Update on New Year's Resoloution

I briefly mentioned here and here that I had made some new year's resolutions.  I'm not sure of the wisdom of doing this.  I had intended for the scope of this blog to be my commentary on world events.  My new year's resolutions might qualify for world changing events from my perspective, but it might not be such for you my readers.
I told you I would let you know about my progress though, so at the risk of going beyond the focus of my blog I'll do what I said I would do.  I'll just try to keep my resolutions to myself next year.
First of all, one of my resolutions was to read the Bible.  My wife and I have been sitting down over breakfast every morning and reading the Bible all year.  This has been the best thing that I have ever done.  My wife and I have grown closer in this one month of doing this than we had in all of last year.  More importantly I think we both have gotten closer to God.  I recommend that you click the link above, bookmark it, and follow along.  I started another blog to document my thoughts and prayers during this.  You can find it at http://thoughtsandprayers-michael.blogspot.com/ if you are interested.
In other good news I have been losing weight.  My wife has too.  We've both been exercising as well, and I can see the results in both of our moods.  There have been some days recently when I haven't wanted to work out.  My wife has been working out every day.  I'm going to follow her example more.
I can't say that I have gotten rid of as much stuff as I would have liked to by now.  I have to renew my efforts in this area.
Well that's my follow up so far.  I'll post about this again in a few months.  I don't want to do it too often so that I can get back to the original intent of this blog.  Just please bear with me while I finish out what I started.

Cell phones and GPS

Sorry about not posting for a while.  If you know me you know that there are times that I don’t have a lot to say.  In the description part I mention that I got tired of registering with different websites to comment on stuff so I started a blog.  Lately the news has been covered over with coverage of Haiti, and I really don’t have a lot to say about that.  I’m not saying that there isn’t anything to say about it.  I’m saying that I’m not the one to talk about the place because I’ve never been there.  The best I can do for those people is to pray for them.  I am doing that, and I hope you are to. 

I’ll try to stick to things that I think I understand.  If I’m wrong about something I trust that someone will comment on it.  I have enabled moderation on the comments, but I just want to keep the blog clean.  If you comment using non-military grade language I’ll post it even if you disagree with me.  I know all three of my followers and I don’t think that you will be posting anything bad, but the blog itself could be read and commented on by anyone in the world.  So far all the feedback that I have gotten has been positive.  I’ll take that to mean that the whole world agrees with me ;-)

Anyway, I saw this article about Nokia giving away navigation software.  I know a little about navigation systems.  In the Army we had the boxes that would give us the grid coordinates of our current position sometimes down to one meter accuracy.  They still taught us land navigation by compass and map because not everyone was issued a GPS and batteries can die.  I had a car with factory GPS installed.  I own a tom-tom.  I also own a droid.  So I’ve experienced navigation from compass to cell phone.

Nokia’s move here should not come as a surprise to anyone.  I would be surprised if Apple didn’t make the same move.  The way I see it the cell phone is where the GPS unit belongs.  The in car navigation was stunk.  The GPS unit itself was probably pretty good, but the maps weren’t updated.  With a cell phone you can easily download updates. 

Also it’s not going to be long till someone figures out that you could have the cell phone update a centralized map with routes taken and travel times so that you could have maps that update themselves with new roads and such automatically.  All they would have to do is assume that say 500 phones traveling along a path between 15 and 100mph means that they are on a road or railroad and bounce that off of railway maps to make sure that you are looking at a road.  You may have to add some time constraint to keep the people who drive ATVs and motorcycles off road from making a road on your map, but this isn’t too hard to do.

This would give you the ability to account for traffic patterns when your program looks for routes to take to your destination.  You could also have the cell phone send up an alert when it is traveling at a slower than expected speed.  Then the central map could kick out a detour for all the other phones using their software to avoid the slowdown.

Tom-Tom could do this if they included some way for their units to call home.  I bought a cheap model so it’s possible that they have this without me knowing about it.  The problem with this is that at some point the cell phone carriers will realize that people might not want a smart phone if the already have a Tom-Tom which would make Tom-Tom a competitor.  You don’t see businesses playing nice with their competition so Tom-Tom’s data plan is likely to go up.  Same thing applies with any other manufacturer of stand alone GPS units.  The only to deal with this would be for the GPS maker to come out with a way to tether off a less smart phone.  If they can’t do this the stand alone GPS will be almost dead.  There will still be a market for the ruggedized ones among hikers, hunters, and such.  That’s the way I see it.

T.S.A. watchlist

OK, I saw this today and I just have to comment.  To be very polite this is stupid.  What possible reason do you have for searching an eight year old every time he flies.  I understand that his name is on your list, but are you really that stupid.  Apparently you are.

I know you are listening so here's an idea.  Since you have a list why not start eliminating people who are obviously not the ones you are looking for?  Start interviewing each of the people that you can find anywhere with those names and figure out if they are the ones that you need.  You might actually find the people before they get to the airport.  By checking off the eight year old scouts from your list you can save your people some work at the airport where they really need to be looking at real threats.