I agree with you on both of your comments.

1) A GPS/mapping package is definitely the best option! (but a lot more expensive!)

2) If you have kids then moving anywhere without a job lined up seems like a dumb idea… Without kids, you have a ton more options!

If you have a family then yes, obviously its a dumb idea.

But if you are young and single and willing to rent a room or share an apartment and willing to do whatever kind of work until you get on your feet then why not. As long as there is potential work in your chosen field. I wouldn’t recommend it if you are say, a pool contractor or in some field that really doesn’t work in Seattle. I moved to Seattle right out of the Peace Corps with no particular job prospects and did fine. Thousands of people do the same thing every year.

Feel free to email me (anna@raincityguide.com) with more information on your job prospects and I may be able to lead you to some good places to look!

There has been a lot of talk about web 2.0 – “web as a platform”. Enough has been said about what web 2.0 means, what being platform is. Quite of few us here in our immediate team(s) have been talking about web being a platform for develop…

My wife gave me her old Dell Axim PDA to use when she got a new one. I promptly got a GPS antenna and car mount and have turned it into a navigation machine. If you get a PDA and a bluetooth GPS antenna to mount in your car and a good PDA mapping software package like mapoplis, tomtom, or Oncourse Navigator you will be able to do the following:

1. Download your MLS listings from your desktop computer into your PDA by making each MLS listing into a separate “contact”

2. Pull up your list of contacts (MLS listings) on the PDA screen and ask the PDA to generate the fastest routes between multiple contacts.

3. Use the GPS with voice guidance to navigate you between multiple addresses.

Of course this sort of feature is probably must useful for people who are new to an an area or not really familiar with neighborhoods. I would expect that most real estate agents can navigate their home cities in their sleep and really don’t need GPS mapping software. But it is awesome if you are looking for addresses or shopping for houses in a new city like I’m currently doing in Texas.

One of the coolest things I’ve seen recently came out of a small group of hackers in the Search group at Yahoo. During the development of the new version of Yahoo! Maps (launched tonight with multi-point routing and other goodies), someone wondered w…