Blog from the 'burbs

I used the Yahoo Maps AJAX API to add location maps to RockvilleLiving.com. You can now find the location of any type of business or organization (hotels, for example, or performing arts centers) in the database on a map, as well as the location of a shopping center with a list of its businesses (Congressional Plaza, for example). I'm really excited to have got this working! For anyone wishing to do something similar with maps, I also recommend this online batch geocoder, which takes an Excel file as input and returns the same file with latitude and longitude information in it. Just make sure you remove extra letters from street addresses or it will return incorrect locations.

Last night we celebrated my husband's birthday by eating out at Il Pizzico. We must've driven by the place a hundred times in the 15 years we've lived in Rockville, thought (mistakenly) 'bad name for a pizza place' and never actually gone there to try the food. Too bad for us though -- the restaurant has absolutely fabulous food, a fun bartender, and a very nice atmosphere, as many residents of Montgomery County obviously already knew: the place was packed. We had a half hour wait for a table, and our waiter told us this was slow for a Saturday night.

I'm no restaurant critic, but I can say that everyone in my family was very happy with their meal, including our two vegetarians, who had the Pansotti di Spinaci in salsa di Crema and Penne with an eggplant sauce (which I don't remember the Italian name for). My favorites of the evening were the Finocchio Marinato salad and the Creme Brulée for dessert. The portions were just right and the presentation (especially the salads) was lovely. We'll be back!

I finally posted the beginnings of the greenpages, which was one of my main motivators for starting this site nine years ago -- to show some appreciation for and promote local businesses and organizations that follow green practices or sell environmentally-friendly products (well, that, and to show off what a person can do with a database and an Internet connection). If you have any information to add to the greenpages, I'd love to hear from you.

Susanne Brunhart-Wiggins is my heroine in this department, for her energetic and thoughtful promotion of an environmentally-conscious way of life. She runs the County's Behind the Scenes class on recycling and waste management (highly recommended, especially the trip to the waste-to-energy incinerator at Dickerson) and has collected reams of information that is enthusiastically imparted in the class and at her Talkin' Trash blog.

Want to watch Town Center being constructed? Here's a timelapse view of the construction of Rockville Town Center over the past two years, based on photos from the RockNet Webcam, set up on the Victoria Condominiums in October 2004. Rocknet has now amassed hundreds of pictures on the server supporting the webcam, all of them a view of essentially the same place (though the camera occasionally gets shifted by wind or other unknown factors and has to be set back to its original position). I've uploaded 112 of those pictures, kindly provided by Bob Ekman, who sorted through and batch color-corrected over 700 noontime photos from the camera. The set runs from October 2, 2004 through December 15, 2006 and is displayed in a Flash-based timelapse viewer (coded with ActionScript 2 and PHP, and you'll need the (free) Flash 7 player or higher to view it). Put on your hard hat and take a look.