We like to walk. When the weather cooperates, we can easily get in 5 or more miles in a day just walking around the neighborhood. We walk to the bank, to the grocery store, the hardware store, or just around the ’hood. There are two huge irritants on our walks. The terrible drivers who refuse to yield right-of-way to a pedestrian, and the abysmal quality of the sidewalks. This report will look at the sidewalks.

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Solar Panels in Houston

Having bought solar panels myself a couple of years ago, and realizing that the city permit database could be used to find most installations, I decided that it would be interesting to look at the recent history and a few other facets of residential solar panel installations. The first step is to download the structural permit data as a CSV file from the city open data website. Grabbing the correct records As far as I can tell, Solar Panels are designated as such in the Description field, and nothing else.

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Introduction I have been struggling with geocoding for about a year now, and have begun to learn far more than I wanted about the ugly details of the tools available for free. In particular I have been using Google and the US Census Bureau for geocoding. They each have their own strengths and weaknesses, so I thought it would be appropriate to share what I have learned. I would call Google promiscuous - they will try very hard to return a location to you, even if it is all wrong.

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Author's picture

Alan Jackson

Retired Geophysicist, geophysical consultant, budding data scientist, trouble-maker.

Consultant and Chief Bottle Washer

Houston and Seattle