On my first trip with my Garmin navigation system (Model 2610), I got lost within a quarter mile of home.

Well, I didn’t get lost because that doesn’t happen when you have an omniscient navigator. I did manage to make a wrong — unindicated — turn, I think because I was not used to how far away an intersection is when the navigator says that I should turn left in 400 feet. A few seconds after you make the wrong turn, the navigator calmly says that you are “off course” and recalculates the route. As a result, it took me through back streets all the way to my destination (Halley‘s apartment), a route substantially different than the one it plotted for me when I came back and didn’t make wrong turns.

That aside, it’s pretty damn impressive. The pre-turn instructions are timed well. The map zooms appropriately so you can see where you are and where you’re supposed to be going. It would help, though, as Halley pointed out, if it gave you a verbal “Right on!” when you’ve managed to make a turn correctly; some of us (me) are so pathetic that we need the encouragement.

It did route me home in a sub-optimal way. I’m sure the route looked like the fastest on paper, but you really don’t want to go through Harvard Square at 6pm on a Saturday night unless you have to. Also, while it’s legally possible to make a left onto Comm Ave the way it told me to, you’d have to violate the laws of physics to do so, particular the clause that says two bodies can’t occupy the same space at the same time.

I’m still finding it confusing to create routes. It’s a highly compressed UI. But I’m getting better at it.

The weirdest thing is, though, that while it certainly is getting me from A to B better, I now have even less of a sense of where I am. I don’t know how what cities I passed through or what roads I’m on. All I know is that I have to make a right turn in 400 feet.

[Episode 1. Episode 2.]

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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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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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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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Mind some dumb-ass questions about cell phone location technology and policy for something I’m writing? I’m having trouble finding a site on the Web that talks about this at a sufficient level of ignorance.

I understand that by 2005, 95% of cell phones in the US need to be able to broadcast their location with an accuracy of 50-150m. This is part of the FCC’s e911 (“Enhanced 911”) act. Here’s what I don’t understand:

1. The wireless carriers are required to track that information only if you make a 911 call. But will my cell phone be broadcasting its location continuously, or only when I make a 911 call?

2. I’m confused about the tech used by cell phones to determine location. Is it GPS? (If so, what happens when I’m indoors or in an urban canyon? And, if so, a GPS device receives; it doesn’t transmit. So does the location information just get encoded as a header or something in a 911 call? In all calls?) If it’s not GPS, what is it?

I’d ask smarter questions if I could. And, of course, please feel free to correct the part that I think I understand, too.

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Sven just IM’ed me through Skype, the P2P telephony system. Sven seems like a nice enough guy, but I don’t know him. He was just looking for someone to talk with. I was busy paying bills through Quicken and probably was brusquer than I intended. But what sort of IM system lets any and all of its 4M users ping you? Or do all IM systems lay you open to spontaneous global chatting? And if they all do, why don’t I have more people pinging me? Is it my breath?

(Yeah yeah, I’m sure there’s a way to turn this off in Skype. Can’t I just complain about it irrationally?)

Then I went back to Quicken. I’ve been using it for 15 years and have gotten worse and worse at it. My Quicken work environment is so screwed up that it’s beyond cleaning: I have uncleared checks from ten years ago, a bank balance that shows me to be $41,000 overdrawn, multiple entries for online payees that I can’t figure out how to delete, and a column in the “Split” dialogue box labeled “Exp” that seems to be entirely undocumented. But that’s not what I want to whine about.

It occurred to me that the way I’ve been entering deposits is probably wrong: I go to the registery and create a “deposit” line. It works, but it’s totally inelegant. Surely the UI gives us a better way of doing it. So, I click on “Help” and type “deposit” into the index. What comes back is

If you receive payments for invoices or cash sales but don’t deposit the payments directly into a bank account, you can set up an asset account such as Undeposited Funds and use it to track the cash and checks until you deposit them into your bank account.

Ok, but how do I make a deposit?

If you click on Contents > Finances > Entering transactions in the account register > How do I … > Enter a basic transaction in the register, step 4 tells you: “In the Payee field, indicate who receives this payment or gives you this deposit.” So the instructions are there, but buried and only slightly incomplete: It neglects to tell you that in the “Num” field you have to click on “Deposit.”

Man, Quicken’s documentation sucks.

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Yes, friends, my PC is broken again. The motherboard (Asus P4P800 Deluxe) I put in this summer suddenly lost its onboard audio and NIC. The audio revived when I reinstalled the drivers but nothing seems to be bringing back the NIC. Further, my spare PCI NIC reports the same problem: the drivers install but the system says that it cannot be started. I have flashed my BIOS and it says that the onboard services are enabled. (When I replaced the motherboard this summer, the network capability shorted out within hours and I had to replace the replacement. Hmmm.)

I’ve also noted occasional raster problems since the networking problems happened. ..little flickers of instability.

It feels like a surge problem, but it’s plugged into a Back-UPS Pro 650 which ought to be enough to keep its electrical diet healthy. Might it be the internal power supply? It, too, is only 6 months old and pumps some hefty wattage, although I don’t recall how much.

Consider also that I go through hard drives the way other people go through socks. I get about 1.5 years out of ’em before they grind to a halt. This is true not only of my desktop machine but also my laptop, which is plugged into a plain old surge protector, not the UPS. Am I just in a Bermuda Triangle of computing?

[Two notes: 1. Yes, I am a backup fanatic. Multiple backups every night. 2. The first person who tells me to “Get a Mac” will receive a stinking fish head in the mail, COD. Yes, a cod COD.] [Note: I will admit that that’s a very long line.]

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Kevin Marks suggests that the Church Turing Thesis — any computer can emulate any other — means we’ll be able to emulate our way around any DRM scheme. He points to the MAME emulators that let you run old games.

But — despite Church, Turing and the Darknet paper — will DRM, combined with digitalID and “trusted” computing, raise the bar so high that you’ll have to be a hacker to get around DRM even for Fair Use purposes? If so, then DRM will have forever altered the economics and ethos of the Internet, primarily (IMO) for the worse.

(Kevin also points to the wonderful Bayeux Tapestry Construction Kit.)

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According to Scott Kirsner’s column in the Boston Globe today (the link breaks tomorrow):

1. What percentage of personal computers get recycled when we’re done with them?

2. What percentage of cell phones are recycled?

Scott writes that you can recycle your cell phone by dropping it off at Staples who will hand it off to a company that will resell it in a less affluent part of the world; Staples will also donate $2-$25 to the Sierra Club. Or, he says, you can go to CollectiveGood to find the name of a nonprofit that would like you to send them your old phone.

To see the answers (presumably specific to the US), use your mouse to select the areas between the X’s.

X———— 11% ———-X
X——- under 1% ——-X

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[RFH= Request for Help]

I bought a big, fat Sony lithium-ion battery (NP-FS21) for my digital video camera two years ago. Now, after fairly minimal use, it’s dead, Jim. When I plug it into the recharger, the charge light comes on for about 15 seconds. The thing just doesn’t take a charge.

Any ideas about how to regenerate it?

Failing that, does anyone have any recommendations for offbrand batteries that actually work from vendors who don’t suck?

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