As beautiful as my hometown was, it was, like many small towns, economically depressed and void of all but the necessities. As I grew older, I became frustrated by this. We had one small grocery store, one stop light, two movie rental places and not a single fast food restaurant. We had no book stores, no electronic stores, no big-box stores and only a couple of places to grab a bite to eat.
Shoutout to white, you might find this interesting.
His finished map looks beautiful. I'd love to work a smaller area where the finer details are what's being explored.
I wish I'd known about TileMill before tackling the data viz with D3JS. It seems like most of the heavy lifting is already taken care of as long as you have the GeoJSON/PostGIS/etc. data.
I know at least two people who work with big data in Portland. It must be a hub for this kind of work or something.