Hello.

Just found this site. Apologies for not finding it sooner.

My particular slant is postcodes.

I was a coder for about 20 years. Mortgages. Yep, Mortgages. Spent a while - or, actually, several whiles - writing a postcode validation routine. The post office then released their database - released? I mean started selling - on a CD! A CD? Wow! We'll have some of that. The very thing we were looking for. See, we had just bought a PC with a CD player in it! I did wonder if it would ever come in useful for anything other than a Dire Straits album...

Must say, as the years passed, I realised that the money I was paying the PO could have paid for two more coders. Why don't they just write the database? I investigated and found out that - even if you type it in from scratch - you are still violating copyright. Well, violating is what I do best. So I set about creating my own postcode database. Mind, the thing I do second best is procrastinating. So my database has yet to progress beyond seven - no six - streets away from me. I'll get to seven Tuesday week.

Simpy

I saw an interesting comment in the blogs. It said that the American zipcode database is in the public domain. I would be fascinated to hear a history of how it got there. Were there debates at a high level? Was it just passed through on a nod? Was there a campaign?

Anyway. heh, heh, that word is somewhat ironic don't you think? No? OK.