joeware - never stop exploring...

I went and did it… Bought yet ANOTHER handheld gadget. I have to travel again next week (lovely Ohio this time) and the thing that I keep wishing I had every time I travel is a simple easy to use and deal with GPS with good maps. I was close to that in Montreal; I had a GPS built into the car but it was neither easy to use nor deal with and, in fact, showed me driving through water and no where near roads most of the time. Thankfully I had my Streets and Trips GPS with me on my work laptop which did work ok but it is kind of a pain to use. Plus my work laptop long ago decided that it wanted to have a crappy connection between the battery and the laptop so if it is bumped just right it can claim it has no power and crash. As you can imagine, this is a wonderful feature for a laptop, especially one driving down the road in a car. Not too mention that you can’t really set today’s laptops on the seat of a car unless you want to melt something whether that something is inside or outside the laptop case.

So I bought the Magellan eXplorist XL (North America Edition). I did a considerable amount of reading and came to the conclusion that this is the one that I wanted over the comparable brands. I love the concept and actually the implementation of GPS. It is just downright cool for someone who likes to drive around in rural areas as well as someone who has to find their way around areas that they have not been before or better, get back from random exploring. I like just going in random directions and seeing what I run into. I have found many shortcuts this way and otherwise cool spots I wouldn’t have found as well. Many has been the time that I find myself somewhere in the Jeep Wrangler thinking, man I wonder where I am and I hope I can recall how to get back here. I usually have a good sense of spatial recognition with decent memory of the areas so I have a general idea, but that sometimes isn’t good enough when trying to find your way back to a specific spot.

I thought about getting a GPS attachment for the Cingular 8125 but the more I use it the more I realize it isn’t like my old ruggedized Nextel phone I had (yes the yellow one with the rubber on it). I once had it sitting on the spare tire mounted on the back of my jeep when I pulled out with a little more vigor than possibly some folks would pull a jeep out with and saw the bright bumblebee of a phone go bouncing down the asphalt road as I whipped the jeep around sideways. I picked it up and it had a chunk of the rubber missing but it still worked fine. Not that I don’t like my Cingular 8125, quite the contrary, I think it is very nice, but I don’t visualize it standing up to flying off the back of my jeep and bouncing down the road and being in what I consider reasonable shape afterward especially when I get fussy when the display gets some fingerprints on it. Plus, it is still a phone and I still don’t like carrying my phone around with me. I like the idea that I can go wander around and no one can get a hold of me. It is so incredibly rare that the people who want to call me happen to be someone I actually want to talk to I can accept the rare occasion where it does happen and I miss the call. The people who really need to get a hold of me know how and can get me relatively quickly.

So the device should be on my doorstep tomorrow which gives me a couple of days to play with it including the holiday weekend which should be full of jeep driving time to get me used to it before I have to put it to “official” use and find my way to the location I need to be at next week.

   joe