It’s A Small World After All

Wed, 12 Jun 2024 22:20:08 GMT

In typical user-unfriendly fashion, Google has unilaterally decided to shut down the web version of users’ Location Timeline, forcing everyone to transition to a mobile app with only half of the old functionality.

In addition to the entire web interface, one of the features they’re taking away is the ability to summarize your travels by year, something I found useful and informative.

As an example, I thought I’d share the following three screen shots from the soon-to-be-removed online version of Location Timeline. Each map summarizes all my travels for a particular year. In this case, it’s 2018, 2019, and 2020.

It’s a stark comparison, as my travel horizons shrank from global to national to zero.

Thanks largely to Inna’s work and family, in 2018 I set new records for the farthest I’ve travelled to the east, west, and south – but not north! – planting little red dots in Germany, Italy, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand. As always, click thru for teh bigness.

My travel in 2019 was in service of finding a new hometown, so we stayed within the US, but still managed to hit Denver and Boulder, Portland OR, Charlotte and Raleigh/Durham, plus northern Michigan for a bike ride.

In 2020, just as the Covid-19 pandemic and associated lockdowns were declared, I picked Inna up at the Pittsburgh airport, about 25 miles outside of town. That was the farthest I got from home all year, as I limited myself to the distance I could bicycle without refueling. And 2021 looked similar, except we made one excursion north to the beaches on Lake Erie at Presque Isle, PA.

Small world, huh?

Since then, travel has remained limited, mainly by my choice. 2022 saw two trips to Austin: one to evaluate Austin as a place to live, and the other to secure housing. 2023 brought the actual move, including our three-day road trip across country. Since then, I’ve been more interested in getting settled and learning about Austin than in spending time away.

I’m sure more travel is coming soon. But looking back at how quickly and drastically my horizons shrank between 2018 and 2020 was an eye-opener that was worth noting.

And I think it’s sad that Google won’t let me see this data anymore.

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It’s A Small World After All