Life Nomadic has begun. Six months of not particularly careful planning and a full week of hectic scrambling to rid ourselves of nearly every earthly possesion has paid off.
As I write our first post for Life Nomadic, Todd's in the next seat over editing our first video. The kid behind me is pounding on my seat. Holy god. It's like he's playing Rock Band back there and the tray table is the drums set.
I'd always talked about freeing myself from a single location... making my income portable, all of my belongings portable, and becoming more comfortable being a nomad. After Todd and I took a random trip to Japan I realized that there are probably MANY places in the world that I'd like as much as, if not more than, the U.S.
On Tuesday night my friend Brian and I tried out a new restaurant in Tokyo. An Izakaya is a tiny bar that also serves food, popular with Salarymen. Usually the food is huddled way over on the unhealthy end of the spectrum, but we found a macrobiotic one with good reviews. We sat there bemoaning how difficult it is to find places in Tokyo. Streets don't have names and the address system is a bit confusing. The conversation moved on to talking about how difficult it is to express a location to someone. GPS coordinates are awkward, google maps links can't be sent by SMS or over the phone, and not everywhere has an address. Even some addresses are confusing enough that they get miscommunicated. And how do you concisely give someone the exact location for "that bridge in the middle of the park"?
Is there a better way, we wondered? Could a location be expressed in just a short string of characters?
As I walked home, my mind was churning trying to figure out just how short of a string I could pack any location on earth into. As soon as I got home I visited wolframalpha.com, using it for a legitimate purpose for the very first time.
