Current Location: Chicago

Expected arrival in Pittsburgh: Sunday, around 6pm

Where's the content? Ammy and I are blogwriting on Monday morning. I'll probably be consolidating pictures and text into galleries for several days, including video when my desktop machine arrives via UPS early in the week. Day-by-day installments will be written and posted on Monday and Tuesday, with a more complete and permanent sitelet being assembled soon after.

Suffice to say at present that we saw many, many amazing things, have a lot of great pictures, and will be sharing them all as travel, sleep, and writing allow.

It's been a great week, and we're almost home (err, my new home, that is).

Oh, and that SMS message-to-my-phone thing? The handshaking between Cingular and Voicestream sucks, which in practice means that I've only received three SMS messages, but have received each of them over 12 times. (David: Yep, Georgia's a bit out of the way. Trisha: Good morning!, Dave: Legoland Rushmore? Maybe, but the one at Wall Drug is cool too. And they've got an 8-foot Jackalope, too.)

We've been seeing hundreds of motorcyclists, mostly on Harleys, for the past couple days. At first we thought a few might be die-hard SCA folk going to Pennsic, but as we discuvered tonight, they're headed to Sturgis, South Dakota, for the 62nd annual Sturgis Rally, an event which, among other things relevant to the participants, was relevant to us because the two hundred thousand motorcyclists needed hotel rooms, and so every hotel in the eastern half of Wyoming and the western half of South Dakota was booked solid. This we find out when we're a stone's throw from ground zero, past 11 at night, with nowhere, we discover, to sleep.

Thanks to Sara, a very kind helper at one of the hotels in Gilette, Wyoming, we found one room available in Keystone, South Dakota, and now, after another 170 miles of driving, we're in the hotel that we're sharing with about 80 'cyclists.

All told we saw some amazing sites today, not the least of which was ascending an 11,000 foot elevation mountain pass that really felt like the top of the world, a pizza place in Montana that seemed so Californian that we asked our waitperson if the owners were from Califormia which, as it happens, they were, though 20 years removed.

We also laid about 640 miles of asphalt behind us, and are looking forward to another long stretch tomorrow after seeing Mt. Rushmore, the Crystal Caves, and, of course, Wall Drug.

Err, I mean, today. Damn. I need to get to sleep.

Oh, and keep those SMS pages coming. We have literally had no cellphone coverage for nearly two days, but I'm looking forward to the flood of messages that come in when we reach a large enough city, probably Minneapolis on Thursday...

Take care!

After several days of long driving and post-midnight hotel check-ins, Ammy and I realize that the only way real blogging will happen is copilot composing, so starting tomorrow night both our blogs should have more real blow-by-blow content.

In the meantime: Still no cell service, but there should be tomorrow in Minneapolis, and I also added our stops to the 'Look Ahead' nav on the left, so you can see where we've been and where we're going!

I know how to pack a car, but I don't know how to pack an apartment. The dichotomy makes a fair amount of sense, I suppose, considering that despite using the same word, 'pack,' the two tasks entail entirely different skill sets and objectives.

To pack an apartment, in order to move to another apartment or, in my case, to simultaneously move to another apartment with the constraint of fitting the new-apartment-bound contents into the backseat and trunk of a Civic; three small boxes to be shipped media-rate, and three computer-boxes (okay, computer, monitor (flat panel, thank all that is good and holy (or, failing that, Apple)), and printer), while at the same time putting a good portion of the remainder into a new storage space of questionable size and location, or at least the remainder which is not one of the several pieces of furniture being held/used by friends for the coming year (65 book-feet worth of Bonde wall bookcases to the girls, four chairs and a good Pier One wood table to join their five twins (err, twin and fellow octuplets?) at Emily's, a 240lb, 36" TV at Ali and Mark's, two floor lamps at Ammy and Rick's, and a multitude of permanent givts to fellow (err, former) neighbors at the Palazzo, and slightly more distant (physically and socioeconomically) neighbors who frequent the People's Park Berkeley Free Box) and all through the sorting and packing process, being swept into the throws of nostalgia and the anxiety of seperating ones-self from one's past enough to part with the lingering physical instantiations of same, is a subtractive affair.

In comparison, packing a car is intelligently stuffing a lot of stuff into a space that is demonstrably smaller than the stuff to be packed.

This, honestly, is a much easier job.

[note: the sentence three before this one should be taken out and shot (with respects to the late Douglas Adams), but if you try to sort out the clauses, parentheticals, and asides, you'll have some small idea of exactly how difficult a task this organizing, sorting, historical divesting, and moving actually is.]

Okay, so this is written after the fact. The above was written in a sparse but comfortable hotel room in Elko (sorry, no elk in elko, as it's in the middle of the desert, but we did see the world's largest polar bear, trapped by an Inuit Indian over half a century ago, and now overseeing the terminator between Elko's 24-hour coffee shop and a curiously muted casino, all sitting in front of the Elko Bus Stop.

In turn, the above paragraph (along with this one) was (is being) written in a room in the Three Bears Inn. It's right around 1am here in the Mountain time zone, just barely inside Montana sandwiched between recently (and quickly) traversed Idaho, and recently (and again to be) visted Yellowstone Park. Ammy has an annual National Parks pass, allowing free access, saving us $20 at the entrance, as well as more untold yuppie foodstamps at the three additional nathonal parks we're scheduled to visit on our continental sojourn.

