Third Avenue. All of it.

Today I wanted to test various hypotheses etc etc and so I walked the entire length of Manhattan.

Battery Park - Water Street - Pearl Street - St James Place - Bowery - Cooper Square - Third Avenue

Apart from anything else it was nice to see the shifts in population and land use as I moved through the different districts.

The trace is in two parts (I stopped for a break!) with the GPS units obviously struggling with the second leg and giving much greater shifts and ‘noisy’ results compared to the first.

A quick screen grab of the resulting trace

This is why I like to repeat journeys several times – to filter out these one-off effects. I think I’m going to struggle to do many journeys of this size whilst the weather is so hot though. I might try some of the other avenues instead and sample some of the other districts.

…and hope the weather cools off a bit!

Logging the Queensboro Bridge

I’ve been able to evolve the circuitry I was using for the last Colony prototype to include a logging facility and (with Andrew‘s help) to then convert the log file into either svg (vector graphic) or kml (Google Earth) format.

Last night was its first test run as, with various blinky lights about my person, I went for a stroll over the Queensborough Bridge.

East River and Roosevelt Island from the Queensboro Bridge

The resulting trace

As you can see from the trace above (made from a lot more lines than it appears) there’s a bit of work to be done with this system…

Beginnings

Start spreadin’ the news*…

This blog post is supported by the National Lottery through Arts Council England

I’ve been sucessful in my Grants for the Arts application for funding to support a programme of professional development activities: a research trip to New York; a visit to V2_ in Rotterdam; Interesting Things I Can’t Talk About Yet in Den Haag; and attendance at Maker Faire UK and Future Everything.

Other than doing the official announcement, I also want to thank everyone who was kind enough to spare some time to contribute a testimonial back when I was preparing the application – they were all very much appreciated on a number of different levels. Thank you!

* it’s the first line of a quite famous song rather than an actual request