Merry Christmas! Happy New Year! Happy Daily Programming!
I have to say this is the most sophisticated Google map I have created so far. And it is significant on both the practical and technical side.
On the pratical side:
Knowledgable friends always admonish me: "Do not send your kids to a public school, Otherwise you will ruin them. Move to the surburb. "
Well, there are so many sides of Chicago public schools, good ones, not-so-good ones, bad ones ..., magnet, classical, gifted centers, community ... test-based, open-enrollment, lottery picked ... Based on the 2006 Chicago Sun Times school ranking, it turned out, the best elementary school in the state of Illinois is not from the upper-class suburb Wilmette, or Buffalo Grove, or Barrington, it is Decatur Classical right here in north Chicago. There are other eight schools made in the top 50 elementary schools of the state Illinois.
From next year on, I will cross my fingers for Emma to get in one of them. (Or have not I already?)
On the technical side:
(I have to admit that I have shamelessly stolen codes from various website and had forgotten from where. Sorry, sorry ...)
1. css style is applied to make the map pretty.
2 school list is loaded on the fly based on XML data; so the basic statistical information for each school
3. I added directions (to here, from here) box to InfoWindow of the map and enable users to search directions to and from for each school. This is the newest addition to my ammunition of attacking Google Maps.
4. Enjoy the map.
I swear I am not living under a rock. But I might as well be. Everyday as I browse the few tech websites, incomprehensible new terms, new techniques, new imageries, new trends, new "it" hit me, swirl me with the impact of a blizzard, even though I sink my teeth trying to move along and hang on, I would not last for more than 10 minutes. I retreat, feeling quite lost and defeated.
Don't you wish the clock could stop running? Don't you wish this generation stays this generation and let your kids be the next generation and cutting-edge, shiny as a newly minted coin?
New things, bewildering terms are hurling around in the techie world fast and furious. .NET 1.0, 1.1., 2.0, 3.0, SQL 7.0, 2005, 2008, XML, XQUERY, XPATH, XAML, XHML, LINQ, XLINQ, REST, AJAX, JASON, Silverlight ...
Don't you wish you could withdraw and write out your distrust, frustration and confusion elegantly in a immortal book called "Walden" like Thoreau in the turn of 20th century? (Of course, "Walden" is more, much more than that).
Or would you rather excuse yourself to a theoretical high-ground, laughing at the busily passing trends and futile struggles of these worker bees? Like my professor, finally had enough of chasing the "next-generation", the newest thing, he gave up thinking about new tools in coding at all and now works on applying computer technologies in children development.
Or maybe you could switch to nursing or accounting? Like my this friend, or that ...