Iowa Highway Ends: Starting ninth year, third computer

[Jeff Morrison]

Mid- to late November is about the time for the "anniversary", such as
it is, of Iowa Highway Ends. I haven't done much with the site lately,
owing in part to a decrease in Iowa roadtrips, but that is going to
change.

I just bought and set up my third computer of the decade, a 21.5-inch
iMac, and it has 2 TERABYTES of space. Put another way, it has more HD
space than every computer I've ever used plus all the computers in
Mom's labs combined. I thought the applications I was using on my
laptop for the site would have to be upgraded, but as it turns out
that situation may not be as bad as I feared.

What does this mean for the site? It means that I have the space and
ability to do a complete reorganization of the storage system I have
for the ends photos and files. (Yes, I could have done this at any
time with the external hard drive. I didn't.) In turn, that means that
the entire site will eventually be moved to my Mac.com site. I have
many parts of it there already, but this will help centralize
everything. Assuming Illustrator still works without any hiccups,
there could be a slew of new maps in the future too.

With the new computer comes the newest iPhoto and its Places feature.
It's not exactly perfect when it comes to naming locations - first of
all, it wants a name for everything and defaults to "New Place" when I
would be happy leaving the intersection nameless, and when it's in or
near a city, it's the city name, so I have a drop-down of half a dozen
places labeled "Ames". (Just typing that automatically goes to where
happened to be my first placement, I-35/E29.) So in my down time I'll
be sorting through my thousands of photos and pinpointing them best I
can, assuming the pin stops dropping a tenth of a mile east of where I
put it.

In non-Iowa Ends news, I have a lot more viewing space to refine the
roads that are my responsibility for Clinched Highway Mapping, and
with the recent changes in Google my laptop was straining to keep up.

[richard]

So you're gonna put together 100gigs of data for the site.
Now how ya gonna crunch all of that into a 10mb space?

I get a kick out of "Abbey" on NCIS. She's holding this nice big case and
says, "This puppy has a terabyte of memory in it!"
Hell, I can now have that much in my back pocket!

My big tower, half the size of her case, has a terabyte in it.

And next year 5Tb will be the norm.

[txsta...@hotmail.com]

Wow, Jeff, congrats. I'm almost jealous. If only Macs were more in
my $$ range, it'd be different.

I might have a labeling suggestion...for those turnoffs/crossings not
in or close to a town, why don't you use the county they're in? I
know that might present somewhat of a problem with multiples but
surely there aren't too many intersections in the BFE column in that
great state I once briefly called home.