{"id":17419,"date":"2017-01-22T10:11:26","date_gmt":"2017-01-22T15:11:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.howderfamily.com\/blog\/?p=17419"},"modified":"2022-04-18T06:34:49","modified_gmt":"2022-04-18T11:34:49","slug":"island-adventure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.howderfamily.com\/blog\/island-adventure\/","title":{"rendered":"Mr. Walker’s Island Adventure"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

It didn’t take much to get me started on another obsessive-compulsive exercise. Longtime reader Rhodent commented<\/a> on my observations about a stalker on St. Martin’s Island (map<\/a>) in Bangladesh. That made me even more curious about the underlying situation. So I needed to check every single image in painstaking detail to see if I could untangle the story. Fortunately the island didn’t cover a lot of ground so this actually seemed like a reasonable task, if a bit ill-advised.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Google Street View Comes to St. Martin’s Island<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\"Antarctica:<\/a>
Trekker: Google Street View Backpack Camera<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Google Street View arrived on St. Martin’s Island in October 2015 in an unusual way. The government of Bangladesh doesn’t allow motorized vehicles there. It’s too small and it doesn’t have much in the way of infrastructure anyway. People follow footpaths. Therefore Google brought its Trekker, a backpack device used more commonly to photograph mountain trails or glaciers in Antarctica or inaccessible places like that. The Trekker weighs 42 Pounds (19kg)<\/a> including a vertical staff topped by 15 cameras. Google loans the Trekker<\/a> to qualified individuals and organizations for those who want to add a favorite out-of-the way place to the Street View portfolio. Apparently someone wished to do that for southernmost Bangladesh.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The Main Characters<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Two men dominated the narrative. One man carried the Trekker. I called him Street View Guy (or SVG). The other man accompanied him every step of the way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Shadow
Street View Guy<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Evidence of SVG rarely appeared because he carried the backpack and stood beneath the photo sphere. At certain times, however, his shadowy image emerged from beneath the camera. This happened primarily as the sun began to set on a long day, when shadows extended far enough that they fell into camera range. Those were exceptions. Most of the time SVG stayed behind the scenes as he should, recording the story instead of contributing to it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"The
Mr. Walker Reveals Himself<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

In the earlier article<\/a> I named the other guy The Stalker. That didn’t seem appropriate anymore so I renamed him Mr. Walker because, well, he walked every corner of St. Martin’s Island. I viewed literally hundreds of distinct frames, tracking his every move. Only one showed his unobstructed face, the one that I found previously that Google forgot to blur. Who was he? I knew he wore a uniform although I didn’t know what it represented.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"G4S
Mr. Walker’s Epaulet<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Every once in awhile Mr. Walker moved next to SVG. One of those close-up images let me see his epaulet and the matching logo on his shirt in detail. It said G4S. That offered the clue I needed. G4S is a company that provides security services worldwide including Bangladesh<\/a>. That solved the mystery. Mr. Walker wasn’t a policeman or a tour guide. He belonged to a private international security firm. He was hired to keep SVG safe, or maybe just Google’s expensive hardware.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Maps That Guide the Story<\/h2>\n\n\n\n