As much as I enjoy tinkering with WordPress, I just don’t have the time or patience for all the updating and themes and plugins and whatnot. I’ve rejiggered my Tumblr blog to use the URL http://tumblr.jasonbaldwin.us for now, mostly because it’s easier for me to curate things I find interesting than produce original content while I’m swamped with freelance work. I’m also planning to move my photos to Flickr (right after I set up a Pro account), so this site will mostly become a portfolio site and direct visitors to the other places I’m doing things. I’ll keep you posted.
Mostly, I just want to drive the car without having to build it myself. (See, that’s a bad analogy, and an indicator of where my brain is right now.)
Since getting an iPhone 3GS a couple weeks ago, I’ve been trying to reduce the number of things in my car, starting with the Garmin nuvi, which I’ve never been thrilled with. Google Maps is fine if I’m going somewhere familiar (most of central and southern Indiana, St. Louis and points in between), but I wanted another option for turn-by-turn directions.
Before taking the plunge into some of the more expensive options, I tried MotionX GPS Drive ([iTunes link] / $2.99 plus $24.99/year or $2.99/mo. for turn-by-turn and voice guidance). I like the model because it allows you to pay as you need it from within the app, but the fact that I only get EDGE coverage 90% of the time (living outside AT&T’s 3G coverage in Indiana) made it painfully slow to download maps, and in a test drive across town last night, I took a purposeful wrong turn and drove for a solid 3 minutes after the app announced “Re-routing” and not updating before I restarted the app.
The data issue, coupled with the troublesome delay in re-routing, led me to the conclusion that one of the more expensive solutions with onboard maps was the answer. I studied every app in the App Store, read reviews, read independent reviews on the web, watched demos on YouTube, and talked to a couple people before making my decision this morning. I narrowed my selection to TomTom U.S. ([iTunes link] / $49.99 on sale through 12/28), Navigon MobileNavigator ([iTunes link] / $59.99 until 1/11/2010), and CoPilot Live ([iTunes link] / $19.99 on sale). My first PND was a TomTom One XL, so I was familiar with its positive and negative attributes, and some reviews I’d read expressing concern over out-of-date maps was a strike against it. CoPilot Live’s interface was one of the ugliest I’ve seen, and I ruled it out almost immediately based on that. So this morning, I purchased the Navigon app, since it was the most positively reviewed both on the App Store and other sites I read. Using it to navigate from home to the coffee shop in Indianapolis I use as my remote office was utterly flawless, the voice guidance was clear and easy to understand, and the couple of stops I made along the way off-route were handled immediately and without incident.
I don’t think I’m going to spring for the $24.99 lifetime traffic add-on, because I don’t commute anymore, and Inrix Traffic ([iTunes link] / free) seems good enough for now; I checked it last night around rush hour, and it listed (and mapped) all the reported traffic accidents, congestion, and construction around Indianapolis that I could incorporate into my drive if necessary.
Navigon appears to update the app frequently, which might make for a painful download when they do because the maps are contained within the app (it weighs in at 1.47GB, which I still had plenty of room for on the 3GS), Coupled with a $25 Arkon dashboard friction mount from Amazon (the most solid I’ve found so far without investing in a ProClip system for $75), a car charger, and retractable 3.5mm audio cable (until the Griffin noise isolation cable arrives—I have a ground loop in the Prius that makes al kinds of noise), that makes me pretty happy.
I’ve taken 20 logos that were originally designed in Helvetica, and I’ve redone them in Arial. Some people would call that blasphemy. I call it a challenge: can you tell which is the original and which is the remake?
Norman E. Borlaug, the plant scientist who did more than anyone else in the 20th century to teach the world to feed itself and whose work was credited with saving hundreds of millions of lives, died Saturday night. He was 95 and lived in Dallas.
You’ve probably never heard of Mr. Borlaug, or, if you have, you were probably introduced via Penn Jillette, but ol’ Norman was an amazing man I regret never meeting.
So with Patrick Swayze and Jim Carroll, that’s the trifecta, right?
Other than the first planting of French Breakfast and Cherry Belle radishes, which I’ve harvested, everything is still in the ground and doing well. I’ll be harvesting icicle and Easter egg radishes in about a week, and turnips not long after that. I’ll need to cut down the collards and do something with those, too, while they’re still young and tasty.
If all the pepper plants bear fruit, I’ll be up to my eyeballs in bells. Tomatoes, too. And don’t get me started on the zucchini.
