Technology, Innovation & Telecomm

I was young. Not terribly experienced in the world. And pretty gullible, truth told.

When I was in my 20’s, I spent a few years as a field Engineer for Rockwell International. I traveled the country diagnosing and repairing, configuring and commissioning, and generally getting natural-gas chromatography gear working. I was preparing for my first trip to California to help get a site in the desert functioning, and was being advised on various aspects of life in the sand from some co-workers. Of the advice that I received from my well-meaning colleagues, the suggestion to watch out for scorpions most struck a nerve with me. For some reason, the idea of being stung by one of those little buggers just didn’t sit well. I obsessed a bit on it and finally resolved that the chances were small and I just wasn’t going to think about it.

I arrived at the hotel without incident and when I stepped out of the car, the first thing that I noticed was that my shoes sunk into the very-soft pavement of the parking lot. It was hot…really hot. I looked around at the site on which the hotel sat and was immediately impressed by the sight of a lot of sand and very little else surrounding it…with the possible exception of tumble-weeds. No kidding, real honest-to-gosh tumbleweeds. For some reason, I thought you only saw those on re-runs of spaghetti Westerns on TV. But I digress…

Anyhow, I suppose in the back of my mind I was still obsessing about Scorpions, though I didn’t know it at that moment.

I had a late dinner due to the fact that we arrived at the hotel late, and since that took up the bulk of the evening, I decided to turn in. I wear gym shorts to bed and due to the heat (even with air-conditioning), I wasn’t wearing a shirt. Sometime in the early morning, I felt a sharp pain in my thigh…quite enough to wake me. Immediately, I thought that I had been stung by one of those objects of my fears and I swatted at the site of the pain. I felt a hard-ish object and heard a click as whatever it was hit the wall next to the bed. By that time, my heart was doing a samba and I leapt off the side of the bed opposite where I had heard the thing hit. I turned on the bedside lamp and began crawling around the bottom of the bed on my hands and knees. I’m not sure what I figured I would do if I found a Scorpion, but there I was, “Joe Commando”, tracking the sand-devil. Silly. I couldn’t immediately see anything, but there was a small upholstered chair in the corner and I decided that I must have hit somewhere near there.

As I crawled slowly toward it and around the side of the chair, I sighted my enemy:

…my pocket comb…

It seems that before I went to bed, I had transferred my comb from my pants pocket to my gym shorts. I can’t say why but I distinctly remembered doing it, after the fact. Anyhow, I suspect that as I was sleeping and rolling about in bed, the comb came out of my pocket. Thereafter, when I rolled over, it must have dug into my leg. Thus, my “scorpion comb” was what “bit” me! I was able to laugh at myself for a while before I went back to bed. I slept great the rest of the night.

What a potent combination: Youth and imagination.

I’ll be in Kansas City most of this week. I’ll be travelling with a co-worker to a customer out there to begin field-testing a package I’ve developed to allow them to do bulk firmware downloads to the many test heads they’ve purchased from the company I work for.

It was my first significant experience developing a scripting language. I built an interpreter that has a number of purpose-built features and a variety of general-purpose features. It was a blast, since I’ve been wanting to do that for a long time. It isn’t the prettiest language, but it fits the bill and helped me to learn a ton about language internals and some of the issues surrounding the things that separate various programming languages.

Meanwhile, let’s hope the tool helps the customer accomplish what they need to…!

I’ll be in Chicago at the annual SuperComm show. So, I’ll be posting from there related to what I’m learning as I go. Let us hope for an instructive and useful time…

A co-worker and I will be attending seminar tracks, rather than the usual floor-trolling and booth duty, so our days will be pretty much consumed by that.

With any luck, I’ll get to visit some of the sights while I’m there. We’ll keep you up to date.

I wanted to have some kind of GPS navigation on our recent trip to Nashville. Having used the “NeverLost” feature of Hertz Rental cars, I’ve come to truly love what it does for me. I can read a map but I’m not the fastest at it, and so I’ve frequently passed by some turn that I needed by the time I figured out that I did.

I first took a look at the dedicated GPS navigation systems from folks like Garmin, Magellan, etc. They offer a lot of really nice features including voice prompting, 3D maps, tons of waypoints, downloadable maps, etc. But geez, these things are stinkin’ expensive! To get that kind of system, you’re gonna pay anywhere from $500 and up. I wasn’t prepared to spend that kind of moolah, so I began to think…

DeLorme sells their StreetAtlas (tm) product, along with a small USB-powered GPS unit. Looking at the features on the box, I noted that they seemed to support pretty much everything that the dedicated units do, at a way lower cost. Of course, the implication here is that you have some kind of laptop or maybe a PocketPC. It so happens that I have a laptop that is fairly nice and so I thought that perhaps I should consider using that and StreetAtlas for our little trip. But then the thought occurred to me that I couldn’t use the laptop for the entire trip without needing to recharge the batteries a bunch of times. “Aha”, says me to me, “I should get ahold of an invertor and run the laptop from that”. Since I was at BestBuy at the time, I took a little stroll over to the computer section from the software aisle that I was in and asked if they had such a beast. Indeed they did.

So, $100.00 for the DeLorme software and $55.00 for the invertor and I’ve got myself a nice little in-car navigation system. The results? Pretty good overall.

