Subtle Coolness

I don’t know about you, but I had a wonderful evening.

I called up my friend Michelle earlier today to ascertain if she was busy this evening. It was spur-of-the-moment, I admit, but it was only this morning that I discovered that the International Space Station would be visible this evening. I wanted to see it, but I also wanted to share this wonderful experience with someone else so I decided to make a date of it.

It turns out Michelle was free, so she met me at my apartment just in time to see the Space Station pass across the night sky. I was afraid she would miss it, but her timing could not have been closer, for the pass only lasted about one minute, and then it was gone. But we definitely saw it, and hands down it was the coolest thing I have seen orbiting our planet this week.

With that spectacular light show out of the way, we each made a cup of hot chocolate and proceeded to walk around my neighborhood in search of Christmas lights. We found some really good displays, we drank some really good chocolate with real candy canes melted right in, and we even took turns spilling the aforementioned chocolate onto ourselves.

We also had an enjoyable stroll and pleasant conversation. We ended the evening back at my apartment with ice cream cake and looking at photographs. Oh, what fun!

I made an update to my WardMap script, so now we are at 2.2. The changelog is in the script.

WardMap is a convenient way to plot ward members on a Yahoo! map. See the demo. The demo uses a fabricated membership directory. Actual directory information for my ward is restricted to members of my ward.

As always, the source can be downloaded from /stuff/wardmap.php.

Please email me if you would like to use WardMap.

An explanation: the ward web sites that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints hosts for each local congregation include a directory of members for that congregation. There is an option to download that directory as a csv (comma separated values) file. The WardMap script uses that csv file without changes and plots the addresses on a map.

Using this script requires a few things:

1. A Yahoo! Application ID. This is a free ID that allows a programmer to access Yahoo! web services. Instructions for obtaining this can be found in the source of the script.
2. A web server to host the script, with the particular ability to run scripts written in PHP.
3. To view the map, you need a web browser with support for JavaScript and Adobe Flash. Any modern browser will do: Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, &c. Flash is free from Adobe’s website.