As I started looking for places, I noticed everything that used to be for rent was now for sale due to the same foreclosure effect that happened to my landlord.

It also appeared that the rents were going up..... but... were the really? or am I just paranoid and bitter?

Since I was waiting to get my research published, I figured I could waste ample amounts of time coding perl scripts and learning google maps.

This project was born out of boredom.

CraigStatsSF [via BoingBoing]

Larger icons received more calls.One of the venues, a Holiday Inn, is only 3 blocks from the White House. There seems to be a confluence of activity in and around the K Street area, where lobbyists, advocacy groups and think tanks have their offices. In one case, two high-volume locations, the St. Regis and the Capitol Hilton, are right across the street from one another, which we suppose is something like competing gas stations next to a busy highway.

DCHOtellalls [Map Builder] (Thanks to Veffekt!)
PREVIOUSLY: Top 10 Most "Ho-Friendly" DC Hotels, Based On The DC Madam's Phone Records

They're currently tracking Best Buy, Home Depot, IKEA, JCPenney, Kohl's, Lowe's Target, and Wal-Mart. The site draws from publicly available information and user submissions.

Personally, we're hoping for some yellow balloons (IKEA) in Brooklyn. — BEN POPKEN

Big Box Watch [Official Site]

Just type in your query, select the category, and check off the cities you want. You can even select large geographical swathes, like Northeast or West Coast.

The results page brings up windows for each city result with their own scrollable windows. If you don't like what you see in one city, you can easily X them out without refreshing the page.

The site even lets you create RSS feeds for specific searches

For other neat Craig-hacks, check out Lifehacker's post, "Craigslist for power users."

Crazedlist: a great resource for expanding your Craigslist search powers. — BEN POPKEN

The thought of washing down a Big Mac with a chai was too appealing to ignore, so we mashed up Richmond, Virginia's 1990-2000 Poverty Statistics by Census Tract along with Payday loan center locations. * Click to enlarge.

Richmond payday centers seem to roughly prefer to sit on the edges of areas with 15-30% poverty. People got to have a paycheck to give them an advance on, with 177% interest.

If a worker is short of cash and gets their full next paycheck advanced to them, how are they ever supposed to catch up?

With a windfall investment, or perhaps, another loan. — BEN POPKEN

* Combining 2000 poverty data with 2007 addresses is, admittedly, less than ideal, but it was the best we could get our hands on.

Oddly enough, the Philly tourism office are the tipsters behind this.

Interactive BYOB Restaurant Map

The interactive map provides cuisine type, address, phone, comments, and driving directions.

Chicago BYOB Restaurant Google Map.

Although sad that this Jean Claude Van Damme Mentos commercial doesn't end with him punching a tube of Mentos Ricky-Oh style through the spurting torso of his enemies, it's amazing how Mentos-like Van Damme's girly little chase scene from Bloodsport actually is.

This entrant satirizes the SUV industry. With their own tools.

Irony, you are mistress most fetching.

View it here quick, before Chevy gets wise and takes it down.

UPDATE: Link is down. Posting screenshots shortly...

UPDATE: Screenshots posted after the jump.

UPDATE: A preserved version of the parody in question made it to YouTube:

(Thanks to KevinQ for the YouTube catch!)

Less than two hours after getting posted here and on CBCNews, a user-generated Chevy Tahoe ad, an entrant in the "Make a Chevy Tahoe Ad and Win a Free Trip" contest, is down. The ad mocked SUVs, gas guzzling, planet raping, and inane car ads. For some reason, Chevy didn't want that on their site.

Whoddathinkit.

Good thing we had the foresight to take screen shots.

Guess Chevy's definition of the American Revolution doesn't include the freedom of speech.

Consumer-Made Ads Backfires for Chevy [CBCnews]

Simply enter in any IP address and click. The GoogleMaps mashup shows where that IP resides.

In more robust email systems, you can find in your toolbar an option called "view message source" that will help you figure out the IP(s) of the sender(s) (which, for the unitiated come in the format something like 69.138.23.172, four sets of 1-3 digit numbers seperated by three periods).

Nifty for determining where the spam is coming from, who may have sent you that anonymous piece of hate e-mail, or whether your online customer service has been exported to Pakistan.