Nostagia time!

This was a big part of my childhood... maybe that explains some things:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=-sFK0-lcjGU&feature=related

material world: tthe 21st century

I decided to take another step into this century... er... I mean I found a lame excuse to buy a new toy, and get a GPS for the car (especially since there was a $100 off sale until January 5 on the one I was looking at.)

I haven't had a chance to go driving with it yet, but I'm a bit doubious. It seems to take a long time to enter in your destination and when tried to make it take MY route to Ottawa, it was very unhelpful. I asked it to go through cornwall, and it took me into Quebec and then back down to Cornwall. You could avoid certain cities, but not whole provinces. There is supposed to be an option to make a multi=leg trip, but I can't find it on my unit, despite the help pages saying it's there. But what I really want it for is getting to addresses I don't know, and it will be a bit before I can test that out. Getting to watch my self go to Canada was just going to be a silly use of it.

I'll have to wait to see how I like it. Luckily I didn't pay a HUGE amount, but I did pay enough that I hope it's actually useful and helps me when I get lost.

You can't get there from here

What I've learned about the tomtom ONE 3rd edition in the past 12 hours.

This is babbly and a bit dry, so feel free to skip it.

So apparently there was recently an OS update (navcore 7) that blew away from old options, including the multi-stop trip planner. You can get this option back by using the old style custom menus, but that blows away options for the new "help me" and "map correction" features. While the first one I don't ever expect to use, the second I think is exciting to have community updated maps and I want to encourage using this feature. Let me be clear. All these features are on the device, so there just aren't menu items for all of them all at the same time (there is also this cool "show me where the GPS satlites are near me" thing that also goes away in v7.) So you can't get there from here on a navigation device feels very silly.

What is cool is the device mounts like a USB media storage device, so I can go frob things under linux. I think the device itself runs linux and there seems to be an existing community who is on top of this whole menu thing and are pining for a SDK for v7.

You can also down load dennis hoppers voice to give you directions, but that costs money.

People also report that TomTom's customer service sucks.

Oh and so far I'm liking my new toy.