Migration!

Hey all,

I'm moving my nonpersonal blog posts from livejournal to here.

Ogle Earth Blogged BadHill

Ogle Earth posted a writeup of BadHill, featuring a particularly boring, rambling, and badly composed snippet of an email I send to the them. Lesson: send only snappy, proofread emails to blog authors.

del.icio.us linkbacks of BadHill.org, post blogging

del.icio.us linkbacks of BadHill.org, with user titles and descriptions. wheeeeeeeeeeeee

Blogged by Seattle Metroblog

BadHill has been blog'd by Seattle Metroblog. Spiffy.

"Even if you're into accumulating vertical in your commute, you can use the site to see just how high you're climbing on a day-to-day basis.

Don't you just love it when the internet is awesome like this?"

Update: Could someone check badhill from a non-mac and tell me if it's hosed? It seems hosed. Damn thing holds up for a month and the second it gets blogged comes crashing down.

Metaupdate: It's fine: it was this antiquated version of Safari not parsing the XML return code. If it doesn't code your address, that's not my fault: it's geocoder.us's.

GIS Meeting

Chris S. and I had a meeting last night with two transportation planning consultants who are interested in the work "we" are doing. ("we" because Chris singlehandedly did all of the famous stuff and I'm mostly just coattailing at this point). We talked for a long time, and they eventually gave us a bunch of data and a free server, and one of them seemed interested in recruiting me into transportation consulting, which is basically all I've ever wanted to do. I'd jump on it, but I'm not certain that I'd want to abandon the security of a nine-to-five job while I still have so much debt. Chris, by contrast, is pretty fantastically hire-able, but he's working at Amazon likely making more money than God, so he's out of the rat race for now.

There is an interesting catch-22 in making GIS-enabled internet application with municipal data: Anyone who can actually finish a cool GIS project is totally hot and can scoop up huge amounts of government GIS project money. By taking government GIS project money, however, you doom your project to bureaucracy and sloth, and will no longer actually be capable of doing cool things. It's like when MGM bought out Buster Keaton because he was a ninja, which effectively extinguished his ninjahood.

MSN Virtual Earth

MSN released their google maps clone, MSN Virtual Earth. I like it, but not because it's good. It's approximately exactly what Google maps would be if they siphoned a large portion of their coding budget into PR and marketing. It is useful, in that it will keep the people at google off a high horse and in the code mines keeping their product top notch.

Update: Okay fine. It appears the MSN satellite images have a higher resolution than the leading brand.

BusMonster

Today I met with Chris Smoak of busmonster.com. We're going to work together on a soon-to-be-widely-adopted bus/bicycle/walking/ferry/donkeycart trip planner.

*flex*