I won a Garmin nüvi 1370t navigation gadget from NewEgg back in January. I also have turn-by-turn navigation from Google Maps on my G1 Android-based phone. When I’m driving, the two are basically right next to each other on Baby Huey’s dashboard, and that’s given me a unique opportunity to compare the two.

My advice? If you’re holding onto any Garmin stock, drop it now.

I’m not saying that because the Google Maps navigation is better. In fact, the Garmin unit probably has a slight edge right now. The Garmin text-to-speech is definitely better (you can understand what it’s saying much easier than with Google Maps) and the nüvi does a better job of knowing where you are. I’m saying that because Google Maps keeps improving – which is essentially what Google does with everything.

I bought Vicki a first-generation Garmin nüvi about 4 years ago. The one I got in January has a slightly better onscreen keyboard, and the display seems a little crisper, but that’s really about it. Oh, and the new one is black instead of silver. They have essentially done nothing to improve their product in 4 years.

Google Maps, on the other hand, seems to update itself about once a week. New software with bug fixes, added features, new map layers, new map data, all sorts of things. Google just never quits tinkering, implementing small-but-significant improvements over and over again. In the 2 or 3 months since I installed it on my phone, it’s grown by leaps and bounds, evolving from an interesting (but not really usefull) app into a serious rival against a product made by the company that has practically owned the GPS receiver market since Day 1.

But the real reason why Google Maps is going to kill Garmin runs a little deeper than that.

Let me give you an example:
A typical route I have to drive takes about an hour and twenty minutes to get from Point A to Point B. When I use nüvi to navigate me between these two points, she picks a route that goes through a dense urban area, and with all the stoplights and traffic it takes almost two hours to make it where I’m going – even with nüvi on the ‘fastest route’ setting. And yet, if I drive the same route the next day, nüvi will send me the same way. It should have figured out from yesterday’s trip that the route it prefers is a lousy one that takes a lot longer, and run me through the countryside instead, but it doesn’t. It can’t learn.

Google Maps learns. It doesn’t seem to be using my individual results to adjust routing yet, but Google is implementing user data to improve routing, and the way the software is evolving it won’t be long before it personalizes that data to the routes I routinely drive. The capacity for feedback is built into the system, and over time that’s going to result in an infinitely better system.

Oh, and Google Maps is free with the phone. If I would have paid for the Garmin nüvi, it would have cost me almost $400. That’s almost four hundred bucks for a product that isn’t significantly better than a competing product you can get for free. That pretty much nails the coffin shut, doesn’t it?

- Ken

A few of the many things that bug me about the olympics.
 
 
1. If an event has to be scored by judges, then as far as I’m concerned it’s not a sport. It may be a competition, but it’s not a sport. A sport is seeing who can get from Point A to Point B the fastest, or seeing who can put the puck in the net or the ball in the basket the most times. If the whole point of the activity is impressing a judge or a set of judges, who will determine how good you did and who won, then that’s not a sport. That’s a job interview.

And don’t give me any of that crap about how hard it is. Figure skating, for example. Yes, I’m sure it’s hard. Yes, I know they work hours and hours for years and years. That’s great, but it has nothing to do with the conversation. Pouring concrete is hard too, and nobody calls that a sport.
 
 
2. It irritates the hell out of me hearing about how many medals guys like Michael Phelps or Apolo Ohno won at the olympics. You know why they win so many? Because there are 47 different types of swimming, and 52 types of speed skating, each of which gets its very own medal.

“Swim from this end of the pool to that end of the pool. Good job! Here are some medals. Now swim from this end to that end 4 times. Good job! Here are some more medals. Now swim from this end to that end with one finger stuck in your left nostril. Good job, have some medals!”

Skating is the same way. You have sprints, and non-sprints, and 2000 meter races, 200 meter races, 195 meter races, and if you don’t fall down or knock someone over the odds are good you’ll win a half-dozen medals. At the next winter olympics I expect to see paired speed skaters, each with one leg stuck in a potato sack.

If hockey was handled like skating, you’d have medals for shooting, medals for skating, medals for checking, medals for 20-minute, 60-minute, and 90-minute games, with and without sticks. Instead, you’ve got 400 guys competing for one gold medal in men’s hockey, while Ohno gets 3 gold medals for lacing his skates up and a bronze for remembering his helmet.
 
