Do you know where you’re going?

No!  I don’t mean your path in life!   You obviously haven’t read any of my stuff before.  A philosophical subject like that is waaaay too deep for my shovel.

What I’m referring to is, when you leave your home and go to your next location, do you know where you’re going?…or more specifically, how to get there?  In this case, the modern GPS is an amazingly helpful device, whether it’s on your cell phone, a portable unit or one of those tablet sized ones they build into the dash on your vehicle so you can be easily distracted while attempting to not get lost.

The GPS, or Giant Pain…no, that’s GPA!…  The Global Positioning System is a technology that uses a space based satellite network to pinpoint a location “on or near” the Earth’s surface.  For purposes of this article, we will assume “on.”  It was invented by Al Gore after he invented the internet.  Or before.  Or maybe it was someone else.  Doesn’t matter.

Either way, this technology can find your location, find your destination, calculate options as to route and roads, then direct you in the direction of the most traffic.  There is also technology available to help circumvent that traffic, but that comes at additional cost and only works in the movies.

As with any new tech, there is a plethora (that means a lot) of uses and applications for this system.  Also, as with any new science, there are downsides and learning curves with which to deal.  One of the downsides of the GPS is language compatibility.  Some of these units have a voice interface.  What this means is you can talk to the unit instead of punch buttons on the screen to instruct the machine to lead you where you want to go.  This feature helps you keep your eyes on the road or your cell phone keyboard as you text while driving.  Sadly, however, it doesn’t do a thing for your frustration level.

“And why not?” you ask.

Okay, one of you asked, even if it wasn’t you.

That’s because, with all the choices available in the language selection menu, “GPS language” is not one of the choices you are offered.  The unit will likely instruct you in a language that resembles whatever you chose, in this case English, but the words it strings together don’t seem to make any sense!

Let’s take the simplest instruction you receive when you get to the first corner.  Your high-tech electronic device will inform you to “prepare to turn left.”

What does that mean?

How do you “prepare” for something like that?  Do you have to wake up?  I am relatively sure this is one of the prerequisites for driving in the first place.  This requirement comes right after the one that says you can’t drive if you’re blind.  Maybe it’s telling you to move to the correct lane, but then why doesn’t it tell you move to the left-turn lane?  This is one of the statements you have to learn in order to operate your vehicle under GPS instruction.  Fortunately, it doesn’t take too long for most of us to catch on after we see our intersection go by outside the window because we didn’t properly “prepare” to turn left.

Granted, there are many very useful instructions or informational comments.  “Prepare to exit left,” is a particularly helpful piece of information, since most exits are to the right.  Knowing this can keep you from cutting across three lanes of traffic in front of other vehicles – provided they “prepare” you for the exit far enough in advance.  I should warn you, from the opposing perspective, that the unit will NOT advise you to watch for an idiot cutting across three lanes of traffic to make the exit.

“You have reached your destination; your destination is on the right” is a useful statement, but not all units seem to have this courtesy.  If they don’t, you invariably find yourself in the wrong lane and need to circle the block to attain your destination.

“Bear right” is another helpful hint, but different manufacturers seem to have different definitions for this statement.  How many degrees of course change constitute a “bear” as compared to a “turn” or a “follow the road?”  Was the last little bend the “bear right” or is that still ahead?  If you take your eyes off the road to look at the GPS screen, you may find out that the “bear right” referred to the extremely large, hairy guy in the Super Duty pick-up.  You know…the one you just tagged while not looking where you were going.

Translation notwithstanding, some proclamations are just designed to cause confusion.  “Move left and keep left, then keep left.” You know there’s a median over there, right?  I can see it on the screen that you know that.  How far left do you want me to go?  We could assume that one of the two left most lanes would be good for this instruction, until it’s followed by the suggestion, ”Prepare to exit right.”  Now what the hell do you do?!

I should point out here that speaking harshly to the GPS unit will NOT gain you an explanation or clarification of any sort.  It may increase your blood pressure but you’re still not getting any help.  Just sayin’.

