February 24, 2006
Anagram map of Downtown Bend
Inspired of late by Boing Boing's pointers to subway maps that have been remixed to used anagrammed names, I thought it would be fun to do the same with Bend. Only, Bend doesn't have a subway (or any mass transit, grrr), so I did the next best thing: remixed the map of downtown.
The only constraints I followed were dropping the directional part of the street names (the NW in NW Franklin) and spelling out the type of roadway ("Avenue" vs. "Ave").
Enjoy! Oh, and the Internet Anagram Server came in amazingly handy for this.
July 30, 2005
Online Bend maps
Lately I've been playing around a bit with Google Earth, and correspondingly Google Maps, and it's amazing the kinds of things you can do with it. Unfortunately, their source data for Central Oregon is less than impressive; try to zoom in too tightly and you just get pixelated blobs.
Well, the city of Bend website has put their GIS mapping system online, you can get to it here, and it's super-detailed (for Bend only) and largely fills that niche that's missing from Google's maps. It even has some of the same functionality with their layers option. The only drawback is that it only runs in Internet Explorer 5.5 or greater (and, I'm assuming, Windows).
Still, it's pretty sweet. I'm already thinking about how to use this data somewhere...
