After a little less than two years on the job at the government agency which shall remain nameless, Butterfly was promoted to manager! Yay! She will be responsible for managing the team from which she was promoted.

She’s got a fantastic work ethic and a really good head on her shoulders. I just know she’ll be wonderful!

With the increase in responsibility comes an increase in salary (naturally); nothing gigantic, just a little bump–and as a manager, her employer picks up 100% of the cost of our health insurance. Schweet! The biggest perk, though: she ditches the cubicle for her own office! She moves in on Monday.

So now we have a house full of managers! Wheeee! That’s okay–we’ll manage. *Drum fill*

Welp, I’ve officially retired from doing the Thursday night Karaoke show. I gave KJ German all of his equipment back a week or so ago.

I’ll miss it, but I missed Butterfly and my family more, and I missed not being exhausted on Friday morning.

Finally: a worthy replacement for my venerable Curve from Big Red:

Verizon Wireless BlackBerry Curve 8530

I was so happy with my Curve, and so disappointed with my Storm. So when I heard on Engadget that the 8530 was coming to Big Red, I was delighted–I’d seriously envied the fact that AT&T and T-Moble were enjoying the GSM version of this phone and I, a Verizon CDMA user, was out on the cold.

The 8530 has a faster processor than my old Curve and a real keyboard (SurePress was neat, but I do so much mobile texting and e-mailing that I really need a physical keyboard). But I think the most noteworthy change is that RIM has replaced the trackball with a capacative trackpad with no moving parts–it can never get gummed up or dirty, except from the odd fingerprint or two.

And the phone is all black and sexy, too–which never hurts.

I had been eyeing with some interest the Droid and the Storm 2, but after having a chance yesterday to fiddle with both at very great length, I found that they were both let-downs. The Storm 2’s SurePress is markedly improved, but not enough for me to eschew a real keyboard in its favor; besides, the rumor that it was a Mifi access point turned out to be disappointingly false. The Droid is an impressive phone, but a few little touches here and there indicated to me that someone, either at Motorola or Google, had forgotten that this thing was a phone first and a computer second, something that Apple had kept clearly in mind when designing the interface for the iPhone. And I really didn’t care for its physical keyboard. Flat and featureless, it was scarcely better than the SurePress on the Storm 2.

The real kicker is that the Droid would set me back $200; Storm 2, $179. The Curve 8530: only $99.

Everything I need at a great price. Who could ask for more?

I just have to be patient until November 20th, when it finally hit’s Big Red’s shelves.

Alright, I’m going to settle this once and for all.

Conman has responded to my anger-induced tirade about GPS and has included the following quote:

Yes, you got us from Deepest Darkest Florida to our hotel room via GPS, but damn if it didn’t take us a very circuitous (if not very dark, and deer prone) route.  A GPS does you no good if you need to get from Anaheim to El Segundo and it has you going through Compton.

Once again, I will reiterate that I personally do not care how circuitous the route was. We got to our hotel, and that was that.Again, I’m a very results-oriented individual.

So, for shits and giggles, let’s compare the two routes back to the hotel I could’ve taken.

I must preface this by setting the stage for you, dear reader: We four–myself, Conman, Bunny, and PipeWrench, are visiting a friend in a very rural Northern Florida town (Blountstown, to be precise). It’s 12:00, maybe 1:00am. It is pitch black outside. The rural roads in Blountstown are barely even paved (and some aren’t), forget about them being at all illuminated by whatever government runs the place up there. My Prius’s standard, non-HID headlights are doing a fair-to-midland job of illuminating the road ahead of us, but not much else. I am equipped with my ever-present Mag-Lite flashlight, as well as a second LED flashlight I’d purchased at a gas station on the way up. My failing memory being what it is, I consulting the U.S. Navy’s moon-phase website to try to remember if I even had any moonlight at my disposal, and the answer is no. It was pitch black. Blacker than Hitler’s heart. Blacker than a black cat on a pile of coal at midnight on a moonless night–much like the one I had to navigate during.

