Several folks have asked how I keep track of my progress. If my work as a sysadmin has taught me anything, it’s that I should never trust a single system to store any important information reliably. Because I don’t want to end up starting over–or massively backtracking–I keep track of things in three different formats.

First, I carry a small Moleskine notebook; when I turn onto a street, I jot down the name in a big long list. I use acronyms for street names pretty heavily, because really I only have to disambiguate amongst all streets that intersect a particular road. So the list might say, “SVN, 21, Shot, 23, V, 24 E.” That would be South Van Ness Avenue, left on 21st Street, right on Shotwell Avenue, right on 23rd Street, left on Valencia Avenue and ending at 24th Street.

When I’ve settled in at home or on the shuttle, I convert that path into black lines on a map of San Francisco that’s included with the notebook. I hash out finished blocks and typically spend a while cogitating about my next walk by pondering blank spots on the map. Unfortunately the book cuts off a large amount of the southern part of San Francisco, including about 80% of the Bay View, so eventually I’ll have to also get a complete map.

A few times a week I also plot my walks as paths in Google Earth, which is just a digital copy of the notebook. I slap a date stamp into the path name, sometimes include a few notes in the details, and then export a KML file. On my web server, a small script slices that into various meaningful subsets. You can look at the raw list of files here. I’m working on a page that will draw Google maps of any of these, but work has left me with little free time lately.

So there you have it, a completely paranoid way of redundantly manually encoding the same basic information over and over again. At least it doesn’t include Gantt charts.