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While I was in Germany, I began to enjoy water with bubbles in it (”Soda Water”). In my previous trips to Europe, I hated the stuff, but this time it really grew on me. Before my course started, I was invited out with a really nice German family from Munich. In their house, they had a machine to turn tap water into bubbly water.

I had to get myself one of these machines! In Germany, they are relatively cheap and the cartridges of CO2 are refillable. This is not the case in Canada. The cartridges are expensive, and each company has their own style of doing cartridges. Clearly this wouldn’t do.

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GPS Logging of my Germany trip is complete (enough). Version 1 is available at:

http://www.muzik.ca/gpsdata/parse.php

The XML files were logged by the Sunset GPS Tracker (mentioned previously) running on my Windows Mobile (yuck!…well actually it works quite well) and a Hollux GPSlim bluetooth receiver. While in Germany, I had the receiver on my person very often, and I logged many of the trips I did. The log took a way-point every 5 seconds (so you can calculate how quickly I was going by the difference in the waypoints!). “Parse.php” takes the xml file (actually a .gpx file), and extracts the coordinates and puts them on a google map.

Unfortunately it will crash your browser if you have too many points (~300) on your current viewport. Some of my files have lots of way points (5000+), so you still need to choose which leg of the journey you wish to see (0-300 is the default starting position). On my list of todos is to discard “duplicate” points (that is a point within a short distance from its previous point). Also todo is to be able to name a journey (rather than 2007-05-14_…gpx, name it “Trip to Hann-Munden).

When time permits