New clips — and an exciting new project!

First the housekeeping: Here are a couple new clips from Tom’s IT Pro:

• Building a Business Case for Cloud-Based Chargeback Solutions
• Flash in the Cloud: Is Performance Worth the Extra Cost? (in which I predict when flash becomes cheaper than disk)

Now the big news:

October 19, I will get on the A train in Far Rockaway and, 68 days later, get off publicly available transit at the Muni stop near Golden Gate Park. No Amtrak, no Greyhound, no Uber. Just local buses, commuter rail, vanshares, carpools, rural dial-a-ride service, casino motorcoaches, university motor pools, Native American tribal transit, trolleys, inclined planes, ferries, church buses, mall shuttles and, maybe, drunk lift services. Out of a 4,100-mile route, I’ll still have to hike a total of about 200 miles, or about 20 miles a week.

This can be done, even though nobody has ever thought of this before (no less attempted it). But I mapped out a route and a timetable for what I call the Cross-Country Local. I am currently in contact with markets which could host content as I stream, blog, tweet, snap and old-fashioned report from more than a hundred stops through 14 states.

The expedition will spin stories of varying lengths and formats:

• Extemporaneous reports while in transit: Video stream, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat
• Local heroes, characters and traditions, a la Kuralt: Finished videos, 1,000- to 2,000-word text with still photography
• Raw, unedited interviews with heroes and characters: Video stream
• News features about transit issues (e.g., ADA’s growing effect on transit, your tax dollars are paying for church buses, vanpool explosion/light rail implosion): 3,000- to 5,000-word think pieces with graphics
• The trip, internalized: (personal reflections on why I chose to do this, who and what on the journey has affected me most and why) Blog posts, to form the shell of a literary non-fiction book at the end.

Until I find a home for this content, you can visit the Cross-Country Local page on Facebook and follow #xclocal on Twitter.