Once again, I’ve stayed up past my bedtime in Atlanta. However, tonight I did more thinking and less working. I love to travel because in every new place, there are thousands of places to stop and ponder something you may take for granted in your usual surroundings. Here’s my short list of thoughts from Atlanta:

• I’m super, ridiculously silly-tired.
• I sometimes use hyperbole abundantly when I’m tired.
• My relationship with flying is still so odd to me. I love to soar above everything. I’ve been in a single engine propeller plane (Citabria) and all sorts of passenger jets. By far, I love flying more than any thrill ride at any amusement park. But it puts me in such a weird mindset. Before a flight, I think about every person I know and care about. I wonder if I’m leaving them well. That is, am I right with that person? I guess the morbid-sounding way to put it is: if I never see them again, are they going to remember me with a smile? I have trouble explaining it and I usually ends up sounding like I hate flying.
• I’m always so grateful to the people who live and work where I’m visiting. I find that I say “thank you” profusely on trips. I’m just so excited to see new places that I want to thank every person I see for making my experience enjoyable. I need to do this more at home. Everyone should be thanked for making life enjoyable for others; whether I see them every day or once in my lifetime.
• I like being tossed into new situations with no expectations. It scares the crap out of me, and I’m shy in new situations, but I really enjoy the experience of being up-ended by new surroundings.
• I think an awesome gift you could give someone is a “Yes” coupon. The person you give the coupon to can ask you for anything (obviously, you’ll want to give this someone you trust) for a set period of time and you have to say, “yes.” I can’t remember where I first saw that, but I was thinking about it tonight and I think it would be an awesomely selfless gift.
• Sometimes, you just have to keep walking. Last night, my conference co-attendee Tom and I walked to the Fox Theater. They were gearing up for the last night of The Color Purple musical, so we could not go inside to check it out. Tom had been inside the night before and he said I should see it. So we wandered around Atlanta until around 10pm, when the show let out. As the crowd began to stream out of the doors, Tom and I walked toward the door. Right as we got through to the inside, a door person asked Tom what he was doing and instructed him to leave. I just kept walking. I faintly heard the door person call me back, but I just kept walking. I turned back once and made eye-contact with the door person and I think he understood that I wasn’t going to turn around and leave without seeing more. I patiently waited for the crowds to come down the staircases and then went up each one until I was on the third level. I walked into the theater auditorium and was momentarily breathless. It is amazing. It looks like a hazy, evening sky. It’s like you walked outdoors on a perfect Georgia night. Unbelievable. If I had stopped when asked, I would have missed out on an amazing experience. It’s a sappy metaphor for life, but sometimes you really have to keep walking past those who would stop you or you’ll miss the pretty stuff. I’m so glad I got to see the inside of that theater. Of course, I profusely thanked the door person as I made my way out.

Thank you, Atlanta. It’s been real. And I still have one more day.

I have thought numerous times about closing down my blog and simply redirecting you to my Twitter page. I’ve spent most of the last year posting my thoughts in the form of 140 character “Tweets”. Fun to look back on, but not the same as blogging.

I miss writing. 2008 finds us in an presidential election year. It was 4 years ago that I started blogging (Not my first post, but the oldest I have). I had been sending my thoughts on the 2004 election via email to friends and family. After losing a couple of friends to my political rants (I’m pretty sure they were on their way out anyway, maybe I just gave them a push), I decided to just let people read at their discretion by blogging instead.

So this marks my 4th year of publishing my thoughts. I spent some time over the holidays thinking about this site and my presence on the web in general, which has drastically increased over the last 12 months or so. I have more thoughts on that I’ll save for another post. Needless to say, I’ve got some goals for this site in 2008 and what better way to get going on them than to state them here so I can hold myself to them in 12 months.

2008 Goals for This Site

• I will be redesigning this site. Adding some things, subtracting some things (like the banner, ick).
• Add video. I’ve done plenty of video work and I plan to bring it here.
• Add audio. Can you see a theme? You may not know this, but I am 1/2 (the other half being my favorite new dad, Rick Corbal) of the rock/folk/metal/acoustic band Massive Shovels. We have a decent sized catalog of quite awful songs that I’d like to share with you.
• Add my resume and professional portfolio. I’ve been fortunate enough to develop web sites professionally for 16 months and I’d like to share what I’ve done and what I’m doing.

So, you can see this site will continue to be about me. After all, it is named after me. It’s just that I’ve become quite spread out on the web amongst social networking sites, photo sharing sites, video sharing sites, and everything else in between. I’d like to maintain one spot that exists to help you find all the others should you so choose. Additionally, I’ve set a writing goal of 50 posts. This, of-course, pales in comparison to the writing volume of my favorite blogger in the whole world. But I wouldn’t even try to take her out.

I’m looking to jump on some of these goals soon. I’ll see you soon with a rant or two. It is an election year and I get all excited and mouthy every 4 years (some would argue I get mouthy every 4 minutes).

