jesseslife.com

After 1600 some-odd miles of driving, I made it to Houston. Freindswood, actually. I was welcomed with open arms, and news that my godson was in for a nap. Perfect.

I didn’t update my blog during the trip as much as I wanted. Internet connections were available, but I was just too tired or anxious to get on the road. Two more things. I was also not sure about what was so interesting about a blast across the country, sounded pretty boring to me. I also had a hard time updating the pictures on the site in a reasonable amount of time. Spending an 1/2 hour every day uploading pictures and arranging files seemed like a waste of time. I’d like to get it to 15 minutes or so. Looks like some PERL programming is in order. I KNEW I got that college degree for something. I also want to pick up a phone with a reasonable cell-data connection. That way, I could update my blog while at a rest stop, or wherever the urge grabs me.

Lots of time to think, lots of time to figure out what I want to do next.

First thing I want to do is find a better GPS mapping program than DeLorme Streets 2005.

Here are my main complaints:

• The program has fixed speeds for roads in it’s database. While I understand that there is no good database for speed limits in the US, at least compute the time of the current leg based on my actual speed. When I am doing 75, and the computer thinks that I am only doing 60, the time estimates are way off
• The map should zoom automatically when I am close to my destination or on a series of short legs. Too often, I was mucking around with the software trying to zoom in so that I could see where I was going.
• I was surprised at how well the voice recognition worked. Just using my laptop microphone, I got about 80% recognition and very few wrong commands (usually it just ignored me). What sucked is that the computer tried to recognize itself. I can’t tell how many times the thing panned while it was reading off the next turn. I’d disable the voice recognition while the Text-To-Speech was running
• The night mode kinda sucked. While the map was rendered in light colors on black background, all the other elements were bright Windows colors
• Periodic status updates were missing. “You have 500 miles to go” and all that.
• There was no “microphone off” speech command.

I’ll have to see how well the handheld version works.

All in all, it was a lot of fun, and not nearly so bad as it could have been. A book on CD got me through Sunday (James Patterson’s “4th of July”). I’ll have to play with Audible.com for more material.

Up an coming features on my blog site:

• Photo gallery
• GPS map (all my posts so far have GPS coordinated)
• Real-time GPS map updating via cell phone/SMS, hehe

Bye for now!