Captivity Revamp

After a few days of trying to track my time outside, I’ve run into a few snafu’s.

• My Garmin Forerunner GPS doesn’t have enough battery power to make it through a full day (especially on the weekend - Memorial Day picnics prooved this to be a major challenge).
• I was amazed at how little time I spent outside, and realized it may be even more powerful to demonstrate ALL time spent outside.
• Waiting for a GPS to find the satellites when I first went outside was a pain.
• As cool as a wrist-mounted GPS is, being a computer worker on a laptop all day rendered a large clunky thing on my wrist a pain

So, here is my even more simplified revision of Project Captivity:

• Track ALL time outside, even time walking to car
• Don’t worry about additional weather, distance, etc information
• I bought a cheap digital wristwatch to help track the time each.

Also, there is a project page up now too. I’ve started a graph that I’ll be updating so you can see the day-to-day progress.

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Project Captivity

Today I’m starting a new project/experiment. I’m calling it Project Captivity.

The basic premise, is that I have no understanding of how little I probably go outside (even with the amount of gardening I’ve already done this spring). To phrase it conversely, I have no idea how much my life resembles a life lived in captivity. I already have a Garmin Forerunner 205 Wrist-Mounted GPS so I figured I’d just start wearing it more to track how often I’m outside.

Here are my basic guidelines for the project:

• Only track outdoor time
  Unfortunately, this is probably the smaller number and easier to track. This works better for getting GPS satellite reception anyway.
• Track ALL meaningful time outside
  Even if I’m reading a book in a lawn chair. This may affect the averages for the day when it comes to calories burned or average speeds, but my first priority is to track how much anti-captivity time I am getting.
• Don’t track tiny times
  Like walked from house to the car in the morning. This could make the project more tedious, and unless I’m incredibly deprived of outside time it won’t make that much of a difference.
• When possible, walk or ride a bike
  As opposed to using a car. The reasons for this should be obvious on a number of levels.

What data I’m going to track daily:

• Time (hours:minutes:seconds) spend outside
• Calories burned outside
• Distance traveled outside
• Average, max speeds traveled outside
• Average, lowest, highest elevation
• Weather high/low temps
• Weather status (precipitating heavy/light, overcast, partly cloudy, full sun)

The weather data I am looking at recording automatically via some weather services online. The rest of the data can come directly off of the GPS unit which syncs with my computer. I’ll extract this data and store it in a table so I can tally it easily, but I’m also going to archive the actual GPS records for the day just in case I want to refer back to them or try to extract more data at a later date.

All of this will be rudimentary data collecting for the first few weeks, most likely. I would like to evolve this into more automated system that collects, stores, and reports on the data for me. I will be creating a dedicated page on this site to this project also, complete with graphs!

It’s time to add another facet to “freedom” …

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