There’s a site, commoncensus.org that tracks how people identify themselves geographically and where they live.  For example you can look at a map and see how many people in North Carolina most identify themselves as Southern Americans or simply as Americans.

Even more interesting to me is the breakdown of sports team affiliations by geography that you can find at the CommonCensus Sports Map Project.  Right now I can tell you that within a 50 mile radius of me there are 27 Carolina Panthers fans and 8 Washington Redskins fans (there are also 2 Cowboys fans who should be deported) who have contributed to the project.  The project depends on people filling out the questionnaire on their website to build their data so I encourage all of you (except Cowboys fans) to go and participate.  The same is true for the regular census page as well.

Go check out this video of one home’s Christmas decorations and feel:

• The dismal inferiority of your own decorations.
• Unlimited gratitude that you don’t live next door to this masochist.
• Both of the above.

Thanks to Hogg for the tip.

Don’t cheat.  See if you can guess what it is, tell me your guess in the comments section and then check out some other pics just like it here.

Here’s another find from bookofjoe.  It’s an e-paper watch from Seiko and it will begin selling worldwide in Japan.  They sold 500 prototypes in Japan for the princely sum of $2,230 each, but Joe didn’t mention any pricing for the mass-produced version.

Dick Tracy is smiling somewhere.

It ain’t exactly something you’d find a normal person drooling over, but if the average person lived in my house and all your tools seem to disappear into the same magic black hole that swallows all my socks then I think average drooling would commence.

This 21st century variant of the Swiss Army knife is exactly the kind of thing I desperately need. 

Onyx version please.  You can find it here.

Thanks to bookofjoe for the tip.

There’s a new Google Maps mashup called Gmaps Pedometer that allows you to draw the coordinates of your running route and then calculates the mileage.  I did it for the run I do most often in my neighborhood and you can view it here.

As you can see it doesn’t take into account the curves in the road so it basically draws a straight line from one coordinate to another.  I tried to make as many coordinate points as possible to compensate but it still comes up short of the true mileage (I know, because I’ve clocked it a couple of times in different cars).  What should be a little over four miles shows up as 3.6 miles.

Of course you could say that I’ve been giving myself more credit than I’m due, but I refuse to believe that I’m in such bad shape that my average time is so bad that it takes me as long as it does to just go 3.6 miles…and no I’m not going to reveal my average time.  Let’s just say slower than the hare and faster than the tortoise.

This nifty little tool is available from Herrington Catalog for a cool $14.95. It’s essentially a palm-sized adjustable wrench with no moving parts.  In a true sign that I’m not the man that I once was I actually would consider this a great gift at Christmas.  What happened to the old me who couldn’t drive a nail or care to learn how?

Thanks to bookofjoe for the tip.

GE’s web-based whiteboard has been around for a while, but it was just kind of a fun thing.  Well they’ve added some tools (like typing text) that makes it truly useful for collaboration.

Check it out.