Really, it was a hoax

You know, of course, that the TV footage of the moon landings was shot in a sound studio in Hollywood and the space walks were faked in swimming pools.

I thought I could fake my trip around the country by moving a blue dot on a map that you would see on your computer. Everybody knows you can believe anything you see on the Internet.

But the blue dot wouldn't buy it. The blue dot went on strike and said it wasn't moving until I did. That's why the blue dot has been stuck on Columbia since Saturday while I've be regaling you of stories of my travels to exotic places like Coconut Grove and Key West in Florida.

Actually, the trip is real and so is the problem with the tracking.

In "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" the tools were wrenches and screwdrivers. As the photo shows, maintenance on this trip involves a laptop. The blue dot wasn't moving because there was a driver problem with the sending unit. The tracker is the white box on top of the black tool box on the back of the bike, and in the photo it is hooked to my laptop with a special cable.

When Santiago Ferrer of AeroAstro described the problem he called it a "driver error," but he was being polite. I think he was too kind to say it was a "rider error," as in "motorcycle rider error." The tracker was sending signals after I was led through the start-up procedure as reported in the first entry on this blog. The tracker sent signals from the back of my truck during the test period before the trip.

Then, because I was concerned that the battery life might be shortened by my desire to have signals sent every hour rather than one or twice a day, I put the unit to sleep. It now seems that when I did that, or when I tried to wake it up for the trip I did something to the computer coding that couldn't be fixed in a rest area on I-10 West in the panhandle of Florida. We tried. Santiago hooked his computer to a tracker of the same model as mine and tried to replicate the computer screens I was seeing on my laptop. We probably could have fixed the problem had I had with me the CD with the programming data that came with the unit, but that CD is on my desk in the J-school. I remember holding it when I stopped by the office after commencement exercises and thinking, I won't be needing that. Hey, I brought the special cable didn't I?

Santiago was probably thinking, "Where did we find this guy?"

Once again Pia Miranda rides to the rescue. A new "hot", as in ready to send signals, tracker has been dispatched to my twin in Austin. I was planning to spend Wednesday in Austin while the bike received its 36,000 mile service, so the tracker, and its little blue dot, will have time to catch up with me.

The blue dot hasn't moved, but I have. I'll tell you about riding through Florida in the next post.