north, south, east, or west?

so today . . . i had a doctor's appointment at a facility i had never driven to before. i thought it was a perfect opportunity to use my gps!

i don't use my gps very often, because i usually know how to get to where i am going. (unlike diandra who says, "i'm going out to play with my gps," and then gets purposefully lost so her gps can guide her home . . . ) i knew the general direction i needed to go, and THOUGHT i knew which freeways to use. so i started out, and very quickly discovered that my gps had a different route in mind. rollie says if you are going to use a gps you have to trust it, so i went where it told me to go. as i was headed up the on-ramp to the first freeway, i saw the "road construction ahead" sign just before i noticed that the cars were not moving very quickly. ok, i thought to myself, this is not the route for me today! i got off at the next exit and headed the other direction. my gps got busy "recalculating the route." it took about 10 minutes before "she" and i were going the same direction. i just kept heading south while she wanted me to go north. and every time i turned the "wrong" direction, she just "recalculted the route." finally she figured it out and took me where i wanted to go! it was an interesting compromise between person and machine.

electronics are wonderful, when all the planets are aligned properly. but if you goof up one command, everything can be wiped out in an instant--or skewed beyond usability.

we found this out with our first video camera. do you remember the huge ones that sat on your shoulder and recorded on full sized video tapes? well we missed out on owning one of those, but ours was still kind of bulky, even though it recorded on smaller tapes. it worked fine for a while, and then one day, for no apparent reason everything changed to japanese! suddenly we couldn't seem to do anything right, as all the settings had changed, and we couldn't read the directions to know how to reset anything! so we just stopped taking videos.

my last computer, the dear departed averatec, started trying to have a life of it's own before i retired it. for example, it refused to put the proper ending onto file names (.jpg, .doc, etc) this doesn't sound like a big deal, but it was just annoying to have to remember to do it--or worse yet, have the computer remind me to do it. it wouldn't automatically run programs. it was like when i wanted the computer to do something, it would say, "make me!" i hate sassy electronics!

but my gps and i did finally work things out. i took her choice of route home, and it was fine. although, as i neared home i did have to shut her off. she kept wanting me to turn north . . .