I’m freshly back from a great family vacation to Maine, and thought I’d plunge in and get a fresh post onto this blog.  Here’s a collection of tech things I’ve been thinking about in the last week:
-  The GUI or rather the VUI for GPS’s have some really subtle challenges.  We have an older Garmin unit from 5 years back, and a newer TomTom. Our newer TomTom One has a great screen, with a rotated 3d perspective.  But it often gets slightly confused, e.g. if the street we’re on bears left and then we have a right hand turn a hundred feet afterwards. It will often say “turn right ahead”, just as we’re coming to the big bear left.  It makes you feel like you’re doing the wrong thing by bearing left.   The Garmin although having a much older and unsophisticate screen display, didn’t suffer from this problem as much.
- I got to play with my daughters iTouch, using it with Safari on some wifi networks.  I found it reaching the point of becoming usable, but I did have trouble clicking on just the right hyperlink, and I didn’t master how to enter data on forms. I did manage to do some google maps directions, though, a feat I wouldn’t have attempted on my blackberry.
- Speaking of blackberry, when is that darn Blackberry Bold going to come out. ATT first said June, then it was moved to July, then August, and now I’m hearing October.  In spite of the fact that it’s available in Germany and Chile.  I did take a good look at the iPhone and considered jumping, but the lack of a good international data roaming plan holds me back. I’m in Canada just enough that I think it will get too costly.
- I was recognizing again the value of introspection. I read a couple good books, one auto-biographical, and thought that taking time to carefully examine ones thoughts and understanding of an issue, and then putting effort to clearly describe it; benefits the author as much as any reader.
- I have a couple looming sysadmin tasks that I need to get to, including revamping my off-site storage strategy to use Amazon S3, and also to move this blog over to wordpress.org, so that I don’t have to continually update my wordpress version (3 versions out of data again, grrrr).
Happy back to school week!