Live Map II

Ok, I'm trying this again. This time, Brianna and I are driving from Colorado Springs, Colorado to Everett, WA, along with all her things (she's moving to the Pacific Northwest). The weather is not supposed to be as nice as it was for me last time, so it might take a little longer, but ideally it will only be a two day trip. Let's see if I can set the map up correctly:

Update (Jan 16th, 2012, day after arrival): Another successful trip! We had some bad winds (gusts up to 50mph!) going through Wyoming, and Satus Pass through the Cascade Mountains was busy and wet, but we didn't actually hit any really bad driving conditions until the very end. It had snowed in Washington and some of the roads were icy, particularly the side streets. All told, it was a really smooth trip, although we were really glad to be out of the U-Haul cab by the end of it!

View Road Trip - bringing Brianna to Washington in a larger map

Live Map

During the drive home, I'm trying something new with geo-tracking: a live map. As I'll be on the road most of the time, I won't be able to do much trouble-shooting while the map is actually updating, but the testing has all worked out, so I have high hopes this will automatically update during my trip.

UPDATE: That seems to have worked out rather well. Here's a static map of the journey:

View Road Trip - Midland to Everett in a larger map

Cyborgs

The Unofficial Apple Weblog posted a rumor yesterday speculating on a new voice interface (called "Assistant" in the post) that may be coming with the next iPhone.

We're told that you can speak to the Assistant in your normal tone and speed of voice; it's that accurate. Assistant is also integrated with Wolfram Alpha, so you could also ask your iPhone questions like "Convert 10.2 acres to hectares" or "What's the cube root of 924?" and get an immediate answer.

I have no idea if this is actually coming with the next Apple product, but I'm convinced that something like this is coming in the near future. And it sounds really, really cool. After all, what could be better than asking a question to the air and having your phone spit out the correct answer?

But as cool as this is, it's also worrying. When you don't have to put any effort into learning something, it doesn't stick with you. At the most basic level, this is the same problem as needing a calculator to figure out that 3 x 4 = 12. As human beings, we shouldn't need a technological crutch to navigate through basic aspects of life.

Having said that, you can still bet I'll be all over this feature, if and when it ships.

* * *

One other interesting bit from the article:

One more fascinating feature that is likely to be packed with privacy settings is "Find my Friends." With this feature, you could ask your phone "Where's Erica Sadun?" and (provided she's made her location information available to me) the iPhone would display her location.

Again, there's no way to know if this is real or not, but after the brouhaha about iPhone tracking earlier this year, Apple had better be very careful about how they present a feature like this. I think it would be fantastic to have a service that would let me know when friends are nearby ("enhanced serendipity", if you will) but it would be pretty easy to forget you had this enabled, or to forget who had access to your location. I've been publishing my general location for over a year now, but only a few people have had access to my pinpoint, real-time location. It's not something you would trust to just anyone.

Photo Map

So this is how I spend my Friday nights. After playing with Google Fusion Tables for a bit, I got pretty excited about mapping my photos. Fusion Tables is definitely a beta product, but it's fantastic at turning a table or a Google Earth file into a nice map.

View Larger Map

If you click on a pinpoint, the corresponding photo will pop up.

I've been working on my digital photos for quite a while now, categorizing, getting rid of duplicates and bad shots, and geo-tagging my old photos, and making sure to keep up on that kind of thing with all my new photos. Last night I uploaded a bunch of photos from my college and high school years. You can check out the galleries here. I'm still missing my big European summer of 2006. Cleaning up those photos is an on-going project. I started with close to 2000 photos (almost 200 of which were of the Eiffel Tower) taken by six different people. Getting rid of junk photos (I have sooo many blurry photos of stained-glass windows), sorting them chronologically (nobody had the date/time on their cameras set accurately in 2006) and accurately geo-tagging everything has been quite the chore.

My sister has been working on digitally scanning the negatives of my mom's old photos, so hopefully I'll eventually be able to add photos of the vacation to Hawaii and the two-month RV trip around the contiguous United States.

Oh, and just for the heck of it, here's the Photo Map and the Google Latitude Map overlaid on each other:

View Larger Map

The Last Twelve Months

I've been tracking myself (or more accurately: my phone) with Google Latitude for a little over a year now. During that time I've been in (or at least passed through) six countries on four continents, traveling some 76,000 miles. Not bad. Here are the actual data points for August 2010 through August 2011 mapped out:

View Larger Map

Now I wish I had figured out this geo-tracking thing earlier. When I have spare time, I'll try to import previous years based on geo-tagged photos.