After writing my post about The Food and Wine festival at EPCOT, I started to thinking back about what EPCOT was supposed to be, and what we eventually ended up with–and decided that this really did need to be a Rant and Rave article after all.

I could prattle on about it how sad it is that Walt’s grand vision never came to pass, and describe in detail the depths of his brilliance and his enthusiasm surrounding his ideals and goals for EPCOT, but I’d rather defer to the master himself–Walt E. Disney–in a short film, made in 1966 (not long before his death), about his California theme park and the magnificent plans for some swamp-front property in Orange and Osceola Counties.

While the airport of tomorrow and transportation center Walt envisioned at the extreme southern end of the property (8:34 in the film) never materialized; Disney World does–or rather did–in fact, have an airport, of sorts:

Lake Buena Vista Airport, Orlando, Florida, on the 1972 Jacksonville sectional chart

According to the website Abandoned and Little-Known Airfields, a small STOL field existed sidelining the east side of the Walt Disney World Magic Kingdom parking lot. The paved asphalt and ramp are still there, and still meticulously maintained in true Disney fashion:

The former Lake Buena Vista STOL Airport runway 12/30 (click for Google interactive Map)

Ironically, in our post-9/11 world, a permanent TFR (Temporary Flight Restriction) zone–in English, an FAA-mandated No-Fly zone–has existed over both Walt Disney World and Disneyland since 2003, and reiterated via NOTAM (NOTice to AirMen) by the FAA as recently as February 2009. Oh sure, you can apply for a waiver to fly over Disney. Good luck with that. Not that you could actually land on 12/30 anyway–it’s been closed to air traffic for many, many years (thank you, over-protective, hyperventilating, hand-wringing Disney legal)–and, according to reports, is a staging area for cargo containers and buses.

But this is only one of Walt’s grand dreams that died with him; I could go on and on and on but if you watched the whole film, you were, as I was,  likely shaking your head in sad wonderment that such a beautiful vision of tomorrow was supplanted by what exists on the Disney property now. In fact, outside a handful of independent bloggers and historians on the Web keeping the dream of the EPCOT that could have been alive, only the briefest of nods to Walt’s true vision for EPCOT isn’t even in EPCOT at all:

Rather, this beautiful, sophisticated, detailed model of Walt’s grand design for the Experimental Prototype City Of Tommorow–his largest, most sophisticated, and most spectacular dream–has been relegated to a dark, dusty, little-known tunnel in the People Mover in the Tomorrowland section Magic Kingdom, almost as if Disney management are embarrassed by the fact that they have completely eschewed Disney’s dreams and vision, dashing them both upon the rocks of corporate profits and pandering to shareholders.

Fellow blogger Michael Steele in his blog, URLS from the Edge,  said it best as he recalls in this entry an anecdote about the sadness of the EPCOT that could have been:

Chris Cole used to tell a sad story that went something like this:

“Walt Disney said “Let’s make cartoons in color!” and marketing people said “You’re crazy, Walt, no one wants or needs that” and then he did it anyway and it was amazing and successful and the marketing people said “Wow, Walt’s a genius!”.

Then Walt said “Let’s use cartoons to tell full length stories; tales which can never be told with real films and actors” and the marketing people said “You’re crazy, Walt, no one wants or needs that” and then he did it anyway and it was amazing and successful and the marketing people said “Wow, Walt’s a genius!”.

Then Walt said “Let’s create an amusement park like no other – a clean, friendly place, where we can build narrative spaces and meaningful experiences that people will remember all their lives” and the marketing people said “You’re crazy, Walt, no one wants or needs that” and then he did it anyway and it was amazing and successful and the marketing people said “Wow, Walt’s a genius!”.

Finally Walt had his greatest vision to date; He said “Cities are in horrible shape, poorly laid out, designed by chance and greed, and giving rise to all kinds of environmental and social ills. We can do better than this! Besides, mankind will someday journey to the stars, trips that may take centuries – we’d best learn how to live together soon; let’s build a carefully designed arcology that puts the people’s needs first, and which improves and changes efficiently as technology evolves. We’ll call it EPCOT; Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow!” and the marketing people said “You’re crazy, Walt, no one wants or needs that”.

…and then Walt died…

and the marketing people took control of the company said “Walt was crazy, let’s build a big themed shopping center – people want and need that!”

(Editor’s note: I wish I could find out more about this Chris Cole person–I’d always tucked this anecdote away in my mind thinking that he was maybe a top Imagineer working with Disney up until his death, but sadly, the only mentions on the Intrawebs I can find of Chris Cole bespeaks of his skateboarding prowess–and I don’t care how young-at-heart you are, I’d have a hard time believing that a contemporary of Walt’s is still spry enough to shred on a skateboard at the profesisonal level).

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.

When I got home very early this morning, I learned some highly unpleasant things about a typical door on a typical two-car garage:

1. There is a very large spring that keeps it balanced such that a relatively low horsepower electric motor can raise and lower it
2. When that spring breaks, the door weighs eight hundred million pounds.
3. A 1/3 horsepower electric motor cannot raise, unassisted, an eight hundred million pound door.
4. A typical male of average strength can only just barely raise, unassisted, an un-sprung  two-car garage door to free his wife’s car–without passing out.
5. I think I seriously injured myself getting the garage door open.

I’m actually glad I discovered this at 2:00am and not Butterfly at 700 am, as she would be late taking T-Rex to school and getting to work.

I’m going to go medicate myself and lie down now.

Alright, I know. I’m a techie. I work in the IT industry and have a great deal of experience, and I’m immodest enough to say that I’m damn good at what I do. I’m even somewhat personable, to boot (although you may not come away from reading this entry thinking so). So because I’m somewhat personable, I don’t mind answering the odd legitimate question every now and again. I even like it sometimes; it gives my mind a bit of a workout.

I’ll tell you what I’m not: I am definitely not Google.

I don’t want to be Google. I don’t even have all the answers Google does. And few things piss me off more than someone asking me a really simple tech question that the first one or two Google hits–had they been not-lazy enough to consult Google before asking me–would have easily answered for them.

I know full well how doctors and lawyers feel at social gatherings: “Oh, you’re a doctor? I have a pain in my foot, what is that?” I get the same damn thing, all the freaking time: “Oh, you’re a highly-placed IT professional? My Internet at home is slow, what is that?”

I work for my company. I don’t work for you. And I am absolutely 100% done doing freebies for all but my family (the ones I like, anyway, and that list is subject to change without notice) and my very closest friends. If you want me to help you, 1) search Google for your answer first, before you call/talk to/e-mail me, and/or 2) make an appointment. I charge $90 an hour with one hour minimum.