We've got a Garmin windshield-mounted GPS and while it's useful in most cities, it's gotten us gloriously lost in the mountains and on country roads. Tall buildings also confuse it. And when you don't drive the way it expects you to go, it says, "re CAL culating" with the sort of snide sigh you'd expect from Marvin the depressed robot.

Posted November 29, 2007 11:38 PM by Writerious

I was glad I went to my 20-year reunion, because my sophomore English teacher was there; she died several (five, six?) years after that, still relatively young (in her sixties). "Julius Caesar" and "By the Waters of Babylon" and "Locksley Hall" ....

As for the street maps used for GPS ... they aren't any better when you meet them up close, trying to find something with a photo behind the stuff. (Why I work with the centerlines invisible: I may need the names, but I don't want to see that cr*ppy data they're using for the centerlines.)

Posted November 29, 2007 11:38 PM by P J Evans

Good grief. It should have told you to get off at the previous exit (Government Center) then follow the signs to Congress Street going south. You'd be at Federal in five minutes, given normal traffic.

Posted November 29, 2007 11:57 PM by Jon Meltzer

Back in 2003 I posted a poem written by a guy named Taylor Mali that was in praise of teachers. I led into it by mentioning (by name) the best one I'd ever had. Damned if my former teacher didn't Google himself and turn up in my comments two years later to say hello and thank you.

I know some people with GPS gadgets out here, but when the maximum driving distance is about 100 miles and it's only doable on one or two roads, it doesn't seem all that necessary.

Posted November 30, 2007 1:00 AM by Linkmeister

Uh-oh... We're staying in Boston for a few days after Smofcon and as I swore that the next time I drove in Boston I would do it with GPS, we've ordered it on the rental car. Makes me worry if the maps are going to be outdated or the signal is going to be lost in the parts of the city that I need it most! Luckily, my company's office is fairly easy to find in Burlington but that's not the part of the city that has in the past reduced me to tears. Pray for me... :->

Posted November 30, 2007 1:03 AM by JaniceG

I bought a Miro or Mico or some name like that at Circuit City's Black Friday morning sale, for $99.99 plus tax (I didn't buy the touchscreen laptop I'd been eying the previous week, and was feeling like contributing to the economy that day, so...). It's sort of amusing and I expect will prove itself useful over time.

Posted November 30, 2007 1:53 AM by Paula Lieberman

Sat-nav is notoriously broken.

Here in the UK, it's common for heavy trucks to be directed down totally inappropriate roads. Though weight limits aren't on paper maps either, people using sat-nav don't seem to notice road signs.

Sometimes the "roads" aren't suitable for any vehicles that isn't built for off-road use. For sundry legal reasons, they might be a "highway".

Posted November 30, 2007 1:54 AM by Dave Bell

Sun's buildings actually are very clearly visible from US 3 between route 128 (I-93) and the route 62 exit, though getting to them from US 3 involved get off at the route 62 exit, turn right at the light at the bottom off the offramp, and tak a right at multilane road, then look for a complex of buildings on the right....

Another alternative is to take Middlesex Turnpike north from 128 (I-95) instead of US 3, and head north until coming to a weirdly shaped intersction; the Middlesex Pike -used- to go straight, but the roads geometry got changed so that most of the traffic gets persuaded to bear left. The first true left after that, is the driveway up to the main entrance of the Sun complex.... There's a Thai restaurant on the eastern side of the intersection, that long ago was a Pewter Pot Muffin Shop, when that chain existed....
Burlington is a completely different locality than Boston. It's an incorporated town with thousands and thousands of residents, in in a completely different Congressional district than Boston, is on it own sewer and water systems I believe (as opposed to water from Quabbin Reservoir out in the western part of the stateand sewage to Deer Island out in Boston Harbor/Massachusetts Bay), has its own town library and town hall and police and fire station and its own Building 19 1/2 salvage/overstock/random junk store, has FREE PARKING!!! -- unlike Boston....

Posted November 30, 2007 2:09 AM by Paula Lieberman

Some philosophers claim that if a technology is ever developed that can map Boston, the city will instantaneously disappear and be replaced by something even more incomprehensible.

Others say that this has already happened.

