Due to the current economy and multiple layoffs, one person has been pushed into finding something else to do with her life.  Linda Varga was a prominent engineer who loved her job.  She also loved crafts and decorating.  She decorated her office in a way that no one had ever seen before.  She brought a feeling of home in every office place.  She was very free, wild and vibrant with her decorating, especially during holidays.  She soon starting using her very unique ideas in designing and decorating the company's Christmas Parties.  Friends and family would come to her for help in creating a unique gift basket or flower arrangement for gifts.  She helped plan weddings and would make all the baskets and flower arrangements for the wedding.  After being laid off she decided this was her chance to make a living out of the things she loved best.  It is very hard to start a new business.  First she created a web site for potential customers to see some of her work.  www.uniqueitties.com.  She specializes in unique mosaic art, specialty gift baskets, exotic flower arrangements, and special event decorating/consulting.  The next step is for Linda to open a business store for her potential customers to come in and meet with her, see some of her work first hand, conduct consultations, and work on her masterpieces.

    GIS is a very important tool to use in many aspects of life.  It's popularity is growing tremendously.  GIS is a new way to study the world through maps on a computer.  Even more useful is that you are able to view multiple maps and even combine those maps to find correlations.  These different maps are called layers and you can use them in any combination.  You can have all layers showing at the same time or just a couple of them.  The GIS utilizes spatial and tabular data to create these maps.  There are many industries that use GIS, including, oil industry, government, environmental industry, private firms, etc.  Two of the biggest contributors to this project were the City of Austin official web site and ESRI's Internet Mapping and Data Site.