So, I’m at this big Dean organizing event in a hotel in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and I plug in my wifi card just for kicks. And — surprise! — it tells me I’m getting signal, which is surprising since the event and the hall don’t have any wifi transmitters. So, I look at the properties of the connection:

This would be great except Joi Ito is some thousands of miles away, telling Sony executives what they need to know about the future of media, a fact I confirm with Boris Anthony, Joi’s blogmaster who happens to be at the Dean thing.

And, no, there wasn’t really any wifi working, ad hoc or otherwise.

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Off on a 1.5 hour trip tomorrow with the new Garmin GPS navigator. Part one takes me 20 miles away to Halley’s place; I’ve never been in that neighborhood and it sounds like it’s a bit tricky to find. Then it’s on to Portsmouth, with Halley and Jackson, to a Dean meeting. So, this should be a good test.

I’m having trouble with the UI for requesting routes. When I do a text search for an address, three times out of three it’s told me that it doesn’t exist, although if I use the map zoomed in all the way, I can find them, and the system accepts them as valid waypoints. Odd.

BTW, Gary Turner writes amusingly (as always) about his own experiences with GPS navigation.

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Here’s an unanticipated effect of spam.

Spam showing up in blog comments increasingly tries to pass itself off as a genuine comment. So, I’ve been getting spams that say how interesting my blog is and how much they care about what I have to say. How touching!

Other comment spam disguises itself in the form of some bromide so generic that it can apply to any blog article and so bland that no one will object to it. For example, “Pamela Woodlake” recently spammed an entry on Andrew Odlyzko’s comparison of broadband and cell phone adoption rates with the heartwarming comment that “A good traveler has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving.” The URL she gave as hers, however, is for some weight-loss hokum.

Frankly, I’d rather be spammed by someone touting penile enhancements than drown in innocuous platitudes.

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According to an article in yesterday’s Miami Herald:

In Tuesday’s special election to fill state House seat 91, 134 Broward voters managed to use the 2-year-old touch-screen equipment without casting votes for any candidate…

The percentage of nonvotes — 1.3 percent — is modest compared to the days of ”hanging” and ”pregnant chads.” But in Tuesday’s race, every vote was crucial. In a seven-candidate field, Ellyn Bogdanoff beat Oliver Parker by just 12 votes.

The non-votes may be due to Democrats entering the voting booth only to discover that there were no Democrats on the ballot. But the mere suspicion that the machines are at fault is intolerable in a democracy.

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The Annals of Improbable Research‘s newsletter version — and check out its new blog — is running a limerick contest:

Investigator Steven Slap recommends that we recommend the book “Fundamentals of Microanalytical Entomology: A Practical Guide to Detecting and Identifying Filth in Foods,” by Alan R. Olsen, Thomas H. Sidebottom and Sherry A. Knight.

We commend Investigator Slap for his recommendation, and recommend that, for conversational purposes, everyone refer to the book as “Sidebottom’s classic ‘Fundamentals of Microanalytical Entomology: A Practical Guide to Detecting and Identifying Filth in Foods.'”

Readers who have read the book (which we have not) are invited to submit limericks in tribute to it or to specific portions of it. We will publish the best of these either here in mini-AIR or on the WHAT’S NEW blog (see below).

Here’s my entry:

The book by Sidebottom is lunch-
Time reading for a scary bunch
    Who look into their meal
    With a bug-eyéd zeal
And savor its every crunch.

You can send your entry to:

FILTH-IN-FOODS PAEANS
c/o [email protected]

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My Garmin 2610 GPS navigator arrived this afternoon, on time, from CompuPlus, a cheapie online merchant. But I had to help my son with his homework when all I wanted to do was play with my new toy. Damn homework!

The unit seems smaller than I remember it from my friend’s car. But such is the illusion of consumerism.

