Well I went to Las Vegas for work and the to the Outer Banks of North Carolina for vacation with my family and Paul’s family. And well check the my map of the trip.
Huh, it looks like you have to sign in to google maps before it will show you any of the my maps. I guess I never noticed this before, or maybe its new, in any case, if the map doesn’t have lots of blue lines and markers on it, then you should sign in it seems.
After too much searching I finally ended up with an actual plan to go see the traditional July 4th Fireworks on the charles rivier. I went to a BBQ with Jed and Post at Eastgate apartments, which is an MIT dorm like place. Jed is firends with some people who live there, most of whom I’d randomly met before. Jed and I watched the fireworks from the top floor, 28th, of the tower, but others from the BBQ opted to watch from the river side in the rain. Aparently it was raining both water, and fireworks rocket shells, so I was glad to be inside. The show was pretty sweet and included fireworks shaped like cubes, and some really awesome bright white lines that were suspended from parachutes.
There was maybe an hour or so between the end of the 1812 overture, which ends with a small fireworks display on the river, and the start of the live nationally broadcast fireworks. Durring that time I was surprised to see multiple different fire works shows taking place in the city itself. It looked like they launched some from Copley sqaure. It took a while for me to deterime that they were actual fireworks and not some projected on some kind of tempoary outdoor screen. But there were other fireworks as well from farther away, possibly the south end, or who knows where. They were just rising over the buildings between the John Hancock and Prudential towers, so wherever that might be.
I did a lot of walking, at least 5 miles worth by my estimates during the day. I was egar to get out of the house and so ended up at the BBQ like 2 hours early. So I killed the time walking around taking in the sites. I also walked home from the fireworks because I didn’t get to Kendal station ahead of the pack and didn’t particularly want to wait in that long a line. Although, it was probally still faster to take the T; I did have firends to walk with and no one to stand in line with, so I walked.
The My Maps version of my Ohio trip. It includes:
On Sunday I took my first “road trip” in my new car. That is if you consider 272 mile round trip as a “road trip,” but it was long enough for me to test out some new things. The reason for the trip was to meet up with Josh to settle round one of our bet over the Yankees/Red Sox series this season. For each series or pair of series the loser buys the winner dinner. This dinner was for the first series at NY; we hadn’t started the bet before the first series at Fenway. Anyways it was a nice trip, esp once I got out of the rain in Boston. Below are the things I tested on the trip and the results:
Tonight came the next problem, the reason why I will never use this software ever again. The program recorded gps trails of exactly where I went, which are pretty high fidelity looking at the map. I want to export these traces and put them up on a my map. Well try as I might all this data remains locked up in a proprietary MS binary file format. All i need are the coordinates in text form, I can do the rest, but no I can’t get anything out the program except the screen shot above. Next time I’ll just have to use Linux to log the raw gps data for me. I know, I should have known better than to expect that I would be able to do what I want with locked down closed source software.
So since moving to Massachusetts I have been irked and put out every time I went to get gas. If it wasn’t one thing it was another; maybe that’s the real reason why i bought a hybrid, to lessen the number of times I have to be displeased with the state of gas stations in the commonwealth, but probably not. The problems:
So yesterday I went to a new gas station because I was running on the 2 gallons of gas my car has when the gauge says empty, but I ran into a traffic jam and had to divert from my usual route. It was self service complete with working lever and ridges! I’m saved, these people have my business for as long as I live here, regardless of price. It is The best gas station in all of Massachusetts!
I normally have people over to play board games on Saturdays, but this weekend everyone was busy so we canceled it. This would be a great time for me to strike out and find new friends, but I’m not so good at that. It was super nice out and I couldn’t bear to just sit inside all day so I took this random walk. My idea was just to walk to Harvard Square to see how long it would take; normally you’d just take the T there, but it seemed like a decent place to start. As you will see I went to a lot of places, and spent about 2 hours. The walk, annotated, via Google My Maps.