Analysis of the Trip09 Experiment

So the Trip09 experiment/adventure is over for now and what is the analysis?

Well, first off I've given up on one of my ideas, which was to eat at no "fast food" restaurants and only dine in privately owned small eateries. That was way too rigid and nearly impossible, 1. they are not easy to find, and 2. they are often more expensive since you can pick and choose and share when dining at a fast food restaurant. Also I found that the Fast food restaurants have really expanded their menus to allow for more lower fat choices. Short story watch yourself with those burgers, but do not be too fixed, try a little of everything.

Second the "Twitter-Blogger-Internet everywhere" world might not be ready for prime time. I am not talking about the wilderness here in Florida, and still I found too many places without 3G service. Twitting photos without 3G is a real pain, even with, it's slower than I want. Now without fast Internet access, blogging comes to a standstill. Most motels have wireless Internet connections, but not all.

Third the quality of the photographs suffers when you feel the need to document a particular stop. Some of the images I tweeted are not even worthy of "throw away", but I felt compelled to get something tweeted out. It is also the case that I became so overwhelmed with the technology that I forgot the art, or even the communication. This is a lot like owning the biggest bestest DSLR with so many lens and gadgets that you forget to take pictures.

What worked for hardware, software, and online services?
I used the iPhone for all the Twitter postings. Of course I always have my ClariFI close up lens attached to the phone. The TwitterFon app (http://twitterfon.net/) was used most of the time. It allows you to enter text, geo-tag (although I never got it to work correctly-maybe I just do not understand what it is supposed to do), and send the pictures. As long as there was a good phone connection, it worked well.

BTW, just saw this on the Twitterfon FAQs:
Q: TwitterFon doesn't upload my location
A: TwitterFon updates your profile location, doesn't insert the location info to your tweets.
I also used the Nambu iPhone app to view Twitter activity.

All the other photos were taken with the Panasonic DMC FZ18, clearly one of the most useful cameras I have ever seen, period. The images were transferred via the SD card reader (built in) to a Windows Vista laptop (Toshiba). They were cataloged, slightly edited, when deemed appropriate, and sent to Picasa Web Albums, all using Picasa 3.1. This worked very well. Once on Picasa Web Albums, some images were captioned and tagged with a location using Google Maps. I thought that this was going to be more automatic then it was, but still it was not difficult. The day's tweets were copied from TwitterFon's list and pasted into a blog entry at palzot. Finally the Trip09 album was linked to the palzot Albums sidebar at the palzot blog.

Will I do it again?
Darn tootin', soon as I get a chance. Probably this summer we will take a much longer trip and tweet/blog every last bit of it. Definitely be more aware of the photography and choose the blogged shots more selectively. Plan the stops more in advance (but I've said that before) and try not insisting on showing everything. (wow, lot of "ings" in that sentence)

Oh ya, and we'll just eat where and when we are hungry.