The package lets you load both the software and the entire map database onto your machine if you have the space, which I did. That makes it nice in that you don’t have to keep the CD in the drive while it gets bounced all about your vehicle. Once it’s loaded, you have to download a small update from the Internet and once installed, you’re ready to travel. You do need to set a few preferences up regarding voice prompts, GPS details, map representation, etc. but those are really minor matters that can be decided later (of course, if you expect voice prompts, it’s probably best to configure that early on…)

It’s fairly easy to input a route by entering your start addres and your destination address or just the city. It computes a path and you’re on your way. Once it gets a fix on your current location from the GPS, it will begin voice prompting you about what your next turn will be and how far away it is. The map updates to show your progress and you can see more or less detail by choosing a zoom level. The prompts are a great thing, but I was puzzled by the fact that it will frequently begin to say something but will stop short. That happened a bunch of times. It took a little digging, but I found that you can press the F5 key to get it to repeat its current prompt at any time. You need to do that fairly often anyhow (if you’re me) because the details sometimes escape me when I’m driving.

I need to point out that my wife Lisa was good enough to bear the computer on her lap for the entire trip, so I wasn’t manipulating this thing while I drove. ‘Just wanted to get that out of the way in case you wondered…

Overall, the package worked great. I don’t think I’ll travel anywhere that I haven’t yet been without it. Here’s a summary of my experience:

Pro’s

1. Great overall application. The voice prompts are very helpful and the map details were quite good. When we stumbled off-course, it was able to re-route us using some of the most podunk little side-streets that you can imagine.

2. Fairly straightforward interface. I have to put this as both a PRO and a CON, because while it was ok to use, I think it could be better.

3. Reverse-Route planning is a nice touch. It lets you simply say that you want to return from whence you came, and the package computes that route for you.

4. “Route from current location” is nice too. It lets you start a new route from your present location, rather than having to enter a starting point directly.

5. Pretty excellent maps. Like I said, it was able to route us using some really out of the way paths.

6. It has a pretty nice “points of interest radar” that allows it to announce to you things that might be handy to know, such as gas stations, restaraunts, etc. You can configure what types of things you’re interested in and it can be made to let you know periodically. I didn’t try to do queries for things like “Italian Food”, or “Wendy’s”, etc. I’ll have to snoop around some more.

7. It has a speech-recognition feature that lets you drive the application. The vocabulary is fairly extensive and so you can do lot with it. See the “Cons” section for the downsides of this feature.

Con’s

1. The voice prompts kept terminating early. Not sure why but I imagine others can tell me.

2. The thing got confused a few times about where we were. Not sure why exactly although I’ve heard that urban areas can be particularly challenging for GPS. The net result is that there were a few occasions where we needed to drive around for a bit until it got un-confused. It always did, so once we figured out that it would recover it was less stressful to have it lost itself…

3. The user interface is a little bit clunky. Primarily you interact with it via a row of tabs at the bottom of the screen, below the map. It’s often not obvious which tab you should be looking at. Then, there are sometimes multiple buttons on a given tab that makes deciding your next move a little confusing.

4. It wasn’t clear how to get the software to plan a route from our current position. Finally, I was scrolling through a list box that displayed all of my previous starting addresses and noticed that at the very top of the list is an element that says to use the GPS position.

5. There’s very little documentation accompanying the package. You pretty much have to figure it out yourself and/or use the help system.

6. While the speech-recognition is a nice feature, it does suffer from the fact that noise in a car pretty much swamps out its value. It kept saying that the volume was too high, even when the mic volume was lowered. Plus, you still have to hit a function key before it begins recognition. That’s good in the sense that it knows when to begin listening, but it means that you have to fuss a bit with a key while you’re driving if you don’t have someone like my lovely wife to manipulate the thing.

Like I said, I like it a lot and I’ll be using it for future trips. For my ~=$160.00, I think it was a bargain when you consider the price of a dedicated unit. The thing that would have made it even better would have been to run it on some kind of handheld in order to make the physical aspect a little easier to deal with. If you want some kind of navigation system and can live with a laptop in the car and a wire running up to your dashboard, I’d say the investment would be well worth it.

Truth is, I don’t really like it. I’m more of a jazz guy at heart. That said, my wife and I just returned from a nice little trip to the home of country music: Nashville, TN. It was worth the trip, I assure you.

We went because neither of us has ever been there and Lord knows there’s been a lot of famous folk pass through that town. Also, if you’ve read much of this blog, you know that I’m kinda into recording and music and other media production, so that was another good reason for us to go.

First off, we stayed at the Opryland Hotel. If you read the travel guides, they all recommend at least visiting there as part of your itinerary, with good reason. The place is huge and utterly amazing! As I recall, it’s the largest hotel in the world that doesn’t have a casino as part of it. It has three enourmous atria under glass. Each is populated by lush vegetation, waterfalls, fountains, restaurants, walkways, etc. One of the sections called the “Delta” actually has a stream on which you can take a riverboat ride. There’s also an attached conference center that would suit just about any kind of convention or similary gathering that you can imagine. All in Southern style…

Suffice it to say that the hotel was one of the highlights.

We also got a chance to visit the Country Music Hall of Fame, the Ryman Auditorium (former home of the Grand Ole’ Opry), RCA Studio B (where a ton of hits from artists from many different genres were recorded) and of course the Grand Ole’ Opry of today. The Ryman has a lot of interesting history attached to it. It was also nearly the victim of the wrecking ball. Fortunately a number of intelligent people decided that preserving that piece of history was worth the money, time and effort.

I took a bunch of photos, some of which are up on my online album. Please take a look to get a feel for the beauty and history of this big little city.

Hint: One of my favorites was the RCA Studio B tour!

So, if you’re up for a nice 2-4 day trip and you enjoy Southern hospitality, history, and the music business, I highly recommend Nashville. You don’t even have to like country music to truly enjoy yourself! Again, please visit my album for a look at more of the trip!

(p.s. - Before anyone points out that the photo album is listed as “Studio A”, I know. I managed to goof it up!)