We've been taking a bunch of great pictures and a few small mpeg movies, but despite unpacking more of the car than I'd anticipated in the search, I'm unable to find the USB cables to connect my camera or camcorder, so the thousand-word pictures will have to wait until the next stop, after a stop into a sufficiently-equpped geek-shop.

Sadly, for all the Wal-Marts, DQs, and McDonalds we see at every turn, CompUSAs and Frys are nonexistant out here. We'll find out tomorrow if Radio Shack has what we need.

Anyhow, for another perspective, be sure to read Ammy's Elko to Yellowstone account!

We're leaving through Yellowstone tomorrow, and plan on getting most of the way to Mt. Rushmore, the Crystal Caverns, and Devil's Tower, which some of you might recall from Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

And of course, Wall Drug is just past Mt. Rushmore, so there's another thing not to be missed!

Oh, care to keep us entertained? Send us an SMS message! (PCS#: 5103341620). We'll get it when we reemerge into a cell-equipped stretch of road, and we can only hope that I'm the one behind the wheel when it comes in!

While writing the previous post, Ammy and I had Apollo 13 on cable in the background.

Watching, while Ammy was composing, one of the astronaut's wives was dismayed when she found that her husband's live (pre-accident) television broadcast from the capsule wasn't being picked up by any of the networks. The newsman replied: "Nowadays a moon-shot is passe. You guys make a trip to the moon as exciting as a trip to Pittsburgh."

Ouch! Let's just hope our capsule doesn't blow up.

Okay, so after much packing, repacking, sorting, lugging, and all the rest, we're just an hour or so from pushing Berkeley into the rearview's horizon. I need to pack up the computer (very last thing!) right now, so until I update from the road, Hasta!

First stop: Elko, Nevada! Wow. I mean, I never thought I'd get the chance to see Elko!

So I've been a packing maniac for the last four days, along with godsends Karen, Ali, Crystal, and Mark, and more helping friends Pamila, Emily, and Ray. The apartment is almost empty, but I'm running behind schedule nonetheless. the computer's been out of net-touch for a few days, and will be again after I finish this post. My next post should be from the road, but to be sure that you don't miss a beat, check out Ammy's site as well as we go.

The current plan is to put some miles on the road tonight, or first thing in the morning. Cross your fingers!

Okay, so after a lot of packing yesterday, today's the crunch day. Right after finishing this post I'm packing up the computer, so you know I'm getting close to leaving!

Ammy and I will be setting forth on Saturday, and I'll try to blog each day from the road, internet-access-willing. 'Data-port' is just as big a pull when deciding which 3-star Best Western or Motel 6, 8, or 9 to stay at, though my secret plan is to spend a little time every few days driving through a suburban area, wardriving for high-speed wireless access, and parking in front of someone's house while we document and check mail.

So we'll be taking the I-90 northern route, from Yellowstone on to Chicago, and we've got lots of places on our list to visit, so be sure and check back, becuase while one person drives, the other can blog. We've got digital cameras and wanderlust, and know how to use both.

So I'll be a little slow to respond to email from this moment forward until around the 11th or 12th, and if you know my cellphone number, that's the best bet.

Augh, so much nostalgia, and so little time to blog it...

Bye!

This proof of concept device is exactly the kind of direction I've been hoping that personal electronics would take: shifting from the consumption of media (tapes, CDs, books, etc.) to the creation of it (cameras, small writing devices, microphones).

In a nutshell, this device is constantly recording the sound around you, via a microphone at your waist and one in your ear and, upon recognizing a preprogrammed keyword or phrase, like "nice to meet you" or "I'll have to remember that", will store a predetermined portion of that buffer for you, for further retrieval.

They give the 'cocktail party' example of remembering the names of people you met (which I think would only be useful if there was also an integrated camera) but I could see countless uses in a classroom environement or social environment; anywhere you might hear something you want to remember, but weren't prepared for.

With the proper software, this could also be a very useful tool for people with ADD, giving them the ability to, with a simple voice or button-driven command, get a playback of the last 30 seconds of conversation, if their mind wandered. In fact, for some ADD people, the ability to run a constant, lower volume stream of the conversation, delayed 5-30 seconds from 'realtime' could help them keep their mind in the conversation, even as it wanders, with the first pass being a 'screening pass' and the second enabling them to turn their focus on the conversation.

The device also has a clock and GPS, so with each saved annotation would be the time and exact place where the conversation took place.

There aren't any commercial production plans yet, but this kind of technology could easily be added to existing consumer devices, such as cellphones or HD MP3 players, given the proper firmware and some hardware tweaks.

Two kvetches this morning. First, and most minor: Why does Mac OS X's Software Update suggest that I download a 20 meg update for iDVD, considering that my mac knows it doesn't have a Superdrive and, thanks to Apple's policies, there's no way to upgrade my mac to have a superdrive, nor is iDVD compatible with any third-party DVD-R drive? In short, they want me to upgrade software they know my machine will never be able to use.

Second: Fuck Vanguard Air. I bought Ammy's return ticket a few weeks ago, to fly her from Pittsburgh to San Francisco, and this morning Vanguard announces that they've gone bankrupt, are suspending all flights as of 1am today, and will not be refunding fares to current ticketholders.

Oh but they've made arrangements for discounted travel via Frontier Air and National Air ('discount' meaning they're waiving short-notice penalties, letting you buy their 21-day fares for immediate travel). This despite the fact that I already paid once for the ticket, and that neither airline even has operations in Pittsburgh..

Now the cheapest fare is $290 and involves two plane changes, all on different carriers. Blar.

Blar blar blar blar. Luckily, I have a plan.