First time taking the new bike up highway 9. Must have had half a dozen riders signal to warn that the police were up ahead; this part of the ride was none too spirited.

152 from Watsonville [...]]]> Got a quick ride in today — 112 miles. Quickly coming up on the 1K mile mark on the odometer.

First time taking the new bike up highway 9. Must have had half a dozen riders signal to warn that the police were up ahead; this part of the ride was none too spirited.

152 from Watsonville over Hecker pass was loads of fun, even if the road was a bit rough in spots. After the left turn northward toward, Uvas road was also very interesting. I truly enjoy the ride up these “hidden” valley roads that most folks don’t realize exist so close to their suburbs.

Got tired of hand-editing the GPX files to merge the routes. Started to write a sed script to do it for me, but, just had all kinds of trouble trying to get the version of sed that ships with Mac OS X to insert a newline — which a quick search of ‘sed newline’ reveals that perhaps sed doesn’t much like to do this any case. So, scratched some rust off my once budding Python and decided to learn how to do a regular expression with it.

And for the first time with Python, it underwhelmed me. The simplicity of a regex is burdened by the fact that (I only now realized) Python doesn’t have any in-built regex abilities; I just assumed it did, and it would work like Perl. It most certainly does not:

#! /usr/bin/python

import sys
import re

if len(sys.argv) < 3:
  print "usage:"
  print "  gpx.py <gpx input file> <output file name>"
  sys.exit(1)

f_read  = open(sys.argv[1], 'r')
f_write = open(sys.argv[2], 'w')

for line in f_read:
  p = re.compile('<wpt.*/wpt>')
  line = p.sub('',line)

  p = re.compile('<trk')
  line = p.sub('\n<trk',line)

  p = re.compile('</trkseg')
  line = p.sub('\n</trkseg',line)

  p = re.compile('<time>.*</time>')
  line = p.sub('',line)

  p = re.compile('<trk.*37\.3[0,1,2].*-121.8[8,9].*/trkpt>\n')
  [line,count] = p.subn('',line)
  print "Removed", count," points from the track"

  f_write.write(line)

f_read.close()
f_write.close()
sys.exit(0)

Which does the following:

1. Removes all waypoints from the file.
2. Adds newlines in front of some key xml tags which makes it trivial to merge multiple tracks together using a text editor
3. Removes the timestamp from each track data point
4. Removes any data point that are near my house

All simple stuff, but tedious to do on the XML source file that has no line feeds as generated from the Garmin Nuvi GPS.

With the munged GPX file, this is uploaded to the very handy GPSVisualizer.com site that dumps the track into the map you see above.

Suffice it to say, much fun on ~125 miles of mostly wet roads that I’m sure were quite slick in spots due to tree [...]]]> I’m starting to get the hang of pulling files of the gps and saving the tracks I want to a web page. Once I have the system nearly automated, I’ll share it here.

Suffice it to say, much fun on ~125 miles of mostly wet roads that I’m sure were quite slick in spots due to tree detritus and the occasional patch of mud and gravel; never tested the limits of said same, fortunately. There was even a few departures from tarmac.

As an added benefit of the ride, the new bike got it’s 600 mile service done, but it really needs wash now.

Full pictures here.

Interactive track here.

It came with a 3-month teaser introduction to the Clear Channel FM traffic service which allows the GPS to “intelligently” determine how bad traffic is and reroute [...]]]> Recently purchased a Garmin Nuvi 760 GPS for the car/motorcycle. All in all, it’s lived up to expectations and does the advertised job. But, it’s not without quirks and annoyances.

It came with a 3-month teaser introduction to the Clear Channel FM traffic service which allows the GPS to “intelligently” determine how bad traffic is and reroute to find the fastest path to your destination. Sounds all well and good, until I actual found some traffic this weekend.

There was a section of “slow-n-go” for a few miles along I880 north while making my way from San Jose to Albany. Normally, 880 would be the preferred route all the way. But, at Hayward, it commanded the following departure:

The blue path is our track. Note the departure from the freeway, only to return right back onto 880! Yes, the GPS’s grand idea to route around the traffic was poach the off-ramp and then merge right back into traffic!

And suddenly, I was THAT person that so infuriates me. The one that zooms up the right lane on I5 and cuts you off just before rear-ending the semi-truck that everyone else in the left lane is patiently waiting in line to pass. The one that tail gates you for a mile, changes lanes 3 different times attempting to weave around you only to end-up back on your ass again, because, yes, in fact, you are actually going faster than everyone else. The one that uses the on/off ramps to pass people — it’s just not polite, and Garmin’s programmers think it’s a good idea!

As if that wasn’t bad enough, later in the trip, it sent me off the road again to a stop-light intersection in order to route around traffic that didn’t exist.  Yes, it was there an hour prior when we started the trip, but had since flushed out while en route. We were very near our destination so I assumed it was time to exit the freeway — but then it wanted us right back on it again, only to exit for real a mile down the road.  It clearly showed there was no traffic in our vicinity, yet, it wasn’t smart enough to note the change in conditions and update the route.

So, lesson learned — if you don’t look ahead at the next 3 turns when it wants you to depart the freeway, good chance it’s doing you no favors.