Ted's Blog

I think maybe Jeb told me about the whole concept of Where’s George. Where’s George is a web site where you can register the serial number and year of dollar bills you have. Then you write “www.wheresgeorge.com” on the bill and hope someone knows what to do it with it when they come across one.

Well, I got one in change yesterday at Waffle House (Susan and I like to go to a special restaurant on Friday nights) and told Susan about it. So we came home and logged on. We were the first person to report back on this dollar. It had come from Florida a couple of months earlier.

Neat concept. Keep your eye out. It’s like doing GPS Travel Bugs but you don’t have to leave the house!

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”