Yet others point at the Big Dig. One might quibble about the definition of "instantaneously". In fact most of the tunnel "construction" occurred on the winter solstice of 1999, at the moment of Algol's rising, in a semicontrolled chthonic deliquescence which left twelve dead and nearly eighty in states of indelible trauma. All the Big Dig work up until that moment consisted of ley mapping and geometric analysis; all the work that followed was to drain the poisoned fluids from the Earth and shore up the passages that remained.

Fortunately, the Dig Event geometry proliferated within 20% of planned bounds, and the routes that resulted were acceptable for traffic control. With a few obvious exceptions.

Why the Big Dig? Conspiracy theorists point at nearly eleven million cubic feet of charged superfluidic waste, currently trying to eat through its gold-lined restrainment pools beneath Fort Knox. And indeed the Department of Defense's esoterica divisions (if not most of the individual researchers) have benefitted greatly from the stuff. But the primary aim, as noted above, was to make Boston unmappable -- not just in practice, but in theory.

The tunnels of the Big Dig do not go where Google tells you they go. Route 93 is 27% shorter than naive geometry permits, beneath Boston proper. Three of its entrance ramp-tunnels emerge in the wrong order -- not that anyone has noticed. If you were to dig straight up from the site of the tragic 2006 accident[*], you would not emerge in Boston at all, but in the strictly concealed district of Braintree, MA which gave that town its cognomen in the dark summer of 1640.

To explicate the details further would only muddy the situation. (And the map. And potentially snarl rush-hour traffic for the next fortnight.) The point is, twenty-first century Boston is entirely immune to sympathetic and parasympathetic curses. Any sketch you make will become inaccurate before you can stick a thumbtack (or, to recall history, a drop of Ogoun-dedicated molasses) into it. As a pilot test of psychodefensive architectonics, the Big Dig has been a resounding success, and similar projects will undoubtedly be swung into play throughout the world before the Critical Date of 2012.

[* The accident was, after all that, utterly non-esoteric in origin. Against the sins of building contractors, the Old Ones themselves struggle in vain.]

Posted November 30, 2007 2:13 AM by Andrew Plotkin

And what at that subway named Moebius?!

Posted November 30, 2007 2:28 AM by Paula Lieberman

I used a Mio c320 to navigate from Northeastern CT to the (amazing) Museum of Bad Art in Dedham, then to an apartment in Roxbury. No problems, no other navigation used. It was amazing. The Mio is amazingly fast at recalculating, and getting signal, and managed to extrapolate my position through the Big Dig on the way home.

Posted November 30, 2007 3:57 AM by John at UConn

Andrew Plotkin #9: Stone me! And I thought it was a classic of its kind when the local Minister for Railway Stuff-ups explained how the contractors for the Perth Underground had managed to route half a mile of the city loop through the Twilight Zone.

(Apparently construction had to be abandoned at that point for reasons not entirely unconnected with squamosity and rugoseness, but the Minister was not explicit upon the point, and was in any case overtaken with an attack of shouting in tongues, which is standard for political discourse here. A spokesman later explained that the reference to goats and their prolific progeny was either caused by the Minister mistaking her brief for that of the Minister for Agribusiness*, or else was meant as a description of the Leader of the Opposition.)

*Brief, not briefs. I mean, we explained about that regrettable misunderstanding last week. Sheesh!

Posted November 30, 2007 4:11 AM by Dave Luckett

Once upon a time, I thought I was a pretty good navigator, with an inborn sense of direction.

Then my daughter enrolled in a college in Massachusetts, and we rented a car at Logan and embarked on a voyage of....the damned. Several times.

Turns out I navigate well when (a) the sun is visible (b) there are landmarks, as there are in "hills to the west, bay to the east" -- you are on the San Francisco Peninsula.

Anyway, on daughter-delivery-to-college in August, we rented a car with a Garmin GPS system. Worked great for the airport to general vicinity of college, but since college town was having a spasm of surface road re-working...couldn't get there from here.

Eventually we learned (a) by direct reckoning, how to get from motel to dorm and (b) if buggered up on other expeditions, pull over, find the local street address, and re-set the danged thing.

Back home in California, Tom-tom works great except in downtown San Francisco, where the high-rises block satellite access. And Tom-tom doesn't have the world-weary voice that announces "recalculating" if you don't perform as expected.

Posted November 30, 2007 4:42 AM by Liz D.

