One of the things that I most enjoyed when I came to this country was the travel with friends. Driving around in a structured environment such as lanes and highways was a brand new experience for me and the ease with which one could do it was even more exciting. Large books of maps from AAA was something that I was fascinated with and whenever I went to one of my close friend’s house, I would pick it up and start exploring it for long periods of time and literally commit to memory routes and places.

One thing that I was initially fascinated with was the TripTik travel planner from AAA, which had the whole trip planned out with folded pages of highlighted routing. Soon I began to dislike them. When you were traveling without these, there was an excitement about discovery and dynamic routing based on what you remembered. In addition, there was fierce competition amongst a few of us in the car for who had the most knowledge about maps and routes. You always used the books of maps in the car to subsequently prove that you had the superior routing skills. All of that vanished when you had TripTik, which was considered the expert opinion and therefore the best option.

This also resulted in me being really fascinated with problems such as traveling salesman problem and the minimal spanning tree algorithms (I submitted my completed program in record time for my data structures class!)

With the advent of GPS and Google Maps and Waze, I have completely outsourced this aspect of my life. I have also outsourced a significant portion of what I used to remember primarily to Google and some of the other technologies. It is true that aging also contributed to all of this and I am sure I am not the only one experiencing this.

(more…)