isnoop.net blog

Despite the advances of the Internet, apparently some news still travels slowly. I closed down my Gmail Invite Spooler page months ago, but I’m still getting hundreds of unique visitors to that page along with about a dozen email requests for Gmail each day. Almost all of the emails and traffic are from foreign countries, so I devised a simple javascript that will allow folks to more easily translate the page into their own language.

You can use this very same javascript. It should work on any site just by including the following:

Here’s what it will look like:

In order to help a convention get off the ground, I built a tool that scraped all of the prices for round trip flights from every American and Canadian airport to eleven major North American cities.

According to my Costimator, Washington DC is the cheapest major destination, and NYC’s LaGuardia airport is the cheapest origin airport in North America.

You can enter airport codes and view the average cost to major destinations along with the percent difference from the average cost.

After watching a building burn across the water from my office today, I had the idea of applying the Seattle emergency response data to a map.

You can click on each of the datapoints for some interesting info on what’s going on at this very moment in the Emerald City. In later revisions, I’ll add auto-updating AJAX calls and fancy icons for different event types.

If you live in a major city with data like this, let me know the URL. I might be able to whip up something similar for you.

I have the thoughts page that is a blog in some ways, but I needed more of a freeform way of expressing information that wasn’t just random thoughts.

Despite my best efforts at holding out on actually blogging for five or more years, I’ve finally given in with this WordPress installation.

If you’re reading this, you’re probably a co-worker or you came to my website looking for the Gmail spooler. In the latter case, I’d like to make it perfectly clear that there are no more invites and though I like to respond to every email I receive, I’ve taken to automatically deleting any request for Gmail invites. Please don’t ask.

All that said, this blog will be a glimpse into the world around me and the things that I’m up to outside of the projects on this website. Enjoy!