State of Exhaustion

November 29,2018

Welcome back, Exhaustonauts! (That word is trickier to spell than one would think).

I hope everyone is having an enjoyable last week in November. Hard to believe that things are getting pretty close to wrapping up the wild wild ride that was 2018. It had it's ups and it's downs. If you've played your cards right, and set your priorities on the important things in life (hint: crypto, bitcoin, and steem should likely not be high up on your list -- though there is an opportunity for some cool stuff and relationships with rad people), then hopefully you're one of the lucky ones that had a net-gain in life this year.

I feel like I'm one of the lucky ones.

Maps help you get to where you want to be, but you must know where you're from, too

Todays post is gonna have a minor update, a reiteration of my initial idea of what "EXHAUST" should and hopefully will be eventually (for those of you that are relatively new to EXHAUST, or just haven't been listening), and a couple of questions about privacy and some other stuff.

The Update!

Maps! Holy Crap!

Check it! I've finally figured out how to get some very basic maps working on the site. Currently, I have it set to not show the map if the user has uploaded their activity with a GPX file, and to only work with a TCX file (this is because, generally, it seems that I'm the only one that uses TCX file format).

I'll be the first to admit that they're not the prettiest -- yet! Just like everything else, you build the skeleton, and then you polish that turd to make it nice and shiny. These maps are VERY rudimentary currently, and there are some very powerful features on the horizon once I upgrade the project to utilize a GIS database rather than a standard SQL database -- but we can talk about that another day. For now -- lets all just continue high-fiving eachother!

My "Vision" for EXHAUST:

People have probably heard me briefly touch on wanting EXHAUST to become "a Steem powered monstrosity that pays people to run, or perform other exercises". This is part of the end goal, but isn't really prescriptive of my thoughts on the "how" or "what" that will get us there. You've probably heard a bit of talk recently about the "power of community" with all the negative price action and recent news about Steemit Inc restructuring. I would say that I pretty well completely agree with the idea that community is power. Solidarity! Power to the many! Rah Rah rah! All that good stuff!

My hope is to eventually begin reaching out to local running / cycling / climbing / hiking / yoga / ENTER-REASONABLE-EXERCISE-HERE stores / gyms / groups, and getting them involved in EXHAUST as well. The idea is essentially that we would be creating a community that is enthusiastic about various sports, and EXHAUST could be a conduit that would give stores / gyms / groups the ability to encourage, reward, coach, and otherwise interact with this community.

As an example -- there is quite literally a locally owned and operated running equipment store about 2 blocks from where I live. A few nights a week, there is a group that congregates at the store and goes for a training run together -- somewhere in the order of 15-20 people.

Imagine if these 15-20 people (at this one store) were all using EXHAUST to talk about their runs, socialize with each other, encourage eachother, coach each other, and reward eachother;
NOW image if the store that they all meet at formed an "official" STEEM account for their store. Call it the "Hive account@victoriarunners" for now. Maybe they'll realize that if they invest $10,000 to acquire STEEM to power up their account, they can directly reward and encourage runners that come to their local store and come out for a jog.
What if there was a cute little RaspberryPi computer with a QR code for their STEEM account on the counter, so you can come into the store and redeem your rewards earned from your blood, sweat, and tears for the running equipment you want. (This step is a bit further out -- DSTORS seems compelling -- but might be a bit overkill for what I'm imagining)
- It's not unreasonable to think that a "Group Page" (think xhaust.me/@victoriarunners/store or something like that) could host a few items that are redeemable for STEEM / SBD.
Hopefully this could scale up and out to many sports, at many stores, in many cities, in many countries;

The above rant was my initial plan for what EXHAUST COULD be. Since then, I've had a couple more cool ideas that I think are pretty compelling, and are currently in progress and ComingSoon^TM, such as:

An achievements system to gamify exercise;
Hosting and coordinating "decentralized races".
- Maybe on Wednesday, March 20, 2019 (The Spring Equinox for the Northern Hemisphere) we should host the first EXHAUST 5km/10km/21.1km/42.2km Race Event (complete with prize-purse funded by user posts that register for the race...? Could shave off an extra 10% beneficiary cut to fill the purse...)
- Everyone goes out and runs their best time for the distance they've chosen. Some adjustments would have to be made for runners that have a flat course or a hilly course -- but that's not too tricky.
A marketplace for training plans and coaching interactions;
The ability for stores / gyms to advertise on the site... (I personally feel like advertising is gross -- but not everything is about me... or so I've been reminded).
A place for groups like Hive account@runningproject and Hive account@cyclefeed to interact and compete with their group, while everyone rewards eachother;
For climbing specifically (and potentially hiking as well) -- funds could be directed to nature conservancy / trail maintenance / bolting-funds / alpine clubs / search and rescue groups.

I think I've rambled on enough about what I want EXHAUST to be eventually. Now it's just a matter of finding some time to get it all done. Stay tuned, and please be patient. My attention tends to gravitate towards what's most important at the time (speaking of which, setting up a full Steem node is likely creeping to the top of that list soon -- in which case, it may make sense to set up a Witness... details to come, if I get around to thinking in detail about it).

LET ME KNOW WHAT YOU THINK IN THE COMMENTS BELOW!

A quick question about privacy:

I spoke briefly up top about the basic mapping that is now functional. I also mentioned that it is currently disabled. As we all know -- Steem wallets are very transparent. There's nothing stopping me from exploring the chain and figuring out exactly how much STEEM someone has. With the inclusion of mapping, this obviously introduces a concern. Thankfully, I'm not worth much of anything on here, so nobody has any reason to chase me down. That's not the case for everyone, and not everyone is as unconcerned about sharing their location as myself.

One of my short term goals in regards to mapping is to make an option somewhere (likely in the "Dashboard" -- which desperately needs to be updated in tandem) so users can choose how to share their map info w/ everyone else. Users should be able to choose, for a "default" setting, to share their maps according to one of the options below:

Public Maps (Share with everyone);
Steem-public maps (Share with anyone that is logged in via SteemConnect);
"Following" (Share only with people that you've chosen to follow on Steem);
"Followers" (Share only with people that are following you on Steem);
"Friends" (Share only with people that are following you, and you are following them back)