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In December of 2009, I upgraded my phone. I went from a Razr to a Cliq, which just happens to be a smartphone running Android 1.5. At the time, it was the best T-Mobile/Android offering within my budget; I also took advantage of their 0% financing/installment payment plan, which is a fantastic deal. Interest-free, I'd pay them $20 a month until the phone is paid off. With my particular plan, this option was better than a 2-year contract and its subsidized phone (I actually did the math). This netted me an awesome Android phone running Linux (yay!) with a neat slide-out keyboard.

Bill, husband of the aforementioned awesomest librarian Colleen, matches his wife in awesomeness: today he gifted me with a copperplate engraving of a map of Bavaria. Although difficult, because the map is circa 17th century, I was able to locate Munich, Eichstätt, and Ingolstadt. This needs to be framed and hung on my walls ASAP. To re-iterate: Bill is awesome.

It's also a nice reminder that I need to restore my Google map, after breaking its functionality to convert to Drupal. Well done me.

About a year or so ago, my friend Colleen, the most under-appreciated, bestest Librarian evar (it's okay, she doesn't read this, so she won't be embarrassed), convinced me to start using feed aggregators to handle my endless list of content I was trying to keep up with. I'd tried Sage, the Firefox aggregator/feed reader, and the entire exprience had left me hostile to the technology, but with her admonishment/recommendation in mind, I tried out Bloglines.

Greetings, Googlers! You may be interested in my code samples, my little Google Maps toy, or my self-congratulatory afflatus. Or maybe you're interested in my theory as to why geeks do some of the things they do? If you're here for outdated Benzene information, see the link in the sidebar; I mostly keep that around for sentimental value, so I won't be linking to it from here.

I hacked this together using Ricardo Galli's access map code and modifying it heavily for use on my site. The biggest modification was the upgrade to Google Maps API version 2, which created some minor issues with incompatibilities solved after a careful reading of the new API documentation. This is a map indicating the locations from which this site is being accessed by its visitors.

TODO: Use Drupal's PHP input format to insert map here!! (and don't forget to add it to the primary links)

So far, my international contingent includes Germany, Japan, Canada, China, the Netherlands, France, Colombia, New Zealand, Australia, South Korea, Norway, Thailand, India, Malaysia, Austria, Sweden, Hong Kong, Poland, Slovakia, Monaco, Argentina, the United Kingdom, Greece, Russia, Taiwan, Belgium, Italy, Spain, Philippines, South Africa, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, Hungary, Andorra, Serbia And Montenegro, Costa Rica, Ireland, Lithuania, Bahamas, Iran, Mexico, Slovenia, Romania, Portugal, Estonia, Denmark, Mauritius, Finland, Pakistan, Somalia, Indonesia, Peru, Singapore, Israel, and Turkey.

I created a Page Template for the Tiga theme I'm currently using. I'm calling it Mapper, because it's the hook that will load my Google map page once I upgrade to the new API. Basically, I copied Tiga's page.php file and added an include to the PHP file that will actually load the map.

Google Maps updated its API to version 2 on April 3, 2006. Trying to get my head around the changes (and possibilities of the new features). Also? Taxes suck.

The map page is broken until I can figure out why Google and Wordpress don't want to play together.

At first, it seemed my vainglorious attempt to list my international (web site) hits would be a disaster: the access map page was not part of the Wordpress structure, and editing it was not as easy as it could have been. More importantly, even though I could greet those visitors on my Wordpress pages, which would get pushed to the main Hackwater page, the XML file listing all my hits geographically was not the easiest to read, as I wasn't doing any filtering (all my US hits were crowding out the relatively few international ones).

I finally got website hits from below the equator (hello, Kiwis and Aussies!) and also got hits from Korea and Norway. Greetings all. I guess this means I need to update the map page. I think it's really cool that I can use Google Maps to get a vague idea of where my visitors come from, even the indexing spiders. (I realize that hostip.info, which does my IP to geographic coordinate conversions is not the most accurate in the world, but I have to assume that it can at least get countries correctly.