The answer to my quandary of dealing with the GPS finally fell into place recently when my long owned unit told me to “prepare to drive straight.”  Prepare to drive straight?!”  REALLY?…

And suddenly, with clarity befitting full HD, it occurred to me – this is my spouse!  “Go this way!  Go that way!  Do this!”  Even if you’re doing it correctly, you need to do it correctly in a different way – perhaps MORE correctly!

And so, with this epiphany, I understand the best way to deal with the GPS language barrier.  Do your level best to understand or decipher the instructions.  If you get it wrong, the unit will “recalculate” and tell you the best way to proceed.

In other words, it will treat you like an idiot, just like it has to deal with you ALL THE TIME!

And you thought machines couldn’t learn anything!

          Personal Electronic Communication.

          These are the buzzwords for the coming decades – whether you capitalize them or not.  Actually, you can hear them buzzing and beeping and whistling and ringing everywhere you go.  The air is filled with assorted frequencies of electromagnetic waves radiating in all directions, missing your spleen by mere microns – some of them even passing through your head!

          This appalling situation can be traced back to two people…Adam and Eve.  No!  Though I guess we can blame pretty much everything on them if we could keep from having a literal and religious argument, that’s a little farther back than I meant to go.  The people I was thinking of were Alexander Graham Bell who, with his assistant Watson (a professional assistant who formerly worked for Sherlock Holmes) invented the telephone, and Marconi, who invented those little elbow noodles and also had something to do with radio…I think.  I believe it was the military that first united these two ideas into wireless communication.  For this reason, early on in this technology you were bombarded by radio waves generated mostly by military messages.  You may have heard these unrefined signals in your head by means of a paranormal phenomenon called, um, bio-electromagnetic reception, a known scientific effect, which I just made up.  It’s possible you mistook these messages for an announcement over the speaker system in one of those big department stores.

“Attention Maj…(garble, garble) systems int…(fuzz, pop) arg lnt ez fangle…over, thank you.”

          While this may be similar to what you heard in your head, the high-tech, state of the art electronic equipment used by the military at that time enabled the trained soldiers receiving the communications to hear, well, pretty much the same jumbled message.  The Signal Corps, however, sent these soldiers through intense screenings, serious testing and in-depth training to enable them to understand these messages.  This training program was so effective that it is employed today by fast food restaurants in teaching their employees to understand orders at the drive-through window.

          Thanks to these and several other technological advancements, such as additional expendable cash, you are today walking around in an atmosphere teeming with Captain Kirk-ular communication on all levels of society.  Calls ranging from top-level, multi-gazillion dollar business dealings to queries on the status of the monthly economic assistance check.  Many people don’t even have telephones, or, as they call them now, “land lines,” at home.  Because of that fact, you can no longer tell your boss you were outside, or you ran to the store or you couldn’t answer his call because you were at a PTA meeting and he can expect you to answer his call at any time of day. 

`Well, thank you very much!

And where can we aim our gratitude?  That would be the mobile or cellular phone, the precursor to the “communicator” used only by the “Federation” on Star Trek because the intergalactic service plan costs so much that only the government can afford the monthly fees.  The word “cellular” is a technical term which means that eventually, through dealer incentives, lower costs and a trained and knowledgeable sales force, even small one celled creatures like amoebas and various other intelligent microscopic organisms will own and operate these communication devices.  Unfortunately the development and mobilization of this area of science has also put wheels on other aspects of personal electronic communication.  The answering machine, for instance, has become a part of the service plans supplied by the cellular service carrier (a small service charge may apply per answered call – or after a base number of calls – or per month – or on any message received from cellular phones in AMC Gremlins – or…).  Yes, through modern technology you can now be out even when you’re not in. 

“I’m sorry, but Bob is at home now.  If you leave your name and number with a brief message, Bob will return your call the next time he’s gone.”

