Google Maps in Dead Zones

My wife and I just completed a lengthy road trip to Glacier National Park. I knew we would put a couple thousand miles on the car so we rented one instead of taking a vehicle of our own. Besides neither my wife nor I have cars that get very good gas mileage. We purchase cars more for snow driving than summer and that makes them less than ideal for long drives.

As long as you stay on an interstate road, you are pretty much guaranteed to have mobile service the whole trip. What happens when you venture off into less-traveled paths? Well I can assure you that we had hours of travel in Montana with absolutely no mobile coverage whatsoever. I wondered what would happen in Google Maps and now I know.

I often complain that some software applications were written by people that never got full credit on their homework assignments in college. There are two companies where that is not the case: Apple and Google. Generally those guys know their stuff and this road trip proved that. Most of the time we would lose service and the app kept plugging along seamlessly. This became impressive when we could still see our car on the map. My guess is that the Google Maps app caches a number of map tiles in the surrounding area before you drive into coverage-less areas.

No it was not perfect. There were several instances in Glacier where the car appeared to be driving significantly to the right of the road. We seemed close enough I didn't worry about it. We also drove into some areas where the map showed nothing. For the most part it worked pretty well.

Google Maps turned into a lifesaver when we drove into Canada. The Toyota Corolla did not have a dual-unit speedometer. It only showed the current speed in miles per hour. That doesn't do much good when the speed limit is posted in kilometers per hour. Fortunately the moment we hit Canada, the units in Google Maps switched to metric and showed us our speed as captured in the GPS. I could see that 80 kph actually works out to 51 mph. I also kept track of the appropriate speeds for 60 kph and 40 kph. Those are the speed limits we encountered on the curvy mountain roads in in Waterton National Park.

The one letdown of trying to use Google Maps in dead zones is having it inaccurately provide your estimated arrival time over a lengthy drive. We started the drive with phone service and it had us arriving at home around 6pm. We drove into a dead zone and that time shot up to 6:30pm. We got back in service range and it came back down to 6pm. That happened a few times on the drive and so the second time, it didn't surprise me as much.

Overall Google Maps is a great application. We used it constantly to get around and keep from missing the turn on the small road to our cabin we rented. Without it we would have made quite a few U-turns. Furthermore it impressed us with how it worked even without mobile phone coverage. 

Planning a Road Trip

Last year my wife and I headed to Mt. Rushmore on a road trip. We did a bit of planning before we left but really had no idea what the trip would be like. We made reservations to ride an old steam-engine train and made sure to have hotel reservations when we got to town. Otherwise we didn't stress about filling every second with activities. The trip turned out to be wonderful and we had a great time.

This year we decided to do another road trip and will head to Glacier National Park. We made our hotel reservations back in March and will be staying in some cabins right at the entrance. While visiting Dinosaur National Monument a few weeks ago, we picked up our annual National Parks pass so we already have that taken care of. Last night we sat down and did a bit more planning so we have some ideas of activities to keep us busy.

First I pulled out our National Geographic book with information about all of the National Parks in the United States. That is a great resource to get an idea of what there is to do in Glacier National Park. As can be expected with physically printed media, there is a lot that is out of date. Fortunately a lot of information is still valid.

Next we pulled out the laptop and brought up Google Maps. That is such a great tool for looking at driving distances and times. We mapped the route from our house to the park. It will take almost 10 hours and so we will break up the first day and only drive part way. As with our Mt. Rushmore trip, we won't worry about hotel reservations that first night as we don't know when we will decide to stop driving. I don't know if I want to try to make it to Butte or will stop early in Dillon. There are lots of options in either location.

I have a cousin living in Somers, Montana and so I sent her a text message letting her know that we may stop in on our second day of the trip as it is on the way. My wife has an aunt living in Eureka, Montana about an hour outside the park so we sent her a text as well. It is nice to be able to visit extended family on such a trip.

Lastly we looked at all of the things to do in the park. There is a lot to see and some of it can be done in a car but the majority requires hiking. Then there are the option of horseback and boat rides as well. We created a rough itinerary of interesting things to do. As the park is combined with Waterton Park in Canada we decided we want to bring our passports to facilitate a border crossing, should we decide to do that. We also looked at the weather to help us decide the clothing to bring. Right now, highs are in the mid 60's and so we will be sure to pack appropriate jackets and pants, not just shorts and t-shirts.