Cheers, Rob

Before we left for the trip, we spent plenty of time with Google Earth, planning our trip against visible trails and other map features. This got me thinking about a different way to present the trip to friends and family when we returned. Without much experience using Google Earth, I was pleasantly surprised to learn this morning that it is quite easy to create a “tour” in Google Earth. Not only that, using simple HTML, you can add photos and links to the tour. This was exactly what I was hoping for, so I got started on it this afternoon and with a few hours of work, I have prepared a simple tour of our entire trip. Being such a visual person, this makes me incredibly giddy because it allows you to see our trip photos within their geographic context. It is like an interactive globe! First a few details about the trip.

Annoyances and Helpful Aspects of GPS handhelds

I acquired a Garmin eTrex Vista Cx before the trip in hopes that I could add topographic maps to it and plan our routes using the maps. Was I in for a surprise. Garmin (and I assume Magellan is the same), maintains proprietary control over what can be uploaded to the unit. You can only use their map products to upload maps to the unit. Currently they offer 1:100,000 scale topographic maps of the US. This is not a usable map scale for topo maps if you want to navigate with the GPS unit. The basemap that comes on the unit is abysmally lacking in detail unless you are navigating a city, which is ironic because the unit I bought was marketed as a hiking unit. Despite the lack of map detail, the unit was very handy for providing some interesting hike metrics I had never seen before. We were able to see our average speed while moving, and our overall speed including breaks. We could see the duration of time we were moving and the duration of time we were stopped. We could see an elevation profile showing our total ascent over the course of the trip, our current elevation above sea level (of course the topo gave us that as well). And one totally useless bit of info that I always felt compelled to inform Kalin of, was the straight line distance to our destination. This bit of info always came with the qualifier, “If we could fly to the next campsite, we’d only have to travel X miles.” After day 2, Kalin asked me why that mattered, and after thinking for a moment, I had no answer, so I stopped declaring this bit of info before trips.

This Map is How Old?

Because of the lack of detail in the Garmin GPS unit, I opted for an analog solution, USGS 1:24,000 scale topographic maps of the island. These, combined with a compass, ended up being our second most helpful solution. A simple trail map of the island obtained for free from the ferry terminal was the ultimate guide, with the USGS topos and compass to confirm we were headed in the right direction. I would have liked to use the topos exclusively. But since they had last been updated in 1988, many map details were missing. As much as I trust my compass skills, it helps to see a trail on a map where a trail should be in real life. Do we need to have bake sale so the USGS can update its maps? Or maybe we just need an administration that gives a snot about wild places. But I digress.

The bottom line on the mapping/navigation situation is that we could have certainly lived without the GPS unit, and probably the USGS topos. It’s sad when a free ferry terminal map gets you where you want to go better than satellite navigation and government elevation maps. But such is life. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that my fourth navigation piece was Kalin. I’m seriously direction-challenged. Without Kalin to say, “No Rob, that’s the wrong way” 2 or 3 times daily, I wouldn’t be here to write this. I mentioned to her on the trip — and I believe this to be true — the female vagina has a built-in compass.

Google Earth and Flickr: 70′s Slideshow for the 00′s Techie

Despite it’s shortcomings in the map department, the GPS unit was helpful for marking significant points and tracking/storing our movements throughout the trip. I have a mostly accurate (except under areas of dense tree cover) view of our path over the island that helped me build the tour in Google Earth. One amusing aspect of tracking your every move on a trip is that you realize what an idiot you must look like sometimes. Each time we reached a campsite, there were several minutes of wandering, circling, and aimless tracks as we tried to figure out where we wanted to setup and looked for outhouses, etc.

I uploaded all of our trip photos to Flickr last night. And then using the static links Flickr gives you for each image, I created placemarks in Google Earth where the some of the photos were taken. If you store all the placemarks in their own folder, and order them logically to follow the timeline of the trip, you can playback a nice tour of your trip. And I mean nice. You get flyover views of each point, with a popup image at each stop*. It is quite pretty. Combined with the Flickr photoset, this is an awesome way to display a trip of this type. Since Google Earth and Flickr are free, anyone can do this.

Google Earth Tour

• Download Google Earth
• You’ll need to change a few settings so the tour works right. Open Google Earth and in Preferences > Touring set the Tour Pause to 12 seconds and be sure Show balloon when tour is paused is checked.
• Download the KMZ file and double click it. Google Earth will open and in the Places panel on the left you’ll see the KMZ folder. In it is a folder called “Catalina Tour.” Select that and click the play button and you’re off enjoy.
• You can skip to any point in the tour by double-clicking the camera icon next to that point in the places panel.
• The whole trip takes about 3 minutes. After it is over, you’ll get a link to view all of the photos from the trip on my Flickr page. Enjoy.

This is my first attempt at a tour in Google Earth and I will surely do it again because of how easy it was. I’d love to know what you think. Did it work ok for you? Did it not work? Was it worth it? Suggestions for next time? Let me know.

Flickr Slideshow

Not all of the photos from the trip made it into the Google Earth Tour. All of them are on Flickr though. I haven’t gotten to Geo-Tagging them yet, but I plan to tag them with their exact locations as many of them are in the GE tour.