          Of course, you can use this service to screen your mobile calls the same way you used to when you only had a phone at home.  With this system there will soon be phone solicitors calling to sell you tires, lube jobs, new cars or even a better cellular plan…provided you give them the names and license numbers of all the friends and relatives you regularly call.

          Another phone pheature which took to traveling is the ignore idea.  This is more commonly and euphemistically known as the “hold” button.  Either way, you’re still being ignored.  The positive point to this is for the first time while on hold you can have something to do besides stare at a sink full of dirty dishes or look at the pile of paperwork on your desk.  Now you can dodge in and out of traffic at interstate speeds, a phone stuck in your ear with one hand, the other hand on the wheel and the cruise control set fast enough to get you to next week by tomorrow.  Oh, you could use the hands- free speaker phone mode, but the sound quality is somewhat lacking …to the point that no matter what you say, the person on the other end of the connection hears:

                     “bzzzzzt…ould you like fries with that?”

In addition, you can send a written message if you don’t want to actually converse with the people you’re talking to.  This is also a wonderful complementary option to other social networking options such as Facebook, MySpace, LookAtMe and HoldMyBeerAndWatchThis.    I believe it is spelled “d-i-s-t-r-a-c-t-e-d  d-r-i-v-i-n-g” by the insurance and law enforcement communities.

          Perhaps cellular headsets should be more available for motorists who spend a great deal of time on their phones.  This would allow them to place both hands on the wheel while they weave in and out of traffic accidents involving people who dodge in and out of traffic at interstate speeds with one hand…well, you get the idea.  Of course, it is entirely possible that these people fell asleep at the wheel – probably while they were on hold at cellular phone rates waiting for their party to answer, but that’s just a guess.  

I am coming to you today, and every day for that matter, via the amazing, magical, time saving world of electronics.  Let’s face it – no, you have to turn this way – it’s utterly fascinating what we can do thanks to something which, 50 years ago, was totally unheard of.  No, I don’t mean electronics itself.  Electronics, as the science of the movement and subsequent use of electricity, was initiated by Thomas Edison, who used it to power light bulbs or Benjamin Franklin, who used it to curl hair or God Himself, who used it to strike people down as early as the Old Testament.

Anyway, what I’m talking about is the level of technology we have today in the field of electronics.  Fifty years ago an electronic calculator was a nearly mystical piece of equipment about 1/2 the size of a typewriter and drawing enough current through a wall socket to operate 2 or 3 modern major kitchen appliances.  The machine could add, subtract, multiply and divide and print the answer on a little stone tablet (HA!  Just kidding.  Actually, it printed on a parchment scroll) – all for about 80 bucks.  Today a calculator, if you prefer not to use the one that’s part of your cell phone operating system, will fit in your wallet and operate on the excess light you’re not using at the time, running on less current than it takes to operate the average brain cell.  It will add, subtract, multiply, divide, figure square roots and further perform all sorts of numbery things you don’t even have a clue as to the purpose of – all for about $4.99.  Or, as a free gift with the purchase of a large soft drink.

The difference in cost stems mostly from the variation between the words “electric” and “electronic”.  “HA,” you say to yourself, because you are, after all, sitting by yourself or you wouldn’t be reduced to reading this article.  “How can a simple adjustment in spelling change the price of an item?”  Well, from THAT point of view, would you rather write a check to your IRA or one to the IRS, huh?  Big change, right?  But that’s not the point.  As an actual example I could, fifty years ago, have written this on an IBM Selectric typewriter, at the time a newfangled modern office implement, at a cost in inflation adjusted dollars, about what a BMW 3-series would cost you today.  This unit was electric by the fact that it had an electric servo-motor which lent power assistance to all the moving parts:  the keys, the hammers, the carriage, the paper, the ink, etc.  This relieved stress on the fingers, wrists and forearms after a long day spent typing and it also increased the speed at which a person could type.  In addition, it would correc… no, it would check the sp… well, typing is pretty much all it would do, basically.

Today we use computers for these functions – or word processors, which are small computers built for one function:  to generate documents.  