Ephemerica

I’ve been eyeing a new toy for awhile now, and since my good friends in the Biology Dept saw fit to give me a REI gift card as a departing gift, I decided to buy it and see what I could do with it. I bought a GPS bike computer. The software that Garmin provides is PC only (although a Mac version is supposedly coming out this year—yeah, right), but I can download GPS data to Google Earth (I needed to upgrade to plus version for this feature). I took a little trip around the block yesterday; here is the file that you can load in Google Earth. You can even see my car parked in back of our house

While it would be very cool to upload these files periodically along our trip to let everybody know where we’ve been, there is one major obstacle—you need to be connected to the internet to download the GPS data into Google Earth (well, pretty much to use it period). We’re not super-optimistic about our ability to access the internet along the way though. If anybody has any ideas about internet access (is there a dial-up service we could use in Latin America?), let us know.

Posted by Matthew on December 4th, 2006 | Filed under: Pre-trip Planning