Category: Uncategorized

One of the things we did at Anna Maria Island while on vacation was use Jeb’s GPS “Geiger Counter” to locate a geocache. Geocaches seem to have been invented in order to give people with GPS devices a reason to own them, and vice versa.

So I was trying to think of other things people could do with GPS gadgets. One thing I thought of was an index of historical markers. A lot of times you will be whizzing down the highway and see one of these on the side of the road but you can’t stop and read them. I wonder if anyone even knows how many historical markers are in Georgia, let alone where they are and what they say. One way of putting together a list would be geeky GPS owners armed with their geiger counters and digital cameras. They could record the coordinates and take pictures of each sign, later transcribing the text and making this available on a web page. With hundreds of GPS enthusiasts the entire state could be covered in no time.

Something similar is already being done but they haven’t enlisted much help yet. The Carl Vinson web site(a great resource for tons of neat stuff that your tax dollars are paying for) has a page about historical markers and they are putting together the database. Unfortunately there is only one geek involved who wants to copyright the list and who is without a geiger counter.

I guess since I heard of high definition television I’ve wanted to get it. It bothered me that Europe was able to enjoy higher definition broadcasts than the US because the US adopted a standard earlier. The prices on the TV’s have been too high though and I was fine with my $250 25 inch TV.

But then I bought a DVD player which held the promise of Dolby Digital surround sound and resolution so fine that your TV couldn’t even display it. My crappy old 25 inch TV didn’t even have S-video input, let alone separate connections for red, yellow, and green.

So I bought the surround sound system a few years ago and when my old DVD player died on me I replaced it with a “progressive scan” model that could read all of the detail on a DVD, not just skim the detail like a standard player (all of it moot if you don’t have HDTV anyway).

Prices of HDTV’s came down close to my price range and Mom said I should get whatever I wanted. Susan seconded it (but I think she coveted my old TV). And, after doing some research, I wound up with a 51″ Sony widescreen projection TV.

Continue reading “HDTV”

This is a response to an article in the Saturday August 23 2003 edition of the AJC by syndicated columnist Randy Cohen of the New York Times who writes a column called “Everyday Ethics”. (Read the article)

I read your article with interest answering a person’s question about whether they should visit the Galapagos Islands or not. You should have done more research into the Galapagos before giving a generic answer like the one you gave.

Continue reading “Eco-tourism”

I thought I’d try Netflix for a couple of months and catch up on watching movies and then cancel. So far I’m impressed: I joined Sunday and got two movies in the mail on Tuesday. I sent one back Wednesday and got the next on Friday. I did the free trial a while back and they were shipping everything from California. Now they have a center in Duluth (but I couldn’t get another free trial).

It’s $20 a month to have 3 movies out a time which probably means you could watch a movie every other day if you watch them the day you get them and mail them back the next. They pay the postage both ways. They have options where you can pay more and have more movies out or pay less and have 2 movies out a time (but that plan is limited to 4 movies per month).

You keep a backlog of things you want and whenever they get a movie back from you they send the next on the list. So you don’t have to keep going back to the website to pick movies. They just come automatically as long as you have movies in your queue.

It’s a very neat idea and seems like it should be very efficient using bar codes and automatically generating e-mails.

Read the follow-up posted in December.

Saw an interesting thing Friday as I was leaving work. I walked from my office to the state office buildings (twin towers, aka Sloppy Floyd Building) which takes me right through the smokers’ hangout. I see a couple of people (white but leathery tan) and they’re opening up the smoker station ashtrays mounted to the columns of the walkway. The woman looked up at me and looked kind of guilty so I wondered if they were up to something but it looked like they were just looking for cigarette butts. Once I was in the building I asked the security guard if they were getting cigarette butts. He said Yes, they do it every day.

Wow.