Travis Pettijohn: Blog

I started moving into my new condo today. Except the floors weren't done. They needed to be sanded and get the final coat of polyurethane or varnish or whatever. When I had the walk-through on Tuesday, I was told that the floor would be finished that night, well in time for me to move in on Saturday. Oops. I asked some of the laborers what to do, and they helped me track down the general contractor, Kevin. He apologized, started explaining why, and cut himself off, saying, "I'm not going to make excuses. Let's make this right." Gotta respect that attitude. He proposed that we put my furniture in a neighboring unit that's still under construction while he got the floor done today. Seemed fair enough. And sure enough, about an hour later, the carpenter was there finishing the last of the trim. I talked to him, he said he'd get the floor done tonight. That gave me more confidence, getting a promise from the person actually doing the work!

All this means is that my tasks got shuffled a little bit. I was going to move in/unpack this weekend and come back to my old apartment on weeknights this week to clean. Instead I'm cleaning this weekend and I'll be moving the last little bit and unpacking this week. Sigh. Not a big deal, just kind of a pain. I'm glad Kevin readily admitted that he was in the wrong. I'm not going to start flamethrowing; I need him to be my ally in getting the rest of the items on the punch list completed. Tomorrow I'll go over and unpack my laundry into the chest of drawers...considering that the only clothes I have available are those on my back and dress clothes hanging in the closet. Hmmm. Immagonna stink tomorrow.

I had the inspection/walk through at my condo this morning. It was pretty fun; neat to see all my choices and how they work together. The place is pretty small (but I knew that already), or I guess I should say cozy. But it has some nice finishes that make it feel very "grown up." I'm pretty jazzed. I'll post pics sometime after closing/before move in. Today gave me a fresh burst of excitement about the deal...it had grown a little stale over the months since we had an agreed upon offer. Yay!

Yes folks, I'm entering the 21st century world of indentured servitude: I'm taking out a mortgage and buying property.

Kidding aside, assuming everything goes through I'll move this summer to a condo in Lakeview. It's a gut rehab, so everything inside will be new and fairly high-end (hardwood floors, granite counters, stainless appliances, washer and dryer in unit). I'm pretty jazzed!

I'm joining the club of coolpeople who hack Google Maps.

Late last night (like from 1 to 4, I don't know why) and this afternoon I hacked together a merging of Google Maps and Chicago Reader rental classifieds. I give you the result (it takes a while to load).

I like Housingmaps.com a lot, but Chicago Reader (so I've been told) is one of the best ways to find a place to live in Chicago. Craigslist is so-so. Compare the results on the two maps and you'll see that it's true.

Step one: Perform a search and copy-and-paste the resulting URL into my code. You're looking at 1 bedrooms in 60613, 60614 and 60657, priced between $600 and $1000.

There are two ways to find the location of a property. If the classified ad has a map link, I don't need to find the address. I can follow the link; it redirects me to a new URL that has the GPS coordinates in the query string.

Method two involves me parsing: "Street1 and Street2" or "#### (Direction) StreetName". It's not perfect, but it's pretty good. I can then ask Google to attempt find the coordinates from the address I harvested. In total, I can find the coordinates of about 80% of the ads.

After that, I generate some javascript (ads.js) that defines the coordinates and descriptions in a giant array. I can manually upload that to my hosting provider, and index.html references it. Tada!

If anyone's interested in the source (C#), drop me a line.

Kudos to Google Maps on such an excellent and interoperable product.