Ready, steady, …
GO!!
I’m sitting here in the corp apartment in Mountain View (CA) and I’ve found an ultimately cool widget that you can see on the left hand panel of the blog - it shows you the exact location (to the street level) of the Droid with Froyo ‘special sauce image’ I borrowed from my buddy at Google (thanks, Charles!!). We have tweaked the phone to send a location update every 60s (unless the battery is low, and then it sends once every 180s). At the end (or possibly while we’re on the road), I’ll post a KML of our track, or a PNG static map or something - just to show how you can use Latitude and mobile phones to do this type of “mytracks” action.
Marina and I have packed, carefully making sure that my bag will contain the right stuff needed to start the roadtrip (for example, 2lbs of skittles, a 12V-110V inverter for the car, lotsa cables, credit cards, and so on).
One other thing, I must say that I have such an amazing company to work for. I was telling one of the Street View folks I met with this week about my pending trip - she was really excited and asked me (very politely) if I were willing to take a camera with me to make some special format pictures for Maps. Hell yeah!! So I am now also equipped with two 15Mpix DSLRs, one 7mm fish eye and one standard issue 18-55mm lens, tripod, 10 or so 8GB SD cards [what were they thinking :)], a video camera and all the accessories.
What I’ll do is this: The tripod has a rotating head that has 4 notches, one every 90 degrees. I am to put the fish eye in the rotating head, and take 12 pictures, 4 in each direction, and each direction in 3 different exposures. Google then will stitch these pictures together to create a 360 degree seemless view of my inner (or outer) space environment. I plan on taking quite a few photos, logging their GPS location, and offering them to the team as a special photo shoot reel. Even my VP, Brian, got excited about this, as he had done this on his Antarctica trip. Whohoo!
Well, I’m going to hit the hay soon, as I get up at 4am tomorow morning to fetch my 7am flight to JFK. Here’s hoping that WEiRDJE has a good and non-delayed trip, too!