 
3. I’m sick to death of all the stories about noble parents sacrificing everything to take their kid to the rink or the gym or the slopes at 4AM every morning. Parents who quit jobs, parents who sold businesses, parents who had vital internal organs removed and replaced with bags of sawdust in order to support their children’s olympic ambitions.

I’m sure all of this seems like a good trade-off for the 1-in-5000 who now get to see their kid on a Wheaties box, but how about we see some stories about the other 4999? All those people who sacrificed everything and ruined the poor kid’s childhood, only to find themselves with a 26-year old basket case with no education and no job prospects.

In any other context we would call this sickness, obsession, and lousy parenting, but when NBC decides they need to boost ratings by tugging at your heartstrings, it becomes noble and praiseworthy.
 
 
4. Can we please declare a 6-month moratorium on the word ‘inspirational‘ now?

Babe Ruth was a great baseball player because he could hit the crap out of a baseball. Wayne Gretzky was a great hockey player because he scored a bunch of goals. Michael Jordan was a great basketball player because he scored a lot of baskets. Dick Butkus was a great football player because he pounded the living shit out of people. Back then, doing great things on the court, the ice, or the field was enough.

Now, your in-game performance is not enough. Now, you must also have triumphed over adversity. You must be inspirational. Maybe you’ve conquered personal demons. Maybe you’ve overcome having obsessive, overbearing parents who dragged you to the rink at 4AM every morning and destroyed your childhood. Whatever.

During the last summer olympics we got to hear how most of the athletes overcame a childhood of poverty and neglect – except for the swimmers. Most of the swimmers had to overcome crushing disappointment because Daddy bought them a BMW instead of a Mercedes. Kind of the same deal with the winter olympics. Let’s face it – winter sports are not for poor people, so mostly we got to hear about how they overcame the crushing pressure of high expectations. You know, the pressure from expectations that were created by the same media people who are now telling us these kids are heroes for overcoming it.

But in a way, I guess it all was kind of inspirational. It inspired me to turn off the goddamned TV, anyway.

- Ken

I apologize for the fact that it’s been a couple of weeks since I put up any new posts. There are a couple of stories floating around in the ‘rough draft’ stage and I’ll get them done and posted eventually, but I’ve been slammed with work-related deadlines lately, and simply haven’t had any time to finish anything.

I’m gallivanting around the state of New York right now, in fact – visiting jobsites, conducting inspections, and just generally doing the whole ’safety director’ bit. But even when I’m slammed with work stuff, I take time to take pictures. So in lieu of any actual content, here are some pretty photos to look at.

- Ken

If you manage your own website, there’s a program called Google Analytics you can use to track how many visits the site gets, where people are visiting the site from, that sort of thing. It’s pretty cool. There’s not so much detail that anyone would consider it a violation of privacy, but there’s enough information to be interesting. It can be an important tool for people who make money with their websites, because it lets them track what is popular with visitors and what isn’t.

For people like me who aren’t making any money from this and aren’t worried about how much traffic or clicks we get, it’s mostly just for the sake of curiousity. For example, I don’t need to know that my website got 6 visits from people in Sri Lanka yesterday, but for some odd reason it did, and that’s kind of neat. Since the website went live in March of 2009, it has gotten visits from all 50 states, and 83 countries around the world. What people in Uzbekistan make of this crap I have no idea, but it’s nice to know they’re dropping by every once in awhile.

Shout out to the Uzbeks! Big hand for the Uzbeks, everybody!

I can also use Google Analytics to tell you that the most popular photos on the site are the one I took of a sunrise over the beach on the eastern shore of Cozumel, and one I shot of an Iguana, also on the beach in Cozumel. The sunrise photo from Jonas Ridge looking out over the Blue Ridge foothills is pretty popular too, which is nice because I think that’s my personal favorite.

As for stories or blog posts, Midnight Battle With the Raccoon of Doom and Attack of the Sewer Beast are by far the most popular. That’s partially because they’ve been up the longest, but mostly it’s because people started sending links to those stories around to their friends via e-mail, and they kind of snowballed from there. To be honest, I think Racism, Housecats, and the Healing Power of Ice Cream is my favorite among the Whimsical Anecdotes stories, but it will probably never be as popular as some of the others because the subject matter makes a lot of people uncomfortable.