Now, the goal here is to successfully navigate from the middle of fucking nowhere back to I-10 eastbound (and, subsequently, back to our motel in Tallahassee) in the middle of the night with zero illumination we don’t actually provide ourselves. However, I have an ace-in-the-hole; Aiding me in this task is Chives–a Garmin Nüvi 350 (which has since been discontinued by Garmin in favor of newer, more feature-rich models, but oddly, I prefer bare, elegant simplicity in my GPS devices):

The Garmin Nüvi 350

Lastly, I’m naturally not going to betray my friend’s address; but suffice to say that he lives not too far away from the church I’m using as my starting point. I’m also not going to show the entire route back to the hotel–because it was directly on I-10 and several miles to the east. No, I want you, fair reader, to see the routes in question in detail.

So here is the first route. This is the route picked by my Nüvi, as well as Google Maps, and the route I ultimately followed to I-10:

Route 1, favored by the Garmin and Google Maps

The route was naturally picked by both Google Maps and by the GPS as being the most efficient. Of course, neither the GPS nor Google Maps have any way of knowing that these shitball roads weren’t illuminated and that I was going to have to navigate this route in total darkness on a moonless night.

Here then is the second, perhaps better, route; the only other route from my friend’s house to the Interstate and one that would’ve certainly been favored by Conman as being decidedly non-circuitous:

A less-circuitous route

Did both routes lead to I-10? yes. Did I know about them both? No–I only knew about the first one, and frankly, being as unfamiliar with the area as I was, there was absolutely no guarantee that the second route was any less deer-infested (Conman’s major sticking point that I had chosen… poorly) than the first one. The only thing that can be said with any certainty is that the second route was straighter. Frankly, the second route wasn’t that far out of the way, and would’ve provided a straight shot to the Interstate. But here’s the thing, see: I didn’t know about it, and neither did anybody in the car with me, including Conman. I would’ve had to tell the GPS how to take me along that route, and because of my unfamiliarity with the area, I didn’t automatically know that such a route even existed.

When both Google Maps and my Nüvi selected their routes, they weighted FL-69 the same as myriad local roads that made up the “more circuitous” first route because somewhere, some NAVTEQ cartographer has assigned them all the same weight. Looking at a paper map, and with the clarity of hindsight, a strong argument could perhaps be made that the second route may have been better. But I didn’t have a paper map of Blountstown with me; all I had was Chives and three tired, nervous passengers who were wondering–as I was–where the hell we were, and wanted to get back to the relative safety of the motel.

So this is what I consistently get beat up over when Conman talks about the GPS. I think I did a damn good job ensuring the safety of my passengers during that trip, and don’t deserve to be beaten up afterward for not taking the “most efficient” route back to the motel. That’s roughly analogous with saying “Gee, mister, thanks for saving my life, but you sure could’ve done it better: here’s how.” There’s gratitude for you. How about some props for me getting us from Light-My-Fart, Florida back to the motel in Tallahassee without driving around in circles lost for three days and getting us all there alive and in one piece?

A couple of times, as we were making our way along the first route, Conman asked: “Where is your GPS taking us!?” I replied with “Back to the motel.” And, ultimately, I was right; to directly address one of Conman’s main criticisms of GPS, I’ll use his reply to my last post as a reference:

“A GPS does you no good if you need to get from Anaheim to El Segundo and it has you going through Compton:”

I submit to you this: yes, this route does indeed go through Compton. But it does so on limited-access interstates and state roads. And besides: I DEFY you to show me on a PAPER MAP where it says “Compton is a dangerous neighborhood.“

Uh-huh. I thought so.

My point: if you don’t know the area to begin with, it makes NO FUNDAMENTAL DIFFERENCE if you pick the route yourself, with a paper map, or the GPS receiver picks the route for you. Neither technology (and yes, paper maps are considered a technology) will give you information on what areas are dangerous and what areas are not.

I’m sure my passengers were nervous; the route was indeed dark and spooky. Because of that, I took the route it picked very slow, easy, and carefully. Never once during the trip did I eschew common sense in favor of the GPS, nor give up my sense of driving intuition to Chives. Chives wasn’t driving the car, I was. Me. The whole time.

