quacky: —–+—+—–

I found out today they have a festival nearby called Egg Day!

I have a soft spot in my heart for small-town festivals, having grown up with one of them in my own hometown.

I miss it.

So, ever since I moved to the west coast states I’ve always wanted to follow US Hwy 12 back home to the small town where I grew up, because “The Twelve” goes from the ocean near where I live now, straight [ahem!] back through to Home. And then allthe way back to Detroit. I’m not sure I’ll get to do it in a 68 Mustang any time soon, but today I larked upon a trip I could actually take.

5/25/05

10:12am i’m driving west on US Hwy 12 with google.maps.

Did you know you can navigate the google.maps with your keyboard arrows? You can actually “drive” it, almost like a video game.

And use + and - to zoom. All interactively. This is some AMAZING technology!!

One thing you can’t do, that I find out later I will REALLY MUCH want to do on my trip, is to hotkey-switch between the map view and the satellite photo view. I thought really hard about possibly ginning up, or hacking someone else’s Greasemonkey User Script to do that, it shouldn’t be hard at all. But I became fixated on finishing the trip.

It’s actually quite appalling how much time I spent on it. But it was really fun. It was a tiny bit like having taken a real roadtrip. I even have memories! Like this morning on the news they mentioned a little Washington town called Prosser, and I almost blurted out to my sweetie: “Hey, I went through there the other day!” But I totally didn’t have time to explain THAT one.

There should also be a way to overlay the maps on top of the satellite pictures. But, I realize along the way, how messy that would be. How roads and maps are kind of informational step-cousins. I’m flying along US 12, mostly via satellite photo — aided by the maps whenever I get lost or want to know where I am — and they don’t always match up.

10:24am i just hit Miles City montana

10:32am fuckin. everthing went haywire in Billings. I can’t find US12 anymore.

i THINK it rides along with the I90

11:19am the hell?

mining operation?

montana, just east of butte

11:27am zooming under Santa Claus Rd, Butte MT

11:39am GOD DAMN MONTANA IS HUGE

A friend asked “how many mph are you clicking?”

I don’t really know. It varies a lot, depending on the density of the satellite photography. There are great stretches of what I think of as VOID or old space. Parts of the map that haven’t been recently photographed. So for parts of montana I’m probably going ultrasonic, because to see anything I’m zoomed out so far, I can barely pick out the road, and have to flip back to the map view to make sure I’m still on track. It’s like “you’re traveling via stealth fighter” another friend comments.

11:59am I just hit the NezPerce


 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 


12::10pm the hell?

east side of Lewiston, ID

looks like strip mining

except it’s FLAT area along side a river


 
 
 
 


 
 
 


12:23pm pretty!

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

12:30pm walla walla

I thought up another google.sport. You’d have to have prett strict rules, but, there are extensions and adaptations out there that would totally make it work. It’s called Google.Race. “Anybody wanna google race me from LA to San Francisco?” You go along, following a predetermined route always using the highest possible zoom on the satellite, only using the maps to find your way, probably leaving markers or something to prove it, and then get timestamped at the end. It would totally work, I’m just not brains enough to hack it up. Maybe I’ll put it somewhere like Lazyweb.org or something.

13:29pm made it!

holy crap. firefox is smoking like a 66 mustang after the trip

HOT!!!

page faults up tha wazoo

 
 
 
 

I actually had to reboot my workstation when I was done. I think I overloaded the browser cache, or Firefox had faulted so many page it couldn’t recover. I haven’t looked at the MRTG to see if I left skid-marks all over our bandwidth for those three or so hours. I kind of want to know, but I kind of don’t.

All in all, I “travelled” approx. 1747 miles from approx. 10:24 to 13:29. That calculates to an average speed of 604.8 mph. Not exactly hypersonic, but as fast as an airplane! I’m sure for parts of it, where I travelled at the four or five clicked out zoom, it was much faster, but I haven’t calculated. Also, the route I used wasn’t entirely the same as that calculated by google.maps, because it wouldn’t have strictly hewn to US 12 the whole way, since it’s meant to optimize your route.

Anyway, that was fun!