I now feel prepared for the trip we will take in the next week or so. While I still have a printed road atlas for the United States, I appreciate being able to use the Internet to plan road trips. Furthermore after looking up directions, Google Maps wanted to know if it should send directions to my phone. After all, once in the car, that is how we will navigate. We still have some time though so I will pass for now. 

Road Trip Entertainment

Sunday of last week I found out one of my close friends was driving to South Carolina to help his son move. He had planned to drive his pickup truck and tow his trailer. Unfortunately the truck blew its turbo and he resorted to towing a smaller trailer with his Jeep Gladiator. When his wife told me the story I felt bad for my buddy and offered to catch a flight to Atlanta and drive home with him. I didn't expect him to take me up on the offer but he did. I cashed in enough frequent flyer miles for a round trip to Hawaii and used it for a one-way ticket east. Tuesday evening at 10pm, my buddy Brett picked me up and we started the 30-hour drive back to Salt Lake City.

Brett has always been a fan of satellite radio and so I knew it would be a feature in his 4-month-old Gladiator. In addition, he had two 8GB flash drives plugged into the vehicle's media center USB slots. Both filled with countless hours of music. We also had endless streaming possibilities as Brett has an unlimited data plan and he is not afraid to hot-spot his phone.

My wife's Jeep came with satellite radio and I have a few channels I like to listen to. Brett's satellite radio has an additional feature where it keeps the previous hour's broadcast of all his presets in memory. That means we could start listening to a channel and then rewind for an hour. When we came to a song we didn't like, we could jump over it. When we caught up to the current broadcast, we just had to switch channels to another preset and do the same thing. Talk about an important upgrade. It has me rethinking the relevance of satellite radio. It also turned out to be our preferred method of entertainment.

While we could have taken the quick trip home, we wanted to experience a different route than Brett took all the way to South Carolina. Instead of coming back on I-70, we opted to use I-40 through Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, Arkansas, and Oklahoma. Then I told Brett we could add 19 minutes to our route and drive through Wolf Creek Pass which was made famous by the C. W. McCall song of the same name. Brett thought that well worth the trip and so we made a slight detour through Texas, New Mexico, and Colorado. As we got to the beginning of the pass, we started listening to the entire album that contained the song as Brett had it on one of his flash drives. It didn't take long to get to the top of the pass and Brett turned on his phone's camera held tight in a cradle so we could stream the downhill portion to his Facebook account while listening to the song. The song only takes a third of the time as actually driving the pass so we listened to the song 3 times before getting to Pagosa Springs.

We had a great time on the trip and with all of the entertainment possibilities, the drive went really quickly. Of course 75 MPH speed limits helped move things along too. I don't know how we did road trips back in the 1980's with regular FM radio and tortoise-like speed limits.

Performance Improvement

One of the fundamental lessons I learned in my days as an Electrical Engineering student is the order that performance improvements should be addressed. Always work on the largest problem first. This is really counterintuitive as people will throw out minor improvements because they are easily seen and understood. Unfortunately the improvements may be so minor that they are imperceptible. Let's look at some examples.

Recently I drove a car from San Mateo, California to Salt Lake City, Utah. This is a great example of performance as you always want to minimize the amount of time spent in the car. There are a number of variables you can play with to decrease the amount of time the trip takes. First off is which route you will take. Interstate 80 is the fastest route but is sometimes closed because of snow. You also have how fast you go. You can drive the speed limit or try to go above it. That introduces a few more variables like gas mileage and the risk of getting pulled over to receive a warning or speeding citation. The faster you drive, the more you will have to stop for gas. Don't forget that you may require additional stops to use the restroom or get food.

Thinking of the driving example, most people will point out that you can save time by combining food and restroom breaks with fuel stops. During my recent trip, I stopped for an hour to sleep and that could have been avoided by leaving earlier in the day. Leaving earlier would have also helped with the gridlock traffic I encountered leaving the Bay Area. Ultimately though, that all had very little effect on the overall drive. The best performance gains on a long trip like that are going to be solved by changing the speed of the trip from 80 miles per hour, the legal speed limit for most of the trip in Nevada and Utah, to 500 miles per hour which is how fast you can make the trip in a commercial plane. That is how I got to San Mateo in the first place and if I didn't have to bring a lot of stuff they don't allow on airplanes, it is how I would have gone home.