Yeah, Boston's a bit... well, it's totally barking mad, actually. I've learned to drive there by teaching myself a set number of routes through the city and then slowly expanding them by trying new things when traffic's slow, and by studying aerial images of my route before I leave. It's a process.

I'm in eastern PA for work right now. Eastern PA and Jersey confuse me, so I got a GPS unit with my rental car. So far it's told me to go through a washed out bridge, to make a left turn through a concrete Jersey barrier, and to drive several miles over a dirt road. (I'd do the dirt road in my Jetta just fine, but the rental car -- not so much. Low clearance.)

Posted November 30, 2007 6:54 AM by G. Jules

One problem with satnav systems is new subdivisions. It took months before my current address appeared on some maps (leading to one of my wife's relatives being misdirected by her satnav).

Posted November 30, 2007 7:06 AM by Fragano Ledgister

"At the Mountains of Madness" has an amusing scene where the protagonist, being chased by a shoggoth, madly gibbers out stops on the Boston Red Line subway ("Harvard - Central - Kendal - Park, Harvard - Central - Kendal - Park").

Lovecraft would never have been able to do that today. The shoggoth would be stopped by "switching problems" long before it actually reached our terrified hero; and everyone would ignore Cthulhu's, uh, MBTA chairman Grabauskis's, announcements on the PA urging all toward terra terra terra.

Posted November 30, 2007 7:35 AM by Jon Meltzer

Boston's roads are clearly modeled on the Great Pentacle of London -- not the well known elder sigil that is the M25 motorway, but the underground one, tunneling through plague pits and graveyards, that is the Jubilee Line Extension.

Apropos Dave Bell's comments about satnav and trucks in rural England, the stereotyped story is of the 38-ton Polish farm produce truck that gets wedged between the dry-stone walls of a single track country lane, because the driver -- who speaks Polish and fluent Russian and a smattering of Serbo-Croat -- trusts the satnav when it says it'll take him to the M6 motorway (which, in fact, it would take him under by way of a tunnel with a 10' height clearance -- but that's another story). And the other story concerns the 25-year-old blonde in the £120,000 Mercedes who follows her satnav all the way down a dirt track into a shallow river because she thinks it leads to the country hotel Sir Rupert has hired for the wedding reception.

Posted November 30, 2007 8:05 AM by Charlie Stross

Technology never replaces situational awareness.

Posted November 30, 2007 8:13 AM by Alex

I recently succumbed to the lure of GPS units and bought a Garmin Nuvi 250 when Costco had them at $300 ($100 off). But I'm about to return it, because Costco then offered the Garmin Nuvi 650 (slightly snazzier, with MP3 player) for the same price. (For any Costco members, the 650 is $300 at least until 10 December.)

I used it this week to find a place out in the boondocks (the wilds of Shorewood, MN), and it guided me perfectly, modulo one "reCALculating" when I wanted to take Highway 5 rather than Highway 7. The hardest part of any trip for me seems to be once I get off the main drag and have to find the actual location, and this worked very well for that.

I'm now in possession of an antique German spinning wheel that I think can be made functional with the repacement of the belt and the foot connector thingie. Oh, and it came with a hank of something ancient that I think might be flax.

Posted November 30, 2007 8:23 AM by Beth Friedman

We have a Magellan Maestro, which I love for long-distance trips, or finding my way around urban areas.

Rural Southern Arizona is pretty much a disaster. It insists that the best route for me to take into Tucson is up a road that is surveyed but doesn't actually exist except as a jeep track. And it steadfastly ignores the actual main route.

And it also won't accept my home address.

The key here is when the maps in the thing were last updated, I think. You can find that out by going online and checking the model number. New GPS units have the newest Navsat maps. Older ones (the ones on sale....) have older map files. Allegedly the makers will put a map update online for the beasts, but they seem to have figured out that they can make money if you have to buy a new unit to get newer maps.

Still, I do love the thing.

Posted November 30, 2007 8:46 AM by beth meacham

First, I use a Garmin GPS. It is a "handheld" model made for hikers (i.e. it is small and designed to conserve the batteries). But it also has "autorouting" and turn by turn directions for cars. The only thing is it doesn't talk to you, it just beeps when a turn is coming up, and displays the upcoming turn and which path you're supposed to take. That doesn't bother me. But some may want voice prompting, so you'll have to prioritize what's most important.

