Keeping track

In case you haven't noticed, the bulk of my posts thus far have been about planning for the trip. That makes sense; we haven't actually taken the trip yet so I can't really write much about what we've seen. And you may have formed an opinion about my planning, namely that it shows signs of OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, for those of you not surrounded by a family of psychologists). I assure you that all of this is necessary, and that there is actually a need for planning. Let me talk about planning a bit. This is a fairly complex trip. We are staying in fifteen places, each one needing a reservation. We have the car rental and air reservations. We now have reservations at some restaurants in Las Vegas, Yellowstone and Yosemite. As soon as we started putting the details of the trip together in January, I realized that we needed a database (I'm an old time database administrator, and my Ph.D. dissertation was about Information Retrieval technology). So I reviewed a few options, and settled on Evernote. Evernote is a database which runs on an iPad, iPhone, Windows or Macintosh computer, or in pretty much any browser. It gives you complete access to your data regardless of which platform you happen to be using at the moment, which was a basic requirement for me. Evernote uses the metaphor of a collection of notebooks, each composed of multiple notes. Notes can be text, pictures, PDFs, sound files, pretty much anything.

Evernote screen capture, April 2012

I've been using it for a while, and so I simply set up a notebook for the trip. Evernote also lets you share a notebook with others, so I've shared the trip notebook with the wife. Now we each can see the latest, up-to-date information we have at any time. And here's the kicker: it's completely free! Free as in free beer. Free as in you don't have to give them any money. If you really want to spend some money, you can buy the upgraded version for a few bucks per month, and get additional capacity and the ability to have multiple people to update a shared notebook. I don't need the capacity, and for this application, I think we're better off if only one of us can ever update the database - that way it's always clear what's going on with it. This notebook now has all the confirmations of our reservations, a detailed day-by-day master schedule, a not-yet-fully-formed sightseeing schedule, a variety of national park maps, and other information about the trip that may prove useful. OCD? I think not. Simply good project management techniques honed by years of experience watching people do this sort of thing for a living.