Had I seen a ditch in front of us, I wouldn’t have blindly driven into it because the GPS told me to, and I find it kind of offensive that someone would think I would. Sure, there is the odd story of folks who blindly follow their GPS while simultaneously abandoning common sense. But even as the amount of these stories increase, they are still very few and very far between when compared to the thousands and thousands of times, every day, that GPS technology is employed properly, responsibly and achieves its desired result: Getting someone un-lost, or getting them to their destination with a minimum of fuss.

In closing, I am reminded of a line from “Inherit the Wind,” spoken by Spencer Tracy whilst playing the role of Henry Drummond:

“Gentlemen, progress has never been a bargain, you have to pay for it. Sometimes I think there’s a man who sits behind a counter who says, ‘Alright, you can have a telephone: but you lose privacy, and the charm of distance. Madam, you may vote, but at a price: you lose the right to retreat behind a powder puff or a petticoat. Mister, you may conquer the air–but the birds will lose their wonder, and the clouds will smell of gasoline.’”

From The Boston Diaries 10/23/2009 entry

It must be a change of season… because Conman is going on about GPS again. This is a very old argument between Conman and I, especially given our complete diametric opposition on this particular subject. It also happens to be a major irritant for me, every time I hear Conman drudge up more anecdotal cases of GPS blunders and misuse. I think he does it because a) he knows it’ll make me upset (which it invariably does), and b) for some inexplicable reason, he just has a massive boner against the technology.

Because I count myself among the ranks of the “directionally-challenged,” I was a very early adopter of GPS technology–having purchased my first GPS receiver back in 1997–and have been using GPS devices for many, many years since. In that time, I have endured ceaseless ribbing and derision from my friends–first, because I have always been totally lousy at following driving directions (this has to do with a rare eye condition I have called nystagmus that keeps me from reading street names and addresses until I’m practically on top of them), and second because I have to rely on a gadget to know where I am. But I personally feel that GPS has improved my life in ways I cannot even begin to calculate, enabling me to take off to an unfamiliar address without having a panic attack or setting off on a vacation with my family (or solo on my motorcycle) for a few laps around the country without any fear of becoming hopelessly lost, as I am prone to becoming without such technology. And I have a terrible–almost irrational–fear of being lost.

Now, just because I, by my own admission, am “spatially challenged,” doesn’t mean I’m an idiot. I’m a pilot, and have learned the exacting art of aerial navigation using huge, complicated sectional aviation charts and cockpit navigational instrumentation that has scarcely changed since Charles Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic solo. And to be fair, I don’t use my GPS to get me to work and back every day–I wouldn’t be lost navigating around town without my GPS. I also know full well how to read and use a road map, and how to find an address. However, if I were going to an address I’d never been before, I’d damn sure want the GPS receiver along, because it allows me to find that address in about half the time and without the eight-hundred U-turns I’d have to make otherwise because I can’t read the goddamn street signs until I’m thirty yards away from them. And because I’m not an idiot, I realize that GPS will give you the same kind of “pretty close” directions you might get from a friend–but it’s up to you to actually find the place. The GPS will get you pretty close. It won’t always get you there. That’s where your intuition comes in, and I do have some of that, contrary to what my friends might think.

Now, Conman has obviously gone to great length to search the depth and breadth of the Internet to extract from it the most anecdotal, possibly apocryphal, examples of GPS usage gone awry he can possibly dig up. Even in the case of the very article he’s referenced in his journal entry to support his curmudgeonly view of “GPS is a wholly bad technology,” it bespeaks of folks who have a neurological shortcoming in their brains that keeps them from accurately fixing their position in the world at any given moment–and then become hopelessly lost, on a fairly regular bases. And I’m actually somewhat surprised, given Conman’s penchant for GPS-bashing, that he didn’t include this little nugget from the aforementioned article:

[Bohbot, a researcher studying the navigational capabilities of laboratory mice] fears that overreliance on gps, which demands a hyper-pure form of stimulus-response behaviour, will result in our using the spatial capabilities of the hippocampus less, and that it will in turn get smaller. Other studies have tied atrophy of the hippocampus to increased risk of dementia. “We can only draw an inference,” Bohbot acknowledges. “But there’s a logical conclusion that people could increase their risk of atrophy if they stop paying attention to where they are and where they go.”