(Garmin Model 76CS Plus, for those keeping score)

Second, I downloaded what Garmin calls "high resolution" maps. These are limited by the amount of space available in the internal, nonvolatale memory. I was able to dump about a fifth of the entire united states into its memory. (And this is an older model, newer models likely have more memory). Garmin's maps are good. Really good. Seriously good. I have used this thing to get around in some of the craziest cities, and it has never led me astray.

The unit comes with a basic map of the entire US in ROM. But it can only do autorouting and turn-by-turn directions on whatever high resolution maps you download into its memory. if you don't have a high res map for that area, all you can do is display where you are, but it won't be able to tell you to turn right at the next light. So don't cheap out on memory.

Third, I always, always use an external antenna and (cigarette lighter for power) when in a car. I've used this thing without the external antenna, and it has a tough time finding satelites when it is inside a faraday cage with windows. Get an external magnetically mounted antenna, with about 10 feet of cabling, and just run it between the door frame and door and slap it on your roof. You'll find satellite reception skyrockets. There has been maybe one or two spots where I'm driving down a street with 40 story sky scrapers all around me, where the reception goes on the blink, but an external antenna is still a major improvement over an antenna on the back fo the device, sitting on your dashboard.

If you're getting a GPS, (christmas is coming ya know), I'd recommend a Garmin brand just for the high quality maps, and get an externally mounted antenna for your car, for way better reception.

Posted November 30, 2007 9:03 AM by Greg London

Hmmm. I get around New England with an eight year old Garmin V plus, with 6 year old maps (the new maps aren't broken down small enough to do the kind of routing I need, so I haven't bothered to update). It has gotten me to Blood Drives and Red Cross teaching assignments fine, with the exception of streets that it doesn't know exist. It was way useful on big disaster assignments where I didn't know the territory at all (but did keep trying to send me across broken bridges).
It doesn't have much memory (I can store most of inside-495, but just barely), but I can load disjunct map sets so I have both ends of a journey (with some minor problems). For modern Boston driving, I set it to off-road mode so it just points an arrow and shows the distance (I learned to drive around Boston, I know a lot of the basic topology once I get out of the big-dig).
I do use a good external antenna, which helps a lot in urban canyons and tree covered New England roads. It's waterproof, so I can use it boating, bicycling, or hiking (I've got mounts for the bike and the kayak).
It hooks to the ham radio in my pickup and you can find out where I am if I turn on beaconing. I can also do this with a hand-held radio - useful occasionally when doing first aid on public events. Funny how I'm willing to let people I know and random strangers keep tabs on me when I'd be very pissed if the Govt. was doing it.

Posted November 30, 2007 9:28 AM by John Houghton

Jim,
High school reunionish thing is a downtown Alumni Club, and you wear field boots and whacker pants? Deliberate statement, or just default clothing? At the Bethel Inn for Thanksgiving there were several people in clean jeans and nice flannel shirts (rural dress casual?).
But, much more important, did they make a decent Gibson at the Alumni Club?

Posted November 30, 2007 9:36 AM by John Houghton

Charlie Stross #17:

There is also the Great Sigil of Atlanta which causes drivers to lose all ability to drive, and which causes discomfiture through an arcane spell known as the Multiple Peachtree (there's also the Simple Peachtree, which has been known to turn Damyankees -- everyone who isn't a Southerner -- into gibbering idiots). Personally, I blame it all on an alliance of Huitzilopochtli, Cthulhu, and Creflo.

An ancient prophecy says that it will only lose its malign power on the day that Jim Wootten and Neal Boortz simultaneously say something sensible.

Posted November 30, 2007 9:39 AM by Fragano Ledgister

I have weird (but good) memories of the Boston area, sometimes even because of the traffic. Directions like "take the last left before the air force base" don't help when it's 1 in the morning, snowing, and the map you've got is one of the Hertz courtesy ones. The armed guard accepted "Oh, um, I guess it was the last left then...". Which was nice.

After it stopped snowing, I used to cycle from Bedford to Burlington. The oddest thing on the route was an old Irish telephone box (1960s - one of the ones with an A and a B button), fixed in front of someone's house. The owners'd even superglued some change to the shelf. I left 20p.

