Getting In Shape

As a volunteer assistant high school basketball coach and former athlete myself, I understand the value of off season training. Getting in game-ready shape is much different than just general physical fitness. I work out at the gym sporadically. Yesterday I played a game of basketball with the high-schoolers and quickly realized that my two mile jog twice a week was not going to take me many times up and down the floor at the pace they were running!

During the season, even as a coach I still get anxious before each game. I get transported back to the feeling I had as a player… Do I have my shoes and uniform …my sweatbands? Do I feel ready to run and jump,... ya know my knee is kind of stiff? Then I realize the only physical exertion that will be required of me is to occasionally leap off the bench and shout at the referees… respectfully of course!

Working with ESRI Shapefiles as an intermediate exchange between AutoCAD and ArcGIS is one way to move data back and forth between ArcGIS and AutoCAD. It requires that you have a way to read and write Shapefile within AutoCAD. You may have an existing routine that you jog through to make this happen.

I think people are just now coming to realize that with ESRI’s mapping specification for drawings the AutoCAD .DWG file itself is a better intermediate file for sharing data between AutoCAD and ArcGIS. It handles attribution on Points, Lines, Polygons, 3D features and Annotation. Annotation, curves and splines are supported where as in Shapefiles they are not. With the free ArcGIS for AutoCAD application there is also no need to buy any software to support the exchange of data between ArcGIS and AutoCAD.

I'm learning to sit down, relax and enjoy the game.