As part of my evil plan for world domination and assorted avoidance of doing real work, I purchased a GPS. (There is a reason, but that’ll be a future blog entry.)

During my failed commute, I accidentally had the tracklog turned on. Well I have the data, I better do something with it:

How to generate this map

First, don’t save the tracklog because Garmin “compresses” the tracklog on this model. Their idea of compression is to reduced the number of points tracked and strip out the useful time stamp data. Pathetic.

1. Connect Garmin by USB to your Macintosh.
2. Use GPSBabel+ or LoadMyTracks to download the waypoints and tracks (or just the tracks) as a GPX file (because it’s the only format worth saving).
3. Use GPSBabel+ to convert the GPX file into Keyhole Markup Language (KML). You can skip this step on Windows because Google Earth groks GPX.
4. Launch Google Earth.
5. Load the KML file.
6. Zoom to your location and take a screenshot.

I decided to show Google’s flag so you see how close I live and work to the Googleplex. Rumor has it they bought out the SGI complex where I work so I guess I won’t be working so close to Google this time next year.

A word about the GPSmap 60CSx

Times have changed a lot since I last owned a GPS (1999). This model acquires almost instantly because of the SIRFstar III chipset and the end of Selective Availability and theWAAS differential GPS feature in modern GPSs make the system usably accurate.

I can even see that I take a different route when I walk to the car than when I walk from the car!

Too. Much. Information.