But what was really weird about the traffic in Boston was that it wasn't terribly bad at all, Big Dig and all. I found that Dublin was (and is) much worse. The hardest time I had was getting the car out of the hire lot: you'd be amazed how few cars over here have parking brakes in the footwell. Actually, I'd never heard them called parking brakes in the first place, which made using the index of the car manual very frustrating ("H, h, heating system? Where's the hand brake?")

Charlie Stross #17:
GPS isn't a required part of dumb transport decisions. A computer company I worked for changed its policy about not letting tech support have access to spare parts after the centralised system sent a truck-trailer down a cul-de-sac to deliver a sound-card-to-CDROM connection cable.

Posted November 30, 2007 9:46 AM by Mike McHugh

My single attempt to use GPS navigation was in Boston in the summer of 2005. We were there for the marriage of Eva's niece, which was a huge family affair, as it was also de facto a party to celebrate the groom getting his PhD and the bride getting post-PhD employment. I'd rented a nice big car since Eva and I were traveling with my MIL, who was 86 at the time and needed to use a wheelchair for distances of more than a few hundred feet. As I hadn't driven in Boston in more than 20 years I accepted the GPS extra, figuring I would get an idea of how useful it actually was.

We got into Boston about 3 in the afternoon. The GPS wasn't a satnav system, so it demanded a bit more of my attention than I was comfortable giving it, being stuck in afternoon rush hour traffic after getting off the freeway interstate onto Storrow Drive. We were headed into Cambridge, just off Harvard Square, and so, of course, I got stuck in the wrong lane and ended up heading west again, in the wrong direction. In irritation and desperation* I ignored the GPS map and just navigated by the compass. Reverting to Boston Driver Survival Mode, I cut into the one lane that might get me somewhere I wanted to be, earning the undying hatred of several drivers whom I left an additional car length from their destinations.

We finally got to the hotel, where I parked the car. We didn't use it again until we went to the airport 4 days later, where I was told that someone in the hotel parking lot had dinged it, and was eventually sent a bill for $400 in repairs. The wedding, however, was great fun, and the then bride and groom will be staying at our house next month for our younger son's marriage. They'll have a lot less trouble navigating in Portland no matter what system they use.

* A truly self-defeating mix of emotions

Posted November 30, 2007 9:59 AM by Bruce Cohen (SpeakerToManagers)

A friend of mine found out (IIR the details C) that one of his beloved instructors had died when he was looking at his Lj inerets, and saw one of them was no longer unique to him.

That person was related to the teacher, whom she told him had died.

Posted November 30, 2007 10:21 AM by Terry (in Germany)

I like driving in Boston. Then again, I seem to deal well with long-term exposure to near death experiences.

On the other hand, I can't find way around. I tried to follow the map to get from Boston to Ayre, three time, three different ways of not being on the right roads.

Posted November 30, 2007 10:27 AM by Terry (in Germany)

I was amused last week when, on a trip to Technik Museum Speyer, my parents' Magellan GPS said "make an unauthorized U-turn". (We didn't; we were approaching the museum entrance, and I suspect the waypoint it was using was on the museum grounds but not at the actual entrance.)

Posted November 30, 2007 10:27 AM by Christopher Davis

Andrew @ 9

My cubie says that if we're ever invaded, Boston is probably safe.

Posted November 30, 2007 10:37 AM by P J Evans

Route 93 is 27% shorter than naive geometry permits, beneath Boston proper.

Of course it is.

Posted November 30, 2007 11:01 AM by Dan Layman-Kennedy

John #23:

I actually own a pair of dress pants (that I got for my daughter's wedding) but ... well, rural casual is about right. It's a very nice (dark grey) cable-knit Aran sweater. Boots is what I wear. I've got the lumberjack boots and the lineman's boots. (I do own some low-cut shoes, and there're around here somewhere.) Given the weather on the way back, I was glad to be dressed for it.

No, I didn't even ask for a Gibson. I was planning to drive in Boston traffic (then into the teeth of a threatened ice storm) after leaving. If I were somewhere in walking distance, that's one thing. Driving ... you know the deal. If you go to an accident after midnight and you don't find a drunk, keep looking: you haven't found all your patients.

Posted November 30, 2007 11:12 AM by James D. Macdonald

BTW, speaking of clothing, Abp. Stepinac HS is the reason I can tie a four-in-hand necktie in about two seconds flat, while running, and get the ends to come out even.

