Yomping for young ones

My On10 blog is getting a bit rusty so I thought I'd better tell you want I did this weekend. I yomped 52 miles. 'Yomped'? Yeah, British Army term for walking over difficult terrain or with a heavy load. Ok so, the terrain I walked wasn't that difficult and I was only carrying a day pack - but I did cover 52 miles in two days walking for 19 hours in total.

Why? To raise money for a local pre-school.

Why is this relevant to a tech site? Because I wrote a nice little app for my Windows Mobile 6 Smart phone that automated the taking of pictures, geo-tagging them from Bluetooth GPS, posted them to my site and displayed them using Virtual Earth on my blog.

The app worked well, the GPRS/EDGE service worked just as well, and the GPS near perfectly.  Shame the phone batteries weren't made for the task. I had to manually activate the Phone's GPS comms in the end because keeping the Bluetooth channel open sucked the batteries almost dry in the first 4 hours, and my solar powered Free Loader just couldn't source enough power to recharge my phone.

But, the people at home could watch my progress on my site, and I have a great record of my walk.

We're also on route to raise nearly £4000 for the local pre-school, which is well worth my sore and swollen feet.