Another example of performance improvement I saw came in the form of a National Geographic article. It described how to save water while doing dishes. In many parts of the world, water is a scarce resource. In other parts it falls from the sky in large quantities. The article encouraged everyone to avoid rinsing your dishes before placing them in the dishwasher. No offense National Geographic but if you have a dishwasher, there are significantly better ways to save water. Taking a shorter shower is a good start. Better yet is to water your lawn only when necessary. Not rinsing your dishes saves about 2 gallons of water. Taking a shorter shower will save more than the 2 gallons of water. Watering your lawn only when necessary will save hundreds of gallons of water. In other words, stop worrying about 2 gallons and worry about 100 gallons. Once everyone gets that down, you can worry about smaller amounts.

So what does this have to do with computers? A lot actually. If you find yourself looking to improve performance, look at the system as a whole. Break down the tasks and their various times to complete. If task A takes minutes and task B takes seconds, focus on task A. Don't worry about B as it doesn't really matter until you can get task A into the seconds range.

Road Trip

I have decided that I no longer need a car in California. At least not for the summer. My boat, where I sleep is only 4 miles from the office and I need to ride my bike daily as I am getting too fat. I don't really go anywhere else and so cycling is a perfectly acceptable form of transportation.

Yesterday I used a frequent-flyer ticket and flew my 17-year-old daughter from Salt Lake to San Francisco to help me bring my car home. It was her first time flying alone and she was a bit apprehensive. When my wife dropped her at the airport, my daughter's fear was gone and she jumped out of the car at the curb-side-drop-off area. She then got to visit both Los Angeles and San Francisco airports.

I picked my daughter up at SFO and we headed the short distance back to my office where I finished up a few things before our long drive home. The last thing I did was a quick search of traffic using traffic.com to help me determine the best route out of the Bay Area. I'm glad I did because the San Mateo bridge was a parking lot. Using the Bay Bridge instead saved me lots of time.

As we head into this summer driving season and you find yourself starting from a major metropolitan area, take a look at traffic.com. You may find that the shortest route from home, isn't the quickest. It sure saved me a lot of grief.

Good to be Home

Last night I got back home after a busy week of travel. I visited ten states over a five-day period. Now I am ready for a relaxing week at home. However I may be heading to the San Francisco area shortly. I just hope I have time to rest up a bit before getting back on an airplane.

Last week was incredibly busy. I did half of my travel on airplanes and the other half in a car. It was a great chance to give my mobile office a really thorough workout. I brought my MacBook computer and iPhone. In all honesty I probably could have left my laptop at home as I used my iPhone 95% of the time. In the end, the only real need for the laptop was for its USB port so I could charge my iPhone. Still it was nice to have the laptop just in case I needed the real keyboard. As I said in a previous post, the iPhone keyboard is not nearly as easy to use as a full-sized one.

The iPhone was great for travel in the car. I brought my wife's Subaru Outback Sport as it gets the best gas mileage of the three cars I own (averaging about 30 mpg). It is less than two years old and has an iPod adapter in the center console arm rest. The iPod adapter works with the iPhone with some minor deficiencies. You only have access to the MP3-player features and so if the phone rings, you have to disconnect it from the car and answer it by hand. It would be great if I could hit a button on the steering wheel like many blue tooth equiped vehicles. The only other deficiency is that the adapter will charge an iPod but not an iPhone. That really wasn't an issue because I spent a whole day in the car listening to music and still had plenty of battery power when I pulled into my driveway.

I think the biggest success of the trip was that I spent over 20 hours in the car and never listened to the same song twice. The music capacity of most MP3 players is amazing. When I was a teenager doing road trips, I used to have to carry a box full of cassette tapes. Most tapes were good for between an hour to an hour and a half. Furthermore you often got stuck listening to songs that were just "OK" instead of favorites. Over the past couple of days I was able to listen to all of my favorites and that made the ride go that much quicker.

The second biggest success of the trip was that fact that I drove close to two thousand miles and didn't get a single speeding ticket. Yea, it was a good trip.