Counting

I was just pleasantly surprised.

I was noodling around, looking for information about housing prices in a given state, and stumbled across the site for the US Census Bureau. It's pretty nice. The layout is good, the graphics are good. Its not perfect -- few sites are -- but it looks like someone took time and effort with it. I dropped them a line to tell them it was appreciated. I hope it gets to someone who actually did the design.

I remember using some of their materials back in the dark ages of information gathering, when the slickest thing around was taking notes in different colors, and the storage medium of choice was index cards. I was always fascinated by just how much data was available, about how many things. I didn't really understand a great deal of it -- even now, I'm not sure what a SMSA is, though I do recall what it stands for -- but I thought it was damned impressive, nonetheless.

Seeing their site, I still do.