In the ever decreasing area of privacy, one more corner has been whittled away. This site has been up for a while, but I only recently found out about the reverse lookup feature of AnyWho, the online AT&T Phone Directory.

It works like this...
You can type in a name and address, and as long as the number is listed in the phone book, you can find that information online as well. Slightly scarier, you can type in a portion of a name and a state, and all individuals matching those parameters, their phone numbers and a link to a map of their place of residence.

Along those same lines, you can visit the Reverse Lookup portion of the site, and enter an area code and a phone number, and find out who it is who called and where they live. On any of these results pages, you can click the street name of anyone you find, and receive a list of all neighbors.

Try It!:

Area Code:

Telephone Number (no dashes, ex. 5551212):

As an example, one can get a fine hot pastrami sandwich at 802-864-4408 and 802-864-0110, but is that really important when 802-865-3663 will deliver? This service not available for cell phone numbers or numbers that are unlisted.
posted by Rob Rohr at 4:20 PM 

The satellite photo used in the previous post (below) comes from the ACME Mapper, which is a front end to Terraserver, MSN's large geographical database. Funny thing, the ACME Mapper is made by the same fellow who put together the ACME License Maker, the ACME Label Maker, the ACME Heart Maker, along with some choice UNIX apps like the ACME Country music lyrics generator.

All of these "Utilities" are well worth a gander, but I'm obsessed by the satellite data of the US, now available to the most casual viewers.

My Formative Years as seen by Satellite

• 1969: My Place of Birth, St. Mary's Hospital, Troy, NY.
• My first home, married student housing, RPI, Troy NY.
• 6 weeks: Dad starts active duty, White Sands Missle Range, NM. [ed. note: Mom, Dad, if you can zoom in on the location within the base where we lived and send me the link, I'd be grateful.]
• 1971: The Rohr clan moves to Connecticut, taking up temporary residence in Suffield, CT[ed. note: Er... Mom, Dad, if you could send me a street address for our temporary Suffield digs, as my memory from that time is sketchy.]
• 1971: The Rohrs move into their new ancestral home, Enfield, CT. I can see my house from here!
• 1973: Rob almost loses an eye at the local supermarket, Chester's Market. Mr. Chester, owner and proprietor, chose to avoid a lawsuit by mailing me a plastic bucket full of all the products upon which I bled. Candy bars, yum.
• 1974: Rob attends Kindergarten at the Edgar H. Parkman Elementary School. For some reason, I've always had an unnatural loathing for the letter 'H'.
• 1976: Rob starts piano lessons, Mrs. Johnson is a phenomenal teacher, but a little loopy, later joins cult.
• Rob's addiction for video games begins burgeoning at the local 7-11 (on the way home from piano lessons.)
• My First Job: Delivering the morning newspaper for the Hartford Courant. This condominium complex didn't stand a chance from my marketing tactics.
• 1981: Junior High at the John F. Kennedy Junior High School. For some reason, the asterisk is my least favorite bit of punctuation.
• 1983: High School at Enfield High School, Enfield Street, Enfield, CT. I majored in creative place naming. You can't see this on the photo, but the curving road leading from the parking lot of the right side of the photo was on an uphill incline, and every afternoon, several young macho men would rest the powered wheels of their car on the uphill side of the speed bump and lay down a patch of burnt rubber, and release a cloud of smoke. I suspect this image was taken in the morning based on the lack of clouds hovering over that hill.
• My Second Job: Working as a maintenance/gopher type at the So-Fro Fabrics store in one of the numerous local malls. This mall, the Enfield Square, was the queen mother of all the malls in North Central Connecticut. I feel blessed to have provided sweat equity to enrich the commercial interests in the area.
• My Third Job: Astro's Pizzeria Restaurant. The best pizza restaurants in Northern Connecticut are Greek restaurants, and the best Greek restaurants are owned and run by Iranians. This was one such restaurant. One of the co-owners would offer to wrestle me for my paycheck each payday, but I didn't fall for that one. Invariably, I would then be banished to the dumpster in the back lot with small boxes on my feet to "stomp down the dumpster" in order to make room for an additional days garbage.
• My Fourth Job: Connecticut National Bank in Hartford, CT. I would drive my mother to work in the morning (she worked in CT Natl Bank Main building downtown) and I would work at the computer center on the other side of the highway, writing Lotus Macros to automate forecasting processes. Those were the days.
• My Fifth Job: Gale Toyota in Enfield, CT. Job Title: Lot Boy. Sample tasks: Salesman says, "Go wash my car, and while you're at it, remove the dead bird that is wedged in the grill. I'm starting to smell it when I turn on the A/C." I learned to drive standard on other people's new cars. Sweet.
• 1987: College at RPI in Troy, NY. Particularly, the freshmen dormitories, where, in line with my earlier creative influences, I could see from the third floor of Bray Hall (home of the Brayn Dead) the fabled Hall Hall could be seen.
• Sophmore year housing, I moved to North Hall, much closer to central campus than my intended home with all my freshmen year buddies on 15th street.
• After RPI, I stayed in Troy, living on 13th Street across from the Pikes (Pi Kappa Anyone?) fraternity house...
• ...while working at Luis' Deli (nobody beats Luis' Meats), and subsequently, American Communication Consultants, Inc. It was at ACC that I learned about beaurocracy, graft and corruption. And telephony and networking. And arbitrage opportunities in Rural Electrification and government loans under the auspices of regulated monopoly.
• More to come...