Posted November 30, 2007 11:15 AM by James D. Macdonald

Jon Meltzer #16: "Harvard - Central - Kendall - Park"

Hie thee hence, you leafy narc!

(I've been taking the Red Line daily for a year, and that has me permanently earwormed.)

Posted November 30, 2007 11:37 AM by Andrew Plotkin

I got my wife a Garmin Nuvi 350 for Christmas last year, and she swears it's the best gift she's ever gotten. And Liz D, that "recalculating" announcement when you blow a turn, does sound ever-so-faintly exasperated.

Posted November 30, 2007 11:46 AM by Steve C.

Boston is the only city that so far has been able to break my Garmin (and thus, by extension, me). Not even London could do that. Which is saying something, believe me.

A couple months ago I was trying to get to a place very near where Jim was just going, and had the exact same experience. I finally gave up and just went by sight, because I could *see* the building I was headed for, I just couldn't *get* there.

When I first got my Garmin last year (best Xmas present EVER), I switched it to the British voice b/c I figured I would rather have an Englishwoman sigh "reCALculating" at me than a Michigander. This came in handy for my most recent UK excursion, as I was well used to what it meant by "enter roundabout and take fourth exit".

So far the Garmin (StreetPilot i5) has been far more useful than not. The PNW has been the dodgiest, strangely enough -- I don't know if it's because the satellites are positioned so they tend to disappear behind mountains or what, but in both Seattle and Portland it kept losing the signal even with no big buildings anywhere near me. But overall I daresay it's saved my sanity, as traveling to places I haven't been before, but need to arrive at on time and with my wits about me is my livelihood. It *definitely* made this last trip to England possible, b/c after the last time, no way in HELL I was putting myself (or my bandmates) through that again.

(Oh, and Andrew #9: thanks so much for the history lesson. It all makes sense now!! ;)

Posted November 30, 2007 11:57 AM by meredith

Here in the UK, it's common for heavy trucks to be directed down totally inappropriate roads.

In Boston, the highways along north and south sides of the Charles River are cars only; if a somewhat larger vehicle deigns to trespass, it will be dealt with mercilessly by the 9' high overpasses. Every August the news media stakes out the bridges in the certainty that a naive college student will run a U-Haul into a bridge somewhere near BU or MIT. This year the b0st0n [sic] LiveJournal group held a hit-the-bridge pool. There was a winner the first day that dorms opened.

It's bad enough that the exit signs in the Big Dig tunnel direct Route 3 traffic onto Storrow Drive without giving a height warning; I keep expecting some semi driver heading to New Hampshire to hit the Longfellow Bridge. But, now, we have portable devices to lure people onto inappropriate highways ...

Posted November 30, 2007 12:33 PM by Jon Meltzer

It once took me eight hours to get home from Boston. Home being Providence, fifty miles away. It felt like some all-powerful demon kept rearranging the streets just before I got to them to keep me trapped in the tunnels. Seriously nightmarish.

Posted November 30, 2007 12:46 PM by ethan

Jim (32):
4-5 hours drive to Boston to hang out with some folks from your HS, and you then drove back home?

Fond of highway driving?

Posted November 30, 2007 1:02 PM by John Houghton

Paula Lieberman at #8: Burlington is a completely different locality than Boston...and {has} its own Building 19 1/2 salvage/overstock/random junk store....

Hey, now: thanks for the tip.
But how has it come to pass that I've been to two ReaderCons, and nobody ever told me this? I may need to dispatch a stern note to the Committee.

Posted November 30, 2007 1:25 PM by Bob Oldendorf

Fond of highway driving?

Fonder still of two-lane blacktop driving.

Posted November 30, 2007 1:33 PM by James D. Macdonald

To All In General:

I've got a Garmin i3 Streetpilot -- obtained for my wife (she's a school bus driver, and goes on field trips, and needed one that could work off of AA batteries, since the busses don't have auxiliary 12 VDC outlets.

Now for the war story -- speaking of combat testing -- which we were. Two years ago I took the family ona driving trip in Europe. Now, I'd been stationed there (in bella Napoli!) and had done some driving around, but nothing like what was scheduled.

Paris to Dijon to Innsbruck to Venice to Rome to Turin to Paris.