The installation instructions are mediocre. The software installed pretty easily despite that, although I’m not sure that my registration went through. I got a mysterious error code. But the mapping software seems to be unlocked, so I’m proceeding.

When you turn the unit on indoors, it defaults to showing you China and displays a “Locating Satellites” message, which may or may not be the case.

You load up the two disks of North American maps that come with the system and you click on the regions you want to install onto your device. An inconspicuous note in the window frame tells you how many megabytes of mappage you’ve selected. Since my unit comes with 128MB of memory on a flash card already installed in the system, I picked 127.9MB of maps, which covered all of the Northeast, up to about 50 miles west of the Hudson in NY and upper NJ. Then you tell the software to save the maps into the GPS unit, which you’ve connected by USB.

It transfers slowly. The meter says it’ll take about 30 minutes. Unfortunately, the first time through it got to the 15 minute mark and only then told me that I’d selected too many maps. So I knocked it down to 126.9MB and we’ll see if it craps out again. It’d be real handy if it’d warn you about this before you spend the time uploading. Sigh.

The upload screen grays out the choices for waypoints and routes, so I’m a little nervous that after I’ve uploaded all the mapping data, I still won’t be able to tell it that I want to go from my house to my in-laws’ house. (They live over a mile away so I need electronic help getting there. Really.) But we’ll see.

Anticipation…

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Halley is making light of the Club for Growth today, and manages to work us around to a Joe Conason piece on the hypocrisy of rich addicts who are hardliners about drug users except when they’re them (so to speak).

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A team of celebrities is determining the winner of MoveOn.org‘s contest for amateur commercials countering the Bush administration’s policies and propaganda. But we wee folks get to vote on winners in three categories: Funniest, Best Youth Pitch, and Best Animation. Some of the 12 entries are very well done and quite amusing.

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My GPS navigation system should arrive today. I forewent all birthday and Chanukah gifts from my family in order to build up a fund for the device, a Garmin 2610. It’s a perky little number that sits on your dash and tells you, in a silky voice that forgives all your directional transgressions, how to get from A to B.

I’m not a particularly good driver to begin with, but I spend most of almost every trip trying to envision how the road I’m on links up with the road I’m trying to get to. The rest of the time I’m having mini anxiety attacks, worrying that I’m on the wrong road or in the wrong city. See, I’ve only lived in the same neighborhood for 17 years, so you can understand why going to pick up milk is an adventure that requires road maps, emergency flares and a sextant.

I am just missing some synapses. To me, right and left are like red and black on the roulette table. But two recent incidents really scared me.

A couple of weeks ago, I pulled into a gas station and asked my wife which side of the car the tank is on. (The cars only three years old, so I’m still getting used to it.) My wife, knowing my directional stupidity, said “It’s on your side.” I still pulled in on the wrong side.

Then, yesterday, I said that my son was “up in the basement.” I really thought I had mastered up and down. Fortunately, that smell of burning plastic came from a misguided science experiment.

But my problem isn’t just with basic spatial orientation. I can’t visualize how the parts of my world connect. When driving, I’m constantly surprised that this road leads to that one. To plot how to get somewhere, I have to laboriously piece together scenes of intersections, and often I just can’t do it. I also have no sense of which areas are near other areas.

So, I’m hoping that my new GPS system will let me focus on the important part of driving: Talking on the cell phone.

NOTE: Now would not be a good time to tell me that instead of paying $750 for a Garmin, I could have done the same thing by wrapping copper wire around a $0.59 Boy Scout compass and sticking it into my Palm Pilot. Thank you.

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BoingBoing pointed to a site that PhotoShopped celebrities into old age and zithood.

Since I have on occasion been cruel about celebrity faces, I thought it only fair that I PhotoShop my own visage to see what I might look like at the decrepit age of, oh, I don’t know, 53:

1972 college yearbook

30 years later (artist’s rendition)

(The depressing thing is that despite using every deformation I know of in PaintShop 8, this picture still has aged better than I have.)

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