Wayfaring and Google Transit

I spotted a link to Wayfaring from Urban Cartography. Looks like a lot of fun, but I think I’m mostly enamored with the page design itself. Lovely.

Also, Google Maps & Trimet launched a Transit project that seems less intuitive and functional than Trimet’s own route finder. The benefit is a visual map, I guess. I found the interface didn’t work when scrolling up and down.

Next? I hear there’s a MacOSX version of Google Earth coming. Woohoo!

Late Night in the Lab

Last night I was in the GIS lab until 1am putting together my GIS project writeup. Althought I could have finished earlier, I chose to screw around like my days in undergrad. ICQ with whoever happened to be online, trying to post to my blog (Yeah, I know – service sucks lately), and checking e-mail. It was kind of fun, but most of the group was rather somber. Ah, finals.

Michelle just read over my writeup and had to remind me that no matter how casual the class and assignment may be, it isn’t acceptible to use contractions. Also, stop writing like it’s a blog entry because it’s a graded assignment.

GeoXT issues continued

I’ve poured over Trimble’s support material but there isn’t really anything that describes COM port conflict resolution besides “Turn off the application using the port.” Yeah, that helps.

Growing ever desperate, I backed up the unit and did a hard reset. This removed TerraSync (uh-oh) and failed to resolve the GPS/PocketPC connection problem, so I restored the backup (whew).

What I don’t get is how to restart the GPS service without being connected to it. A hard restart didn’t help, and there’s no way to communicate with the device with the COM3 conflict. I guess I’ll head in to the lab and see if there are any other experience-hardened individuals there who know how to fix this. Or maybe let me use a different unit.

GPS Hell

Every time I’ve used a GPS unit this term there have been problems. The nature of the problems vary, but generally, they stem from a number of issues:

  • No one charges them and people return them with about 5 minutes of battery life left so you have enough to load your data dictionary and start walking to do your survey when the unit dies.
  • If there’s a hardware problem, people just turn them back in and get a different one, so no one knows when a unit is having a problem
  • What did you expect when you put Windows in a GPS unit?
  • There are 7 units and 40+ people in the class
  • can we ever move away from COM ports?

Instead of being halfway done with my survey I’m scouring Trimble’s website for help with determining why COM3 is in use by some phantom program that isn’t in the task list and why the GPS won’t connect to the PocketPC. I wish I’d been given one of the Geo3 units. They at least work consistently.