Last but not least, Google Analytics tells me what search terms people type into the Google search field that leads them to my site – and that’s always fascinating. Lots of people end up here because they’re looking for information on the wild pony herd in the Grayson Highlands, so it’s nice to feel like I’m performing some kind of service.

Far and away though, the #1 search term that leads people to my site is (believe it or not) “Nuke the Swedes”, which leads them to the story I wrote about an unpleasant visit to the IKEA store in Charlotte. That just tickles the hell out of me. I was just hammering out a rant about a store I didn’t like, and apparently in the process I tapped into a heretofore unsuspected reserve of anti-Swede sentiment.

Lately however, I’ve noticed a lot of people are ending up here because they’re searching for “Ken Thomas Photography”, and that bothers me because I don’t think they’re looking for me – I think they’re looking for the other Ken Thomas. That Ken Thomas is a wedding photographer down in Charlotte who seems like a nice guy, is a lot better looking than me, and (unlike me) actually knows what he’s doing when it comes to taking pictures and stuff. If that’s who you were looking for, then you shouldn’t be here, you should be at his website, which is KenThomasPhotography.com.

Trust me, you don’t want me photographing your wedding. I’d spend all my time wandering around outside taking pictures of plants and birds, and then write some kind of horrible, embarassing, profanity-laced story about how your wedding sucked and a wild boar attacked me in a portable toilet or something.

- Ken

On the rare occasions when I agree to talk politics with somebody, it can get really frustrating because there’s so much disinformation out there. People believe a staggering amount of things that simply aren’t true, to such an extent that talking with them feels like having a conversation about two entirely different things. I don’t mind differences of opinion – hell, for the most part I find differences interesting, but building an opinion based on two completely different sets of facts gives you little basis for conversation.

My favorite issue with this sort of thing is probably same-sex marriage. Try to have a conversation with someone who is against it, and almost 100% of the time they fall back on the “this country was founded on Christian principles!” argument, which is so false it’s almost absurd. The vast majority of the Founding Fathers were Deists, not Christians – with a few Calvinists and some Atheists in the mix.

The other big one has got to be illegal immigration. People who get all lathered up about it believe so many things that are just dead wrong, that listening to them talk about it feels like being in a bad French film, where all the characters just start spouting nonsense for no discernible reason. That doesn’t mean people are stupid or anything, it just means they’ve been told a bunch of crap that isn’t true, but it feels true, and it reinforces what they want to believe anyway, so that’s good enough.

I’ve been involved with the construction industry in North Carolina for 16 years now, so I’ve spent a lot of time looking at the illegal immigration issue from ground zero. I decided to write this post to set the record straight on some of the more common myths Americans have come to believe. I don’t expect it to change anyone’s opinion, but at least maybe you can base your opinion on facts, and not on falsehoods.

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I understand how it happens. You’re making a little money now, and there’s nothing like paying taxes to kindle a fierce interest in politics. Your house is probably worth less than you paid for it, you’re worried about job security, your kids are growing up and you start wondering what kind of America they’re going to live in. Suddenly, maybe for the first time, you’re really paying attention to politics, and boy are you angry.

Do us all a favor, OK? Take a little advice from those of us who have been paying attention for awhile. Study a little history, or failing that, listen to those who have. Then chill out a little bit.

Let’s see… we have a Democrat in the oval office, right? Let’s go down the list. He’s going to take away our guns, put the United States under control of the United Nations, drive energy costs through the roof, tear down traditional American values and destroy the traditional American family, inflate the defecit to such an outrageous extent that our entire economy will collapse, obliterate our healthcare system, make us all get abortions, get all our kids hooked on drugs, and just generally degrade the entire moral fabric of our society to the point where we’ll all be out in the front yard screwing the dog in broad daylight and cleaning up the mess with an American flag. Oh, and he’ll probably let a whole family of those damned, dirty Mexicans move in right next door.

Does that pretty much cover it?

See, here’s the part you’re missing – all of that stuff is what the right wing claimed Jimmy Carter was going to do. You remember Jimmy Carter, right? Yeah, Democrat. Elected President of the United States in 1976. Thirty-four years ago. Now Jimbo did a pretty lousy job, but that’s not the point. The point is that none of the above happened, in spite of all the screaming about it.

