with them has been tremendously positive. They have quite simply changed my…
A Day in the Life of a Civil Engineer – Day 15
Day 15 GIS Maps Yesterday at the very end of the day, our IT staff added a link on our Intranet site to the web map we had created. This is an online map of our GIS information that's accessed through a browser. Unfortunately we still haven't been able to make the web map in…
A Day in the Life of a Civil Engineer – Day 14
Day 14 This morning we started out handling a concern from a resident whose driveway was poured last week as part of the road project. The contractor was supposed to have taken off the barricades yesterday. But for some reason, they never got over there to open up the drive. So we had to call…
A Day in the Life of a Civil Engineer – Day 13
Day 13 This morning we started out the day with our regular engineering staff meeting. There wasn't too much unusual to report – everyone just gave an update of their recent work. And some even left the meeting early after giving their report because we are so busy and they needed to get back to…
Failure: The Key Ingredient to Learning
There's been a lot of talk lately about acceptance of failure. Probably because people are pushing for innovation, and it's difficult to innovate if you're afraid to fail. Thus the numerous posts of encouragement across the Internet assuring all of us that failure is ok. Of course as engineers, failure is not something we want…
A Day in the Life of a Civil Engineer – Day 12
Day 12 Another GIS Day Today ended up being another day primarily spent on GIS. I successfully was able to start a web service for some of our data. But when I went into the ArcGIS Silverlight Viewer Map Builder and put my URL into that data, it could not connect. I tried to look…
A Day in the Life of a Civil Engineer – Day 11
Day 11 It's all about GIS Today was one of those days when I try over and over to work my way through a problem. Following up with how I ended on Friday, I went back to the ArcGIS Silverlight Viewer and tried to make a map. One of the first items I attemped to…