Lucy did very well in every situation except Turin (which is where she got her name "Loopy Lucy", 'cause Lucy's got some 'splainin' to do!)

The i3 stores its map data on a micro-SD card. I bought the European version of the map software, and found a 1 GByte micro-SD, and managed to squeeze France, Italy, Germany, and Austria onto that card (just not all at the same time).

We had fun. While we were in Dijon, we had some free time, so we found the Cathedral of Mary Magdalene, and figured we'd go. (How many 8th century chapels are there in the US?) I turned on the i3, and scrolled through the list of Points of Interest -- and found the Cathedral, so away we went.

I'm not sure if my wife ever opened her eyes on the drive up to the top of the hill where the cathedral is located (all good fortifications should command the high ground, yes?) but it is a good thing that the Citroen C8 minivan that we were driving has power-folding outside mirrors. Otherwise, we'd never have gotten up that street.

So, now I have stood on the very steps where Richard the Lionheart stood where the Third Crusade began, and I've got pictures of the Reliquary of Mary Magdalene.

Posted November 30, 2007 1:46 PM by Duncan J Macdonald

Maybe it's because I've lived here nearly 30 years, but driving in and around Boston doesn't upset me. It's kind of relaxing in a way, like solving a puzzle. Except when I cross into Somerville. There's something spooky about that town, because the instant I go over the town line, I become completely and hopelessly lost.

Posted November 30, 2007 1:49 PM by pb

I love our GPS navigator. It does the job that used to be mine by default, and for all its flaws it does that job so much better than I can that I would cry hot tears of despair if it ever got broken or lost.

Posted November 30, 2007 3:20 PM by Debra Doyle

pb #43:

I'm beginning to conclude that every city has its own "default grid"--not necessarily a real grid, but rather a way of laying out the streets. When you go from one town to another, and they don't have the same sort of grid, lostness ensues. I remember what happened when I visited Florence after living for a while in Venice--I kept getting lost in the newer section, but as soon as I got into the Centro Storico, I was well-grounded. There are a couple of spots here in Austin that I call "Bermuda Triangles", because they are indeed triangular; within those areas, directions don't seem to work; all you can do is memorize all the turns. North isn't north, it's more like west, and stuff like that.

Posted November 30, 2007 4:20 PM by joann

joann @45:

I wonder if those triangles are an artifact of Texas roads; there are several spots like that in north Dallas. Addison is full of them, even navigating by foot with a handheld GPS unit. (The area is chockablock with geocaches and geodetic benchmarks.)

Posted November 30, 2007 5:09 PM by Melissa (oddharmonic)

Melissa #46:

Not necessarily. As I have noted before, the worst of these is in the Bay Area, down at the bottom of the Bay. There is a spot where 101 takes a sort of bend as you go south, and from there on, all my logical directions stop having anything useful to do with the actual directions. And then it does it again. Not to mention the whole bit of 280 turning into 680.

I spent a couple days in Dallas last week, and encountered no weirdness, but then I didn't venture further west than the Galleria. There are definite strangenesses involving the Cedar Springs/Live Oak district, and the area around Fitzhugh/Knox/Henderson and anything they intersect--my directions to my husband for getting to Jimmy's for Italian groceries involved "take this exit, go left, and then it's ... somewhere." But none of that is as bad as the multiple intersecting grids on the interface between Seattle's Space Needle area and downtown. (Hmm. I wonder if some GPS failures in Portland and Seattle can be put down to the quadrant system?)

Posted November 30, 2007 5:47 PM by joann

Jon@37: September pools may be the equivalent of clench-racing, but there are idiots to bet on all year round. Somewhere in the Globe archives is a picture of my first serious conductor crawling out the passenger window of his car because the truckload of apples next to him tried to go under the Magazine St. footbridge. The truck box ~exploded; if he'd opened the door, or tried the drivers'-side door, he would have had a car full of smashed apples

pb@43: After 34 years driving in the area, I can deal with Somerville if I have to, but it's never going to be easy; there are too many rail lines slicing the city lengthwise, and not enough bridges over them.

I hadn't read enough to realize that the large units work off of memory. Does anyone have experience with the navigation systems that will converse with your cellphone? I'm guessing these consult a central source (which may also be out-of-date -- cf Map*.com once trying to put me on a road that a shopping center had eaten several years before) because some of the cellphones the system is offered on don't have much memory and because it was described as staying connected for the entire route (and wouldn't that eat up the minutes!).

