Another way to look at a conference
For the JavaOne/MBARI trip, I took along my trust Omron HJ-720ITC pedometer.
This nifty little toy is a wonderful pedometer, and it saves up to 41 days’ worth of data onboard that you can download to your desktop for viewing and analysis. Unlike most of them, its based on an accelerometer chip instead of a tilt switch, so you can toss it in a pocket or bag and it’ll still count accurately. The included software is Windows-only, and I’ve not made a lot of progress in writing an OSX driver. I’ve gotten as far as USB bus enumeration and finding the device I want; it looks like all I need is to download and parse a single ‘report’, but anyway. Project page is here on googlecode if you want to help out.
Here’s a screenshot of the week of the trip, click for fullsize:
(That’s running on VMWare Fusion on my Mac, by the way.)
That’s a lotta walking! Over 12000 steps on two days, and 52 thousand for the week. Now you know why your feet are tired after a conference… It claims 30.4 miles, but I think I need to recalibrate my step distance, I doubt that I walked that far. Interesting regardless, I though.
