Catching Up on 2009

Since I suck at keeping up with this, I figured I'd make a list of what I've been up to so that friends and family can keep up.

• I spent the majority of September 2008 through May 2009 working on an awesome project to help Waste Management track garbage pickup in Seattle using Zonar's awesome GPS/Communications platform.
  
• In December, it snowed in the Seattle area.. and you would have thought the world had ended. (Note: do not attempt to drive in Seattle when it has snowed.. or rained. People here seem to have major difficulty driving unless the road is perfectly dry, and has been so for days.) Because of the weather, UPS managed to lose all of our incoming packages, and we celebrated Christmas a week late.
  
• After New Years, I upgraded from a MacBook to a MacBook Pro. I <3 My MacBook Pro
  
• In January, I was promoted to Lead PHP Developer at Zonar. I now lead a team of 3 developers and between the 4 of us, we can move mountains... or atleast a lot of web code.
  
• In February, We moved from our first apartment in Bellevue to a newer and cheaper place. From our Balcony, we have a view of Mount Rainier. (But its really only visible on clear days.)
• Caught my first bass in June while fishing at Banks Lake in Eastern Washington.
• I flew to Utar twice in July. We tubed the Provo River and didn't die.
• In July I was on the winning team in the annual Zonar golf scramble. I totally suck at golf still, but apparently I suck less than others. ;)
  
• A couple of weekends ago, I went to SeaFair ago and managed to snap some decent photos of the Blue Angels. I got lost on 1st avenue in SoDo while looking for the bus stop. I eventually found my way home.
  

I think that about sums up on the exciting points thus far in 2009. I'm sure there are more, but its Sunday night and I had to work most of the weekend. Coming up? Another week of work, and possibly a haircut.

Is Anybody Out There?

Does anybody read this? Probably not, since nothing is here!

Open Street Map Diary

I have started to contribute to Open Street Map. I just got an Amod AGL3080 GPS Data Logger and have started to run it everywhere I go. So far its working out pretty well! I have added a feed to my Open Street Map diary to the right hand site of my blog to keep the non-OSM world up to date.

Google Annoyance

It seems like every day I find just one more thing that annoys me more and more about Google maps. About a year ago I submitted a correction to TeleAtlas telling them that they had the names mixed up for a couple of shopping centers in Provo, UT (my hometown). To my understanding, the changes would be verified and end up in the next quarter's data. Unfortunately, to this point I have yet to see any changes. I still don't understand why Google went exclusive with TeleAtlas.

TeleAtlas sucks. Google sucks.

GeoData Sources for North America

I've been working on a few projects lately and needed some data for the US, Canada, and North America in general. Here is what I have to share:

GeoBase

The Canadian equivalent to the US Census Bureau's TIGER/Line data. In addition to road segment data sets, GeoBase also offers hydro, placenames, political boundaries and more.

USGS National Atlas

This one really isn't a secret, but it is really quite useful for high-level data of the United States and North America

I know that its a short list, but it packs a big punch.

Google AJAX Libraries SSL Support

Google finally seems to be realizing that the users of the web need to be able to browse securely. This is big news to anyone who has been hesitant to use Google's services because of the lack of SSL support. After months (years?) of waiting, AJAX Libraries SSL support is now available and SSL support in the Enterprise Maps API is just around the corner!

Preload - A Very Useful jQuery Plugin

This jQuery plugin is awesome. It allows to you start loading images into a page after the onload event has fired. Its proving very useful for pre-caching images. It just needs a little work to expand it to support javascript and css files.
Check it out: http://plugins.jquery.com/project/Preload