Twelve years later Bill Clinton was elected, and the right wing started screaming exactly the same things. Bill was even worse though, because in addition to all the above, he was also going to teach all of our third-graders to masturbate. I’m no fan of the Clinton administration – the bastard lied under oath and he should have been tossed out on his ass – but once again, not a single one of those terrible things came about. By some miracle, when Bill’s term came to an end, we still had our guns, we could still afford to put gas in the Buick, we were actually running a budget surplus, and my dog remained unscrewed. At least by me, anyway.

So now we’ve got another Democrat in there, and the right wing trots out the same tired old crap. What I’m suggesting here is that instead of being practically overwhelmed with shock and outrage, maybe your reaction should be more along the lines of “Geez, can’t you guys come up with something new to get hysterical about?”

See, there’s an entire industry out there that is built on stoking your outrage. They need you to be outraged. They need you to be furious. They need these things because that way you will buy their books, and watch their TV shows, and listen to their radio programs. You are being played like a fiddle, and the folks who are playing you are whistling the tune all the way to the bank. They are making a killing, and the hotter they can make you, the more they make.

But don’t feel bad. Those blithering idiots over on the left get played the same way. Every Republican since Nixon has been an evil mastermind who is going to sell the country to the Military-Industrial complex, reinstate the draft, let big business call all the shots, rape the planet, tap all of our phones, drop a nuclear bomb on somebody, put videocameras in our bedrooms (presumably because you might be in there with the dog) and bring back slavery. You might notice none of that has happened either.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t have an opinion. I’m just saying that mixing a little cynicism and restraint in there might be a good idea. Remember how stupid all those shrieking liberals looked a few years ago, constantly going on and on about how Bush was the antichrist and Cheney was Darth Vader? You’re not coming across any better when you’re doing the same thing from the opposite side.

- Ken

Le Monument aux Morts was a memorial to soldiers killed in World War 1, and was located in the central square of a small town called Trévières, on the northern coast of France. Trévières was one of the first towns liberated during the D-Day invasion (the first phase of Operation Overlord) and the statue was badly damaged by shrapnel and shellfire during the battle.

A cast was made of the damaged statue and a new version was created, which a French family donated to the US National D-Day Memorial in Bedford, VA. A plaque on the pedestal below the statue says “With our eternal gratitude to the United States of America for restoring France’s freedom, for granting asylum to our parents, and for halting the extermination of a people.”

 
 
 
The National D-Day Memorial is located in Bedford, which is about 30 minutes west of Lynchburg, VA. If you’re wondering (as I was) “Why Bedford?” the reason is actually pretty simple. The town of Bedford lost more men (44) on D-Day than any other town in America. Good reason. Interesting memorial too, actually. I’m hoping to go by there again when I have more time and can shoot a little more of it. The three pictures I took are all of the top center section, and there are several other areas I didn’t get to.

- Ken

A few months ago a Tuscon-based artist named Kate McKinnon stumbled across my site and left a comment on one of my posts. The search term that led her to arrive here of all places, is probably something upon which it would be inappropriate to speculate. I was behaving in a manner completely out of character at the time, so apparently Kate got the profoundly incorrent impression that I’m a marginally non-reprehensible individual.

Hey, stranger things have happened.

I followed the link in her comment back to her website and found myself really enjoying the posts she puts up on her blog. Her writing is great, but I’ve also really been impressed with her frequency. Kate seems blessed (or cursed, perhaps) with more insights and observations on a daily basis than have occurred to me in the last several decades. If you’ve spent any time reading blogs on the web, I’m sure you’ve noticed that most people who post daily are either posting dreck or just putting up links to other sites. Kate writes almost every day, and always has something interesting to talk about.

See, Kate is a metalsmith, which is something I have a hard time getting my head around. The word ‘metalsmith’ to me, implies grim-faced bearded Dwarven blacksmiths, massive stone forges, pitted anvils, and immense hammers ringing deep in the fiery bowels of Khazad-dûm, pounding mithril into chain mail.

Kate doesn’t have a beard. As for the rest of it, your guess is as good as mine.

Fortunately you don’t have to understand a thing to appreciate it (or else all human males would be homosexual and the species would have died out a long time ago) and I really like Kate’s creations a lot. You should go look at them. None of it is stuff that I could wear (until she starts selling mithril armor) but all of it practically exudes creativity. One piece in particular really struck me, so I contacted Kate about making something like it for Vicki. Christmas was approaching, the stars aligned, the planets converged, and everything came together in plenty of time for me to give my wife something really unique and interesting this year.

