what's on my mind
Mood: okay
Posted on 2008-11-11 10:11:00
Tags: whereslunch math projects
Words: 209

• I was all set to "officially" annouce whereslunch.org yesterday, and then I tried it in Internet Explorer and it was a mess. Consider this a preview release, and please use Firefox to give it a shot :-) Doors open for questions/comments, especially on how ugly it is. (it is ugly!)
• Elections matter: Obama's planning to close Guantanamo Bay and to quickly reverse 200ish Bush executive orders dealing with climate change, stem cell research, etc. Republicans and Democrats are not all the same (didn't McCain want to double the size of Guantanamo Bay?), and while your vote can be a "lesser of two evils" thing, arguing like Nader does that there's no difference between the two parties is insane.
• For my math circle talk, I think the second part will be on Huffman coding. The upside is I think I can talk about this for long enough and it lends itself well to a worksheet. The downside is it's not really that related to graph color. But I think I'm gonna go with it because I'm running out of time.
• Someone is making a spoof movie of all those other spoof movies. (Not Another Teen Movie, Epic Movie, Meet The Spartans, etc., etc., etc.) Truly we are living in meta times.

11 comments

Comment from omega697:
2008-11-11T10:52:59+00:00
Link broken. You need some HTTP:// goodness.

Comment from gregstoll:
2008-11-11T11:00:17+00:00
Hah! Somehow, that seems appropriate... (fixed)

Comment from djedi:
2008-11-11T11:22:04+00:00
Yay for having an intelligent, sane, Democratic prez.

Comment from medryn:
2008-11-11T20:22:36+00:00
Greg, you are insanely skilled at making useful web applications. It makes me want to learn some practical skills of my own!

Comment from gregstoll:
2008-11-11T21:22:55+00:00
Aw, thanks! Now I'm just waiting for teh internet monay to fall into my lap... :-)

Comment from anonymous:
2008-11-11T20:50:45+00:00
Very cool. I want to go eat lunch in Austin now. One suggestion might be to include a color key that's more visible; one of my first thoughts when seeing the map was, "what do all those colors mean?" An indication of whether 1 on the scale is good or bad would be helpful, too, since I tend to think about things backwards but I never remember what backwards is. I really like the "locality" rating as a way to distinguish chains from mom n' pops.

Comment from abstractseaweed:
2008-11-11T20:52:22+00:00
Apparently somebody logged me out of LJ. It's me :)

Comment from gregstoll:
2008-11-12T09:47:58+00:00
Re the colors: I was going for a sort of temperature-based palette, from blue = "cool" = low all the way up to red = "hot" = high. I'm certainly open to other options though - were they not distinguishable enough (especially yellow and orange) or would some other set of colors entirely be better?

Feel free to add places in Houston :-) There was a bug with adding stuff in non-Austin places last night but it should be fixed now.

Comment from anonymous:
2008-11-12T10:13:38+00:00
It wasn't the colors themselves, it was that I had to find a tab and click on it before I could see the legend. Not a huge deal for repeat users, since they'll know where to look, but as a first-time visitor it took a bit of exploration to find it. Perhaps make the color legend the default tab instead of the list, or make it an "always visible" box separate from the tabs.

Comment from othersider:
2008-11-12T00:19:14+00:00
I like whereslunch. It looks promising. I find it oddly amusing that just the other day I was thinking about how often my co-workers and I debate where to go for lunch (or, more often, don't have ideas) and how a well-developed web application could provide a solution for not only us, but possibly the rest of the world - and I actually spent a few minutes musing over what it would take to develop such a site. Looks like you pretty much beat me to it, though. :)

Comment from gregstoll:
2008-11-12T09:51:34+00:00
Thanks!

Yeah, that's kinda where the idea came from - when I go out with people we often meet downstairs and then decide, and I like trying different places but they're hard to remember. The original idea was to let you say where you went each day and then it would suggest places you like that you hadn't been to recently...but that seems kinda overkilly and a lot more work. Plus I doubt anyone (myself included) would really use it.

I'll add College Station to the list of places - feel free to add restaurants and such :-)

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