Getting Away From it All
According to Jeff

Here is the plan. It is either the plan for my next road trip, or it is the plan from my most recent road trip.

Go South Young Man!

Between losing my job, my apartment building being sold, and losing interest in consulting/contracting, when my landlord said, "Get out," I decided to go. So I'm off.

Turns out the drive to Florida is pretty unexciting. I drove down a few months ago. Get on I-95 and turn left when you get to Florida. So I have two toys I'm going to be playing with along the way.

First is Mologogo. Mologogo is a poor man's or every man's Lo Jack. You might be familiar with Lo Jack - They put a GPS transmitter in your car and then they can tell where it is at all times. If something happens, you call them (or the police call them) and they tell you where your car is. Lo Jack charges a monthly fee for this service.

Mologogo is exactly the same, except for all the details. Mologogo is a program that runs on a cheap cell phone. It includes a GPS and transmits your car's position constantly. It is, however, transmitted to the free Mologogo server. You create a password, access Mologogo directly, and you know where your car is at all times. No monthly fees (actually a small monthly fee for the cheap cell phone), no police, no expensive service.

My Mologogo tracking page is here:

http://mologogo.com/friends/private/jjjjjeff
Login: jjjjjeff-ro
Password: jjjjjeff

My second toy will be a cheap digital camera. I'm mounting it in my car pointing out the windsheild. My plan is to create a time-lapse movie of the entire trip. The question is, how fast to increase the speed? Ten times? Sixty times? A hundred times? I've tried making two time-lapse driving movies so far...

	This AVI file (sorry) is a short movie driving to the shopping center. It is appox. 5x normal speed. A 20 hour drive to Florida would take about 4 hours to watch at this speed. (275Kbps/sec)
	This AVI file (sorry) is a short movie driving back from the shopping center. It is appox. 180x normal speed. A 20 hour drive to Florida would take about 7 minutes to watch at this speed. Highway speed will look like driving eleven thousand miles per hour. Not quite earth orbital velocity. Seems a little fast, but the shopping center is not very far away. (1.5Mbps/sec)

I still have a week or so to try out some different speeds. Maybe something in between, eh? Your feedback is encouraged.

Alas, TellMe has discontinued its experimental VoiceXML server. It used to work something like this (for archival purposes):

(800) 555-TELL
Press 1 - 0 - 0 - 6 - 2 - 0 at the menu prompt.

Here are some previous road trips.