Throughout my project I encountered many problems.

Project Design

It took me while to figure out a project, but when I finally did I was really excited. I had envisioned a MCE that would produce one or more specific campgrounds that fit my criteria. I wanted to make this great website where you could click on the campgrounds and surf spots to get information and pictures. I gathered all the necessary information and found pictures of each surf spot as well as people surfing at each surf spot. I worked very hard and put in so much time and effort, but in reality it was too much for me to handle. I spent far to much time on collecting the data and entering it into ArcMap. When it came time to do analysis in Idris there was not enough time because I do not know how to use the software.

Software

The biggest problem was that I am very unfamiliar with the software. I struggeled every step of the way. I have very basic computer knowledge and the only time I have ever used ArcMap or Idrisi was in the weekly tutorials. I found the tutorials in both 255 and 355 very difficult. It took me longer to complete them than other students and I needed alot of help just to get through them. When I first started on the 355 final project (before I even came up with an idea) I had alot of trouble with just opening up and finding data to use in a project. Because of this it took alot of time just to come up with a project.

When I decided what I wanted to do, gathering the data took a very long time. I was quite excited though and was making progress in ArcMap, but I had to relearn the software and it was slow. Once I started rasterizing and importing rater layers into Idrisi I was completely lost. I had huge problems with maps not lining up. I really did not even know where to start. I made boolean images of all my constraints but they did not mean anything because they would not line up with the Oregon base map and I did not know what the points meant because you cannot just open up a table like in ArcMap and see.

I wanted to create a map that showed the campgrounds which qualified after boolean reclassification (were on the ocean, allowed dogs, had showers, etc.), but only blank rasters appeared. I had hoped to do an MCE and create a map that showed one or more campgrounds that best fit my factors. I used the decision wizard and the only thing that produced a usable result was an eigenvector, all images produced were blank (see spatial analysis). I needed alot of help, but there is no help during the time when I could work on the project: weeknights and weekends.

Eventually a fellow student showed me how to line things up properly, but had no idea how to help with what I was trying to accomplish in my project. I was running out of time so I decided to try and change my project around so that I could at least produce a map with an analysis. I started by made a raster map of the Oregon coast. I then overlayed polylines of the north, central and south coasts to make a suitablity map. The problem was when I snapped the polylines in ArcMap the ends of the poly lines were touching. So when I overlayed the north, central and south coasts onto the Oregon coast layer the 3 coasts all blended into one (see spatial analysis). At this point I was ready to throw into the towel. Another student who could not help me before (because he just figured out the software himself) realized how I might be able to do my evaluation. I started again, rasterizing the fields I made, but at this point it was just too late to continue. So I just started to finish my website.

Timing

I would not say that I left my project to the last minute, it just turned out that my inexperience and poor project design caused me to run out of time.

Blizzard

On sunday night at 8:00 pm the power went out. The few of us working panicked! The next day SFU's server was out of operation until 1:00 pm, so I lost alot of valuable time. This is a moot point because we all got an extension, but at the time it was a significant and very stressful operational problem!

File Management

File Management became a really big problem. Towards the end of my analysis I had created hundreds of rasters, shapefiles, reclasses and data layers. When I finally learned what it was I wanted to do I could not keep track of all my rasters. There were so many that I had to search through trial and error and find the proper ones so that I could overlay, etc. This was time consuming and very frustrating. I learned that I should create more folders for different steps. I had so many things in my Final Project folder that I could not find what I needed.