alov

For the past some nights this week that I've had time, I've been working on a Bay Area restaurant map thingy.

I've been collecting menus in a looseleaf folder for a while now and had always had an inkling of how neat it'd be to put the menus online. After I showed my menu folder to Master, she wanted to put comments on dishes and restaurants to know whether or not to go there in the future or to try. I then said I'd feel some obligation to put it online, given that my GIS background.

I eventually searched for free map serving software. My criteria: it had to be self-contained. As nice and robust as it'd be to have something like MySQL or Oracle as a backend, I don't feel comfortable about doing that unless it was my own server that I could do whatever I wanted with it. And great if it could deal with shapefiles. And other stuff. For something free, I'd say ALOV does enough of what I want.

So the last few nights were spent trying to figure out how to get data to show up (the accent mark above the 'e' in "cafe" screwed things up some) and how the thing operates in general. I also showed the thing to my sister and she says I should work faster on it and make a random-restaurant-picker and make money off of it. I'll prolly just incorporate the driving directions suggestion instead if possible. I also tried putting the Bay Area minor roads on but the application said it was too much for it. I may consider having to do it county by county...

Other things I have to do/try are: get more symbols for the other food types, scan in the menus for the locations that don't have a web site associated with it, hook up prolly an Access database to incorporate posting comments, incorporating the search and layout to fit my web site.

whee.

ALOV

I did a quick Google for "free map server" and looks like I've found something I could use! I'll try the stand alone version of ALOV to do the restaurant/menu map thingy. A bit confused about the tagging and how everything will be put together, but it's a start!

Folktales

Yesterday we took advantage of the 20% off Borders coupon akira-chan had given us a while ago. I bought a gift fondue set in case I ever feel the fondue mood, a digital photography book (because I would like to become better at it and having never taken a photography class, this should help some), Strunk & White's The Elements of Style (because I never got one back in high school/college), and a world folktales book.

Doh! I could've bought the digital photography book & folktales book online for cheaper! 30-32% off! Oh well, that'll learn me!

Anyway, I've always enjoyed folktales. I remember going over to the library aisle where a variety of colorful children's folktales were there for the borrowing. I tried to take a folklore class @ Cal once, but the professor intimidated all the lowerclassmen out of the lecture hall on the first day. So I left.

EBMUD: Denied!

Last week, I got the letter sayin I didn't get an interview. It's okay, I'm still quite lacking.