Weekend project update

So, you can't do anything really useful with it yet, but here is the start of my VTA Google Maps hack. Station markers are clickable for their names; as this is a weekend project, I will work on search functionality next weekend.

I'm torn as to whether to include polylines tracing the lines themselves, particularly because the Mountain View-Winchester line and the Alum Rock-Santa Teresa line overlap for about a third of their lengths -- that long diagonal line down the centre of the map, basically. It will probably be a pain in the ass to draw in a way that looks good and is easy to read. I'll play with it, though; watch this space for updates.

Social psychology and hacking

"The experience of being the actual medium for a continual process of creation takes one past all depression or persecution or vain glory, past, even, chaos or emptiness, into the very mystery of that continual flip of nonbeing into being, and can be the occasion of that great liberation when one makes the transition from being afraid of nothing to the realization that there is nothing to fear. Nevertheless, it is very easy to lose one's way at any stage, and especially when one is nearest.

Here can be great joy, but it is as easy to be mangled by the process as to swing with it. It will require an act of imagination from those who do not know from their own experience what hell this borderland between being and nonbeing can become. But that is what imagination is for."

--R.D. Laing

I can think of no field in which this is more true than in coding.