When I was a little kid, I always imagined that, after we die, we’d have the opportunity to visit a pavilion in heaven that traced a line through all our travels on earth. Google Latitude’s Location History can now do this, for one-month periods. It tracks your phone’s GPS signal along with stops along the way. And while this may be a little invasive from a Big Brother standpoint, it’s also quite helpful to notify friends and family of your impending arrival and track a missing or stolen cell phone to it’s current location.
Above, you can see a recent road trip to Michigan with a brief overnight stop in Ohio. The frequency of the dot seems fairly random but factors in speed, signal strength and delays. My five-hour traffic jam outside the Poconos is clearly present by a cluster of rather impatient looking dots. You can also see a kopse of dots denoting my meandering through Kalamazoo, my final destination. Keep in mind this journey retraces into itself for both legs of the trip. In this view, it’s difficult to tell which dot is for the westward vs. the eastward leg. Maybe the next version of Google Latitude Location History will overlay time.
When I was a kid, I imaged that there was an invisible line, like a thread, that started at the place you were born, and would follow you around, unrolling, but tangling itself around every place as you walked. As you went around a goal post, it’d get tied to the goalpost. And so on and so forth.
I also imagined that when you died, you’d have to trace your whole thread back, rolling it all back to the original roll of thread.
Not sure why I remembered this now. Anyway, what I was going to say is, I like your new blog template.