With the Internet at home, it’s always a distraction from getting any work done on the blog. Sure, it’s nice for searching for a code scrap or a solution to a particular coding problem, or to download a data file, but the Internet is mostly a big distraction from reading or doing blogposts.

I’ve figured out an easy way to get block-group level American Community Survey data from the Census department. The Census Factfinder lacks block-group data. It’s called the National Historical Census Database. Not only does it have Census data up to 2012, it also has old data back to 1790. It might be interesting to do some historical mapping of things like population, especially when mapping urban growth patterns. The trick to using that data is to make sure you use the NH Census Shapefiles and not the TIGER/Line as otherwise the codes will not be able to be linked.