I’m shocked that I didn’t get a hyperventilating phone call–or, at the very least, an urgent e-mail–from Conman, decrying “See!? I told you GPS is evil and bad! The damn things’ll even give you dementia!” I swear to God that I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if Conman published an entry in The Boston Diaries saying that he found an article that says GPS gives you cancer.

I think what makes me so angry is that Conman insists upon repeatedly and vehemently digging up evidence to attack a technology which I feel has improved my own life so very dramatically–and is so incredibly defiant even in the face of overwhelming acceptance of the technology. I could just as easily put the shoe on the other foot and tell him: Hey, Conman, wearing glasses is so dangerous; you could slip and fall, and your broken lens can poke your eye out. I know it’s incredibly unlikely, but hey, man–it could happen! So what you should do is just stop wearing the things. I mean really, what do you need to see for anyway?

Conman doesn’t like to mention the one time that GPS came in really handy for him, too. But don’t ask him about the incident. If you read Conman’s account, you’d think that we were on Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride and I was about to drive him off a cliff and directly into the path of hoards of rabid deer. The reality of the situation was that I was trying to find my way back to Tallahassee from the back-roads of very rural Florida, around midnight, in the pitch-blackness that comes with barely-paved roads and no streetlights, with a car-full of passengers whose asses I was responsible for. Now am I really, in that situation, going to pull off to the side of the road and bust out the paper map every few minutes? Or am I going to let my GPS receiver take me back to the Interstate?

I told Conman then, and I’ll say it again right now: I’m a very results-oriented person. We were out in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night. Then we were at the motel. I, and everyone else in the car, have my GPS receiver to thank for the latter. I don’t really give a shit if the route the GPS receiver decided on wasn’t the very best route to get from point A to point B. The end result was we got to our destination unscathed, and honestly, that, to me, was the only thing that mattered. I win.

In closing, it is worthy of noting that the friends who are not Conman and would deride me for my “dependence” on GPS technology have pretty much shut their mouths at this point, especially after witnessing the veritable explosion in popularity of the GPS receiver over the last five or so years. They’re practically standard equipment in new cars these days, and have been commoditized down to the point where you can pick up an extremely good receiver at Radio Shack for about $150.

So maybe I’m not so crazy after all.

Halloween Weekend was fun.

My boys and their mom (and her fianceé and his daughter) came to trick-or-treat in my neighborhood. I live out in an upper-class subdivison of McMansions, so the pickings were really good in my neck of the woods. There was some guy ( a dentist, presumably) giving out–and I swear I’m not making this up–teddy bears. Yup. Swear to God.

Once again, I marched out the award-winning Blind Referee costume… probably for the last time (of course, I say that every year, but every year I still manage to extract more fun out of it).

Me as the blind referee

I had to meet the mishpacha overat a local restaurant across the street–and I could sense that the lady behind the counter could not actually tell if I were blind or not. I, of course, wasn’t going to help her determine one way or the other, and her doubt was further exacerbated by my kids–who, knowing the costume, played along “led” me to the table when I was done paying.

I’m always a little uneasy fooling people into thinking I have a genuine disability–in these days of rampant political correctness, you can’t be too careful–so I usually, time and circumstances permitting, will let the marks in on the joke of the costume. If someone came up to me and asked outright if I were really blind (and kudos for the ones that do; most people couldn’t bring themselves to do so), I would immediately answer no and demonstrate my ability to see. But those in on the joke have to hold back the laughter as I tell a mark “Yeah, my wife made this costume for me. She won’t tell me what it is, but she did say that everyone would get a big kick out of it.”

But the costume has won at least three Halloween costume contests (maybe more; I’ve actually lost count) and several awards. I get a chuckle out of almost everyone who sees it. No pun intended, of course.

I think I will actually have to either retire the costume, or turn it from an NFL referee to a college referee–starting with the 2008 season, the NFL has officiating crew has switched to a custom-made jersey that has become very difficult to reproduce–and absolutely impossible to acquire on the open market.

Current NFL referee attire