Gregory Todd Williams

Been a while since I posted. Things are getting hectic with Adam and I running around trying to get everything done before we leave on Monday. We’ve been packing and planning for several solid days now, and things seem to be falling into place (more or less).

A huge amount of my time (often between the hours of midnight and 6AM) has been spent hacking on code to support us. To the right, you’ll see a screenshot of one of the applications that has been written for this trip. It’s an OS X Cocoa application which currently takes a photo via a connected digital camera and associates it with a real-time location via a connected GPS device. Hopefully in the next 36 hours, I’ll get the final plan implemented: to automatically take a picture from the car after every mile of the trip. This will result in a nice big set of photos documenting the 5000+ mile drive. All of the data should fit nicely onto a single DVD, and I’m hoping to enlist the help of some friends to come up with a nice interface to vizualize over five thousand images with respect to place and time. (Annotating the content of the images will take quite a bit longer.)

Another bit of time has been spent hacking on GPS scripts and Xplanet, coming up with a rough depiction of our planned route on a globe. Our circuitous route takes us up the Pacific coast, east and south through Yellowstone and Salt Lake City, across the Rockies through Denver, through the plains of Nebraska and Iowa, Chicago, Ann Arbor, Maryland and DC, up the coast through Philadelphia and New York, north east to Burlington and Maine, and finally south through Boston and Providence.

This will be a whirlwind of a roadtrip, with an exceptionally tight schedule of arriving in Providence on August 28th; On August 30th, Adam and I will be flying to Ireland where I will be attending the FOAF Workshop, and he will start an open-ended European adventure.

I hope to be posting images and thoughts from the road, as does Adam, but wish us luck just in case.