stupid idiot ESRI and its proprietary "oh, we'll let you work with it, we just won't let you SAVE what you did" data.

You know all that rejoicing a week or so ago when I figured out how to do what I needed for this paper I'm writing? I used the ESRI map of Illinois because it was in latitude-longitude and so were the centroids I needed to use - the original base map I had from the Illinois State Geologic Survey is in one of the Lambert projections and didn't work with those coordinates.

Well, I went to open the thing up today, and couldn't find what I had done. At first, I thought "Hm, maybe I saved the project under another name" but I kept checking and looking and consulted my notes.

And then I remembered: the students in my GIS class had the same problem. It let them work away happily for hours on end, but the minute they exited the program, all their work was gone, poof, even if it told them it had saved.

I think that's really unfair. If the program isn't going to save edits/alterations to its proprietary data, it should SAY so, in big red letters, every time you go to save.

I COULD reconstitute it, but why? Why do that to have it all go away again? I mean, I could save it into a powerpoint file after I made the map layouts (Oh, man, the layouts - the hours I spent on those making all the little lines look right, all the playing with the legends). But I know any time you write a paper and can't tweak the figures, that's exactly the thing they want you to tweak in order to make it publishable.

So now I'm faced with a couple of unpleasant propositions: either I try to convert my lat/long coordinates into Lambert (there's a conversion formula, I guess, here but it involves trigonometry. Trigonometry, ya'll. I thought I was done with that when I was, like, a junior in high school. I'm not a math-phobe but the word "azimuth" in the description of what you have to do just makes my head hurt. And I don't even know if it will work - this looks like how you convert one whole PROJECTION into another). Or else I call around and beg everyone at the ISGS or the INHS whether they please, please have a map in GIS format in latitude/longitude. Or I try to write a conversion program to force the map I have into the projection I need. Or I click over roughly the center of every county and write down the Easting and Northing and use those as centroids, and have it be all jerry-rigged and ugly and bad and not accurate.

I don't know. Maybe I'm best off just flushing this project and having to say "No, actually I did not write any papers this past year" on my self-evaluation for this fall. (Do you know how much I hate those things? How I look at them and go "well, you suck, you did nothing at all valuable over the past year. Maybe that guy who said the tenure committee was high was right.")

I don't know. I just want to cry right now.