Paleogeographers, Neogeographers, Psychogeographers, taggers and Storytellers

I have been thinking and working with maps and location and GPS units for a long time now. I coined a phrase, Quantitative Psychogeography, which has not yet caught on, co-wrote two books, _Mapping Hacks_ and _Google Maps Hacks_, preached to the choir and to the unconverted, and I have been tracking and geolocating many of my travels and photos and gigapans for years.

And I have been frustrated. And I finally realized why: I just want story telling and life logging tools. Paleo and Neo geographers have created amazing tools. I've been part of some of that energy. And it is great fun, and it is powerful, and it matters.

The engineer in me likes these tools. I like PostGIS, I like GDAL, I like Google Maps and My Maps and I am even making my grudging peace with KML. But none of these tools really hits the story teller in me. They don't hit the artist, the life logger.

And none of them is appropriate for managing a 'personal geo-repository.'

For a long time I just collected the data, and either whined, or offered constructive criticism, when the subject came up. And I gave hope that tomorrow's software would be able to make sense of yesterday's data. But then in Vienna I decided that I could no longer deal with a fundamentally broken model of managing waypoints.

Too much, all of it in fact, depended on my remembering wayoint names - key words - and too little of the work was being done where it should be done - by the computer.

I say it was a decision, but there was jet lag and anxiety to blame as well. There was waking up at 3 in the morning and not being able to sleep again, worrying that I was not doing enough here to justify the trip. To justify the trust placed in me by my boss, and by my self, the trust that I would do something great.

So I figured out my waypoint repository challenge. At least well enough for now. See 'Annotating Waypoints, partially solved' And as you read that remember that I am trying for a system which can operate comletely offline, on a minimal computer, with minimal software dependencies, and maximum flexibility. And I don't care if there is a bit of command line involved if that preserves flexibility and if it so importantly doesn't hide anything from me.

Storing points in GPX format, and importing them from the GPS with GPS Babel seems the best option. I can imort them into Google Earth (or better, convert them to KML using GPS Babel, and then import the KML into Google Earth) for viewing, but basica annotation and management seems to need to be kept in a text file format, and in a text file format which won't suddenly be magically and terribly reformated in a way that causes me to lose timestamp information for the individual points (and yes, KML, I continue to be confused about how you manage time, and why those choices were made :-(

I feel like I am refining my keyboard shortcuts for using a TRS100 laptop computer. I know KML is how everything is done, but damnit, KML and Google Earth hide more of my story than they reveal.

OTOH, Google Won, right? Everybody loves Google Earth, I love big junks of it, but I don't trust it to not just accidentally cause me to lose that which I find most important.

Annotating Waypoints, partially solved

I have been fretting about the problem of annotating way points for a decade. The general issue is that I wander around a place,and I mark points of personal interest. And later I don't know why I marked a place 'Pieta' or 'aslice.'

I have a long rant about this, but the main problem seems to be that the 'artistic' side of my brain knew that the system I had didn't work, but was not able to articulate that back to the 'engineer' side to let me just solve it.

The trick is to have a repository of points which you trust, and then to merge in new points, and to add annotations to those points.

I made a small script with GPSBabel. It handles most cases. Patches and suggestions welcome.
The key is a 'repository' of waypoints, in a GPX file, and then I merge that file with the GPS using the GPSBabel filter duplicates command.

#!/usr/bin/sh
# save the current 'repository' of waypoints in version control.
sudo svn commit -m "automatic commit before merging new waypoints from GPS" netbook_annotated.gpx
# Merge master file with the GPS.  deduplicate
sudo gpsbabel  -i gpx -f netbook_annotated.gpx -i garmin -f usb: \
-x duplicate,shortname,location  -o gpx  -F netbook_annotated.gpx
sudo chown rich:rich netbook_annotated.gpx
echo now edit netbook_annotated.gpx and write it back to the GPS
sudo vi netbook_annotated.gpx
echo temporarilly not writing back to GPS.
#sudo gpsbabel -i gpx -f netbook_annotated.gpx -o garmin -F usb:

Here is a sample waypoint in GPX Format

 201.039795
 Operapassage
 27-DEC-09 6:58:05PM Where the u2 karlsplatz line comes out
 27-DEC-09 6:58:05PM
 Flag, Blue

The key for my Garmin GPSmap 60CSx is that the cmt field does get written back to the GPS by GPSBabel, but if it is too long it will be abbreviates.

I have some waypoints where I seem to have done something wrong in editing the name field, and GPS babel attempts to shorten the name and thus generates new waypoints. I am working on that.

Also, I should take the date out of the desc field and reformat it in a proper GPX time field.

But for right now I am able to comfortably sit at the Ubahn station with a train which won't arrive for 4 minutes, connect my GPS to the netbook, import the waypoints, add annotations to them, and usually even pull my most recent track log in and look at them both in Google Earth.

In four minutes while waiting for a subway.

The next big challenge: how do I annotate track logs in a reasonable fashion? How do I mark the spot where we turned wrong and ran into a new adventure?

Another Big Reveal

We stopped at the Gasomotor stop on the U3, and I experienced another in the series of 'Great Reveals' from train stations.

