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Microsoft Knows Where You live and The Shortest Route There
I know that this is the third post in a row about the election but I just thought I should mention it due to it's high nerd content.
Last night I volunteered to drive around the county on a voter registration canvas. The local party office had a list of potential voters who moved to Poulsbo the town north of me but did not register to vote yet. These folks voted for my man Al Gore the inventor of the Internet back in ye olden days of 2000. Well he did not invent it but he did write the legislation and pass that made it public and thus created the modern global free Internet. The goal of this dive is to stop by their homes and hand them the voter registration forms and make everything generally spiffy.
The problem is that these people live across a mish mash of locations all over a town that is a combination of suburban and rural houses way the hell out in the forest. The layout of the town is influenced by the coast line of the Kitsap peninsula and the hills to create a psychotic game of Sim-City that has gone wrong over several decades of questionable urban planning and development.
This is where the nerd part come in. So the nerds and wonks at the local party HQ used Microsoft Streets and Trips 2004 to map an efficient and navigable map out of the surreal jumble of locations and streets. This is wicked cool software that includes.
All updated maps of the USA and Canada. More than 6.7 million miles of routable local, city, state and highway roads in the United States and Canada representing the 35,000+ US zip codes and all 700,000+ Canadian Postal Codes.
More Points of Interest. The number of points of interest was increased to over 1.3 million (from 1 million in the 2003 version).
Find an Address or Place. Easily pinpoint an exact customer or business address on the map by simply entering an address or location. Full address searching available for over 6.7 million miles of roads in the U.S. and Canada. Locate over 2.0 million place names around the world.
It is like Mapquest on steroids. We had a list of exactly where to turn and what house to stop at. Over the next four hours we found and visited around twenty homes including the ones that were way the hell out in the woods past the paved roads. It is all public data but this gives you the ability to sort and manipulate it quickly. We were able to find about 90% of the homes that we were looking for. We probably could have found the other ten percent but we were on a time schedule.
This weekend I saw them use this software to plan the canvassing trips and I jested. "Huh Microsoft made a software tool that lets you track down people based on their personal information imagine that".
Jake at August 18, 2004 
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Comments
This is software I have been guilty of using before, and I love it. It will most definitely come in handy if I get this position with Sony.
Posted by: Mici at August 18, 2004 8:59 AM
Their Pocket PC version can link with the main version. That is hellishly cool.
It is not often that I am impressed by Microsoft productivity software
Posted by: Jake of 8bitjoystick.com at August 18, 2004 11:42 AM
Why do you feel "guilty" for using software? That is wierd.
Have you ever thought about that?
Posted by: Pete at August 19, 2004 9:57 PM
It is a figure of speech. Not that I am actually feel guilty for using it, just that I have used it before. It's an expression, nothing more.
Posted by: Mici at August 20, 2004 8:45 AM
Bah, I'd say this was "medium nerd content".
High nerd content woulda commented on the effectiveness of Microsoft's algorithm for solving the traveling salesman problem.
Bonus nerd points if you'da commented on if their solution was NP complete or not.
Or maybe they don't teach kids that in 'puter school nowadays. It's all just web-this, web-that.
Posted by: dunsany at August 22, 2004 9:59 PM
Woah. You know kung-fu
Posted by: Jake of 8bitjoystick.com at August 22, 2004 10:44 PM
Yes, I was nerdy back before it was cool to be nerdy.
Posted by: dunsany at August 23, 2004 2:19 PM
