[amyjess]

Yes, as someone who has played with Census data a lot this year, I've found myself becoming intimately familiar with FIPS numbers. Also, it's interesting to see what the Census Bureau designates a "place" and what it designates a "county subdivision". New England and New Jersey in particular look weird from a Census perspective (because of this, I've found my self using subdivisions exclusively for New England, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and the Dakotas).

And if you think that's arcane, you should try shapefiles. It took me a while to figure out how to do it, but I have some Python code for pulling the vector data out of shapefiles, sticking them in Python data structures, and then rendering arbitrary combinations of shapefile shapes into a single PNG. It's pretty nice that I can traverse my data, grab the shapes for every place in, say, the Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington MSA, and render them all to a PNG. And I have a REST API for doing that dynamically.

Yeah, I really need to get my Census application up and running again and post it here...

[mooreds]

Please do, that sounds awesome!