On Wed, 21 Mar 2001, John Lawson wrote: I considered using V&H tables (which I am very well familiar with...V&H tables rock! :) But the problem is I would have to map the city names of the zip codes from the survey responses to the Bellcore city names in the V&H tables, and that's not an easy task. I once wrote some FoxPro code to do intelligent name matching from a real city name to the 10-character Bellcore abbreviated city name, and that took a decent bit of work. I don't know if I have that old code still laying around on some harddrive around here. But the real hard part is figuring out how to plot V&H coordinates onto a map of the US. Anyway, it would've ended up being more work. And I never came across any of the software you describe above. They probably had that for fancier switches than I've played with. I ended up pilfering latitude and lognitude coordinates by zip code off a free zip-code lookup website by writing a Perl script that would make the HTTP server request and then parse the relevant data out of the HTML when it came back. It worked great, although the service (http://www.zipinfo.com/) only allows 30 searches per day by IP address, so I had to collect the data I needed over three and a half days :) Tonight I found some pretty cool mapping software called WorldTime, the so-called "swiss army knife" of world clocks. It's really geared towards being a world time utility but it has a feature that allows you to enter and then plot locations by latitude and logitude over a map of any part of the world. You can have three different map projection views: spherical, cartesian, and mercator. Once you selected all the points to plot, it displays them over the map with the names you assigned to them. I found the software on TUCOWS, but you can get it directly from <http://pawprint.net/wt/>. It took me a while to enter about 70+ lat. & lon. points but I did it and have come up with a result. It looks like the optimal spot for the Festival is definitely in the Rhodes Island area. I'll put together the data and present it tomorrow. Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ International Man of Intrigue and Danger http://www.vintage.org

John Lawson skrev: Sorry, I'm neither old, nor a phone guy. Don't know where you got that misinformation. -- En ligne avec Thor 2.6a. /"\ \ / ASCII Ribbon X Campaign Against / \ HTML Mail!