Month: November 2010

GPS

I just ordered a new GPS from Amazon. I’ve been using an older TomTom that I bought back in 2007. It still works, but it’s been a little flaky, and my map update service has expired. I decided to take advantage of a Black Friday special, and pick up a new TomTom with lifetime maps & traffic, and a few other features that the old GPS didn’t have.

I like the TomTom interface, so I decided to stick with them, rather than switch to another brand. I’ve never been any good at driving anywhere unfamiliar — I’m always getting lost — so the advent of GPS technology was a godsend for me. I don’t have to use it that often, but when I do need it, I really appreciate it.

Ernie Preuss


Ernie
Originally uploaded by andyhuey

I just found out that my Dad’s best friend Ernie passed away back in September. I have a few good photos of Ernie in my Flickr stream. This is a nice one from Christmas at some point in the late eighties, I think. Dad and Ernie gave each other a lot of odd gifts over the years.

I have a lot of fond memories of time spent with Ernie, including the time he took us for a ride in a small airplane when I was a kid. (He was an amateur pilot.) He was a great guy, and I’m going to miss him.

Libraries

Mark Evanier on libraries — I too was issued an adult library card before I was old enough to have one, mainly because I’d outgrown the stuff in the childrens library. One of the first things I remember checking out was a science fiction anthology that contained Harlan Ellison’s story “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream”. It was the scariest thing I’d ever read, by far. (Up until that point, I’d mostly been reading Hardy Boys and Encyclopedia Brown books.)

Motorola DROID Pro

Motorola DROID Pro first impressions | BGR | Boy Genius Report: “Something we can’t move past, though? The ear speaker. Talking on the phone with the DROID Pro is probably the worst of any handset we can remember.” — I was thinking about picking up a Droid Pro as a replacement for my BlackBerry Storm. But one thing I consider critical is being able to use the phone… as a phone. So maybe not.

TV fix

The remote for my TV stopped working today. Neither my cable remote nor the remote that came with my TV would work on the TV, so I knew it was a problem with the IR receiver, rather than the remote. I figured I’d probably have to get LG to replace the IR receiver, but I went ahead and Googled for problems with LG remotes, and found this. AVS Forum rules! I just sprayed some CRC 2-26 on a headphone jack, popped it in and out of the remote port in the back of the TV a few times, and everything works fine now. Sometimes, the internet is exceedingly helpful.

AdSense

On a lark, I signed up for AdSense a while back. I haven’t really bothered looking at my account in a while though. I got a message today that they’re changing some stuff around, so I looked at my account. It appears that I made a penny in May, another penny in June, nothing in July, then sixty-one cents in August. Oh, and nothing since then. I wonder what I did in August? If I can manage to do it again, on a consistent basis, I could maybe make enough money for a coffee and bagel by the end of 2011!

mashups

It looks like I will be working on a mobile app (iPhone and Android) at work soon, and I’ve been vaguely interested in mobile development for a while now anyway, so I spent some time this weekend looking around for ideas for a small project to work on, to get my feet wet. I spent some time on Programmable Web, and was interested to see this article wondering why there aren’t any great mashup apps for Arlington National Cemetery. Having recently attended a funeral there, I can see how a good mapping app for the cemetery would be really useful. It’s a huge place. There’s an interesting comment following the article from someone who tried to work with the cemetery to try and get something done, but he didn’t get too far.