The muy atento among you will have already noticed that the map is now la mapa. This week, Google expanded Google Maps to include all of Spain and introduced an option to use the service in Spanish, so I decided to slip a little of that into this website.
Oh, and I’ve bumped the map’s “procrastination value” up to a full hour, since the “Híbrido” mode is that much cooler now, with its new coverage of Europe.
Moving to a more digital world, Waaahhh Weekly has just put its first issue online. (For those who couldn't find it, it's in the column of destinations).
Enjoy!
Btw...more formating to come for the digital format, and...
HAVE YOU SIGNED UP FOR ASSASSINS YET?!
Please zoom in on the map before you complain that you’re not on there; some residents come from the same ZIP code, so their pushpins might be literally blocks away from each other. Unless you zoom in, you won’t be able to see all the pushpins (just look at California to see what I mean).
However, if you really aren’t on the map, please (nicely) tell me, and I’ll add you. Do not write me a nasty letter saying that I’m trying to ruin your life and starve your Tamagotchi by deliberately not adding you to the map.
Anyone still have a Tomagotchi, by the way?
These days, when we say we’re heading back home to eat, sleep, or study, we’re usually referring to our little dorm rooms (also known as sleeping cubicles). But we also like to talk about home home sometimes. There’s a map of our various hometowns on the first floor, right in front of the basement door. I figured it’d be cool to digitize the map – after all, no other dorm has it so far (I seriously checked).
So here it is.
I took most of the data from Zapatistas’ Facebook profiles yesterday afternoon, but not everyone has a Facebook profile – shocking, I know. I mean, Raúl has one, c’mon! So not all the dorm residents are included on the map yet, because we frankly don’t know where they come from. (I could’ve put them in the middle of Siberia, but it seems that Southern Californians don’t like that kind of weather for some reason.)
I thought about password protecting this map, making it only accessible to current residents of Zapata, to keep out random strangers, but this tool won’t get stalkers anywhere, anyways: it’s not even accurate to the ZIP code in some instances.
As I said before, the map is powered by Google Maps. For those of you still stuck in the Dark Ages (also known as MapQuest), you can drag the map around with your mouse, use the slider to the left to zoom in and out, and click on the red pushpin / hot-air balloon thingamabobers to see which Zapatista’s hometown is located there.
As always, it’s not done: besides adding more Zapatistas to the map, I plan to add some options to hide second floor residents or show only freshmen, and once I get my hands on some of your photos, I’ll include them in the little infobubbles that pop up. Be sure to drag the map over to Brazil or Saudi Arabia or Thailand: some pushpins are waaaay out there.
Okay, so we’re not giving out free Boston Cream Pie. But soon, we will give all you Zapatistas access to this website, so you can help keep it up-to-date with current events and shameless plugs.
Right now, this website only consists of a blog; we intend to add much more in the near future (by Thanksgiving, say). The front page works basically like a bulletin board, and all you need to do is to log into Movable Type (MT is a webmail-like service, run right out of our dorm’s CGI account), click on Create a new entry, and type away.
You don’t need to know HTML: there are a few buttons right above the textbox that let you make text bold, add a link, etc. I’m working to install an add-on that’ll make the New Entry form work a lot more like Word, so you can even add cute little tables to your entries without even knowing an apostrophe from an angle bracket – though if that’s the case, you might want to take Aton’s CS1B class, now enrolling.
Our intent is to have people post some of their announcements to this website instead of to the mailing lists, to reduce some load on everyone’s inboxen and stuff. Because we want the whole world – not just mailing list subscribers – to see that we truly are tu papá.
Once our midterms are out of the way, we’re going to start going around the dorm, signing people up for Movable Type. All we need to know is your name, e-mail address, and birthplace (you’ll find out why later), and we’ll try to set you up right then and there. If you can’t wait to try your hand at defacing enhancing the Zapata website, just e-mail me with your information (but don’t spam the mailing list!) and we’ll set you up.
By the way, Dave, is Boston Cream Pie any good? I always hear about it on Arthur. Also, did anyone notice that we’re already Google’s first result for “casa zapata”? Google loves blogs.
Hello, my name’s Minh. (Audience: Hi, Minh!) This quarter, Guille(rmo) and I are going to be your dorm’s collaborative, benevolent dictators. (Yes, we’re also going to be oxymoronic.) Together, we know more Internet-ready three-letter acronyms than could possibly be good for our health. But fortunately, PHE happens to be one of them.
We’d like to thank Steve Nguyễn for finally giving us access to this site. (By the way, Steve was last year’s resident hacker computer expert.) Unlike the Munger Project, this contruction project is scheduled to complete sometime before the juniors decide on their majors. Did I mention we’re going to be benevolent?
Anyways, congratulations on finding this little corner of the Web. We promise it won’t look quite so blue by the end of the quarter – just give us some time to get things sorted out. We also promise this corner won’t be so small by then – first Zapata, then… the world!
Or at least Google.