posted by Rob Rohr at 4:53 PM 

If you are a strike buster looking for work, you might find striking cats in the following location:

If you are a UN coalition bomber looking for nice juicy bombing targets in order to enforce sanctions against our aggressive government, there's a nice chip fabrication facility up the road a bit. Also there's a weapons assembly plant down by the lake. And of course the Air National Guard hangars over at the airport. Golly, we're so doomed.
posted by Rob Rohr at 4:58 PM 

It's been a while and the masses are agitating. What could possibly follow that delightful cat unionization piece? What are those cute little fuzzy beasts up to now? When will the hilarity ever end?

Needless to say, the management chooses not to provide the little hairy socialists with any free publicity, so we'll move on to a topic that has relevance in todays more secure world: License Plates. The way this country is headed, we'll all end up detained indefinitely as enemy combatants. No messy civil rights issues that way. With nobody left in the outside world of "free society", I suspect crime rates may finally fall below 5% per 100,000.

Since we'll all be pushing out license plates on an assembly line, why not visit the Acme License Maker and exercise some creative juices before that sort of activity becomes seditious and punishable by solitary confinement.

Simply choose a state, and a license plate style, select the text to appear on the plate and voila! You've just turned into the type of person that says voila.

You have your choice of many styles per state.

Naturally, you are not limited in your choice of prose.

Other plates are available for the US and Canada:

Out of compassion for the youngsters, I'm restraining my more basic urges to make rude license plates. Also, based on my memory of playground shenanigans, today's youths would probably come up with better (ruder) license plates. Good clean wholesome fun for the entire family!
posted by Rob Rohr at 3:50 PM 

Cats Vote to Form Union

In light of recent negative press about the cats during the Great Fly Massacre, both household cats, Hope and Ophelia, have voted to form a collective bargaining unit under the auspices of the 403rd Local Electrical Workers Union. The cats claim that the management has not been forthcoming in dealing readily with feline concerns, and feel that a new contract would be in their best interests.

The first negotiating session scheduled for last night fell speedily into disarray when talks bogged down over "litter springiness quotients" and the cats' unwillingness to eat bugs. Shop Warden Hope expressed dismay that management continues to offer only the most lifeless kitty litter, and continually ignores cat complaints over the lateness of meal service.

The cat negotiating commitee meets with management tomorrow at which point negotiations will resume. If an agreement can't be hammered out within the month, the cats will go on strike.
posted by Rob Rohr at 6:41 PM