Posted November 30, 2007 11:19 PM by CHip

Hi, your name popped up on my rss feed for Arisia (doing registration, and I google alerts blogs that mention Arisia just in case some one is upset with us)

Just thought I would mention that Rt 3 through Colebrook use to be an undivided highway, single road with only a double line. I wonder if the GPS still thinks it is.

And Route 2 starts a the state house. Because we are weird out here. Hope to see you at Arisia, I'll be behind the registration desk.

Posted December 1, 2007 2:00 AM by Fibrowitch

Rt. 3 through Colebrook is still a two-lane blacktop road with a double-yellow line.

Posted December 1, 2007 5:18 AM by James D. Macdonald

@43, @48: Somerville's biggest traffic problem (for non-residents) is its "if you don't know where you are, you don't belong here" attitude toward street signs. Only the cross streets are marked; not the main ones.

Posted December 1, 2007 7:10 AM by Jon Meltzer

Jon #51 That street-sign problem is also common in Sydney. You can be walking/riding for ages trying to figure out what the big street you're on is, while all the cross-streets are labelled.

My 'guidance system' is usually some photocopied pages from my Gregory's Guide or one of my other street directories. I'd like to take the whole book, but my bag's already too heavy.

Posted December 1, 2007 7:07 PM by Mez

Since I rarely drive more than five miles from my condo, I can't imagine needing a GPS. Once every couple of months I see a specialist and I know how to get to their clinics and the area around them. The last time I went anywhere remote, I just made two Google maps. I'm really good at looking at maps and remembering what they show.

Posted December 2, 2007 1:02 AM by Marilee

Re each city having its own grid:

The street name pattern in Minneapolis made no sense to me until I realized it has 5 quadrants rather than 4, as the downtown portion of the grid curves with the river.

These days I am in the Omaha suburbs, which on a large scale follow the same pattern as most cities in the regions of the US that were surveyed by townships and sections -- regular N/S and E/W roads at mile and usually half-mile intervals. But between them are curving and twisting lanes and cul-de-sacs, not just for the typical residential subdivisions but even for the strip malls and office parks and warehouses. At least many of the streets are named systematically.

Posted December 2, 2007 1:13 PM by Allan Beatty

When I saw the thread title on the main page, my first thought was, "What the hell kind of new security theater have the Boston authorities done now?"

Posted December 2, 2007 1:15 PM by Allan Beatty

Jim, out of curiosity, when did you graduate Stepinac? I ask because my father is an alumnus, probably (based on his age) class of '64. (Feel free to email me if you don't want to air further details in public.)

Posted December 2, 2007 11:54 PM by Betsey Langan

Betsey -- I'm Class of '72.

(Don't change Dicks in the middle of a screw! Vote for Nixon in '72!)

Posted December 3, 2007 12:45 AM by James D. Macdonald

There was a parking garage at the end of Federal Street, and that’s the first place in my life I ever had to show picture ID just to enter a public parking garage.

It is Boston. Lucky you didn't have any exposed wiring or printed circuit boards showing in your car. They'd have shut down the city for ten blocks around and charged you with a bomb hoax.

Also, hi, nice to meet you, sort of, though I didn't know I was meeting you at the time. I was the guy in the black suit behind the desk. ("Certainly! Coat room's over here, and then you're going to be in the Library, which is across the way, and to the right.")

Posted December 3, 2007 7:54 AM by astronautgo

[I could have sworn I replied last night...]

Jim, thanks.

(Just as well; if I'd discovered that you went to high school with my father, I think my head would have imploded with the force of the worlds colliding. Although I suppose it would help to establish me as being a Real Person, as opposed to animated footwear. [Although I suppose footwear would have to post more frequently, and more contentiously, than I do.])

Posted December 4, 2007 12:09 AM by Betsey Langan

Google is a great little toy, isn't it? My friend, "Mr. Vulcz," was googling himself and came across this and suggested that I check it out.

I'm "JoMo" (a simple combination of my first and last names). I, among many other youths, was a student and admirer of Mr. Straka. If there's anything you still don't know, I would be more than happy to offer any information I may have.

I check my email regularly. Good luck!

Posted July 16, 2008 11:02 PM by Joe Moloughney