How cool is that?

- Ken

Used to be that when people would ask me about computer security, I’d advise them not to use any anti-virus software at all. My thinking was that if you’re reasonably smart about how you use your computer, then you don’t need anti-virus protection, and if you’re stupid about it, anti-virus software probably wouldn’t save you anyway. Besides, I despise most anti-virus software like McAfee and Norton. Hideous, system-hogging, overpriced, intrusive, badly-designed bloatware, basically.

But recently, I’ve changed my mind. Why? The main reason would be that viruses have gotten a hell of a lot nastier than they used to be. A virus on your computer used to be a minor nuisance that could probably be cleaned up fairly easily by someone who knew what they were doing. That is no longer the case. Trust me. I’m that guy in the neighborhood that people bring their computers to when they quit working, so I’ve seen a lot of viruses, and some of the stuff that’s rampaging around the net right now will flat-out destroy your computer, and everything on it – and you can get hit with them even if you’re not doing anything stupid.

So do me a favor, OK? Read the 5 steps below, and then follow them. I hate to see decent computers go up in smoke when they could have been protected for free.

By the way, if you’re using a Mac, please don’t bother sending me e-mails or comments about how you don’t have to worry about viruses. There is nothing about an Apple computer that is inherently more secure than a Windows machine. The only difference is that no one is going to bother writing viruses that will only be effective against 10% of their potential targets. Nobody wants to steal the credit card info from Mac owners anyway, because they’ve already maxed out their cards buying overpriced computers with training wheels on them.

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You hear lots of people say “I never win anything” – but in my case it’s actually the truth.

Well, OK. Even in my case there have been two exceptions. In 1984 I won a cake at a cakewalk at the Fourth of July celebration in Gauley Bridge, WV. Since the kind individual who baked that cake is almost certainly dead by now (cakewalk cakes being baked, almost invariably by sweet little old ladies) I can finally reveal the fact that the cake I won was quite nasty and almost entirely inedible.

The second exception was just after I got out of the Army in 1990. I had a part-time job at a convenient store (also in Gauley Bridge) and I was working one night when they installed the new machines for the brand new WV Lottery. I bought a scratch-off ticket and won $10, and to this day I’ve never bought another lottery ticket of any type. That’s not because I hate lotteries or anything, but because I’m an asshole and I like being able to tell people that I have a 100% success rate with lottery tickets.

But that was pretty much it until today. Today I actually won something that doesn’t suck. So now three exceptions.

I’ve mentioned in a couple of previous posts that NewEgg is the only place where I buy tech stuff, right? Desktops, components, laptops, routers, cameras, gadgets, whatever. Just about everything in this house that has a microchip in it was originally purchased from NewEgg. I’ve been using them exclusively since 2003. And it’s not just me. Every serious geek I know (we have a secret club – you’re not invited) uses NewEgg.

Why? Well, they’re cheap, for one thing. How cheap? My oldest son works at Best Buy, and gets a nice employee discount on the things they carry, but I still buy everything from NewEgg. Does that answer the question? Plus, they’re lightning-fast, and offer great customer service – which I’ve rarely had to use but it’s nice to know it’s there. But perhaps most importantly, their website is well organized, easy to sift through, has lots of product info, and great pictures. That’s a pretty big deal when you’re thinking about dropping a few hundred bucks on something. You want to be able to see enough to know for sure it’s the right something.

But any of you who’ve known me for any length of time have heard me recommend NewEgg, so I probably shouldn’t beat that to death here. No, the point of this post is that they had a contest at NewEgg and I won something. Yeah, no shit. Me. And it doesn’t suck.

Specifically, I won a Garmin nüvi 1370t. UPS dropped it off today. Nice little unit. It’s got bluetooth and traffic radio and all sorts of other things going on, but what I care about is that I won’t have to use my Android phone to navigate anymore. Yes, having turn-by-turn navigation on your phone is very cool, but when you’re driving down the road in busy traffic, trying to find the right exit, with your phone playing a podcast, telling you where to go, and showing you an e-mail all at the same time, then somebody calls you? Shit gets a little hairy. Having the nüvi to handle 2 of those 3 tasks (podcast playing and giving me directions) is going to make that small part of my life a lot easier.

At least it will if Vicki doesn’t take it away from me first.

- Ken