Of course I took a GigaPan :-)



You come up the escalater and face this massive victorian building which was a gas storage tank from the
city Gas Works.


And there is a whole row of 'crazy' green apartment buildings next to the four gas towers.

The towers are now redeveloped, see the wikipedia link:


And see this link
http://www.wiener-gasometer.at/en/

This is high on my list of awesome city 'reveals' = those places where you come out of the ground, or around a corner, and suddenly your breath is taken away.

Coming out of the Roman Subway at the Colisium stop is another classic, and the Stephanplatz station here in Vienna.

And perhaps every subway stop, every ascent from the underworld, provides the opportunity for the grand reveal. Symbolically, and literally, we are exiting the underworld, escaping the lost place below and entering again the land of light and warmth.

We are Persephone coming up in the spring to bring warmth and fertility, or perhaps, just coming up into the warmth and fertility.

Nipple Jesus is on my Christmas Tree

Part of the decorations for our Christmas Tree are flyers for art exhibits, hung from the tree with bits of wire. It is all very Kultural. My favorite needs to be the flyer for Nipple Jesus.

There was (possibly) a work of art of Jesus made up of nipples from porn magazines, but there was definitely play about a work of art of Jesus made from nipples from porn magazines.

Here is the description I found at some random web page listed on the flyer.


----
"NIPPLEJESUS
DSCHUNGEL WIEN
105 Minuten / age 15 plus
Directed by: Juergen Maurer

Roli Winkler, a former employee of a guart service, finds himself in a strange, new job. Among students and retirees he works as a museum attendant. The picture he has to observe is one of the most shocking ones he has every seen. It`s called “NippleJesus” and shows a reproduction of Jesus, made of nipples taken from porn magazines. During the exhibition of “NippleJesus” Roli meets quite a lot of different visitors and their arguments. At first he goes along with those who damn and want to destroy “NippleJesus”, but after meeting the painter he changes his point of view over the meaning of art und identifies with it more and more."

Kid's a little delayed, and funny keyboards...

I was all decked out in SFSlim's Santa Suit which I wore for Santa Con a few weeks ago.

I was waiting in the main entrance to the MQ. I worked on the netbook until it got too cold, then I just waited and waited. Adorable cute tourist girls would ask me if they could take pictures with me, but that was no real recompense...

I just waited, getting excited at each arriving taxi cab...is it them? Is it them? I was out there waiting for a long time.

I finally came back in, and there was a gtalk chat up from Molly
"Molly: hey
were going to be late
in venna aroo--nd 8
our flght got delazed
love zyou
were readzy to be there
but we have maps and should be able to get to you guys
lwe a-ll love zou"

Molly is normally fairly good at her grammer and all, so I think that represents a combination of lousy/limited connectivity plus a European keyboard.

The 'love zou' is a give away, with the y and z in unexpected places!

What we see and places we fall in love with

Yesterday, Dec 24th, we went shopping at the Naschmarkt. And my eye was stuck by these incredible buildings, and I had to GigaPan them, RIGHT NOW, even though I didn't have my mast or a tripod. But there was a handy electrical transformer, so I made an effort by balancing the Gigapan on the surface.


It turns out that they are already pretty famous without my GigaPanning. "Majolikahaus and Medallion House' "Designed by Otto Wagner, the genius of the Viennese Jugenstill. The facade of the Majolikahaus, entirely covered in tiles, is an explosion of pink and green ceramic floral designs. Gilded medallions depict female forms on the walls of the adjacent apartment block (1898)."

It was here that Rose said to me that it was important that "you confess to yourself that you are madly in love with Vienna."

I wake up and if the sun is up I sort of panic, I have an urgency to be out there. Not sure where, or doing what. Taking GigaPans and experiencing the city. Rose says
"I mostly think that it is just you wanting to take pictures of your beloved."

Subway trains and the Great Reveal

I love the U-abhn in part for the dramatic reveals that you get. The best is coming up the Stephansplatz exit. You ride up an escalator, and then look up, straight up, and the spires of St Stephans reveal themselves, at first high, impossibly high and then you ascend to street level and it is still massive, but then there are some near human features. You can see the doors, and the ground for reference and you are not lost entirely within the heavens. You have been Revealed.

Donauinsel has another reveal. Especially in the whispy snow and grey sky which I had. You glide to a stop, get off the train, and then you are in the MIDDLE OF THE RIVER! Really. You walk a bit to Donauinsel, or to the Vienna International Center and all of the new buildings, but you are in nature in a primal sense.

Exploring a city is filled with connetions. Where you realize that the 'Naschmarkt' that everyone tells you to go to is really the same place you had been going to - you just didn't realize the name.

Stumbling onto Karlsplatz via Ubahn was one of these experiences for me. First, the station is great fun. It is massive, because there are entrances at each of a number of far corners.

The exit towards Karlsplatz is like an underground garage. You could drive cars right now a ramp and into the station. You stroll up and you are in a gorgeous park and in the middle of Vienna.

And there is another amazing church, and a Christmas market, somewhere on the other side of the station is the Naschmarkt, and the Secession space - which as near as I can tell is a hacker space for artists, largely supported because one of the group did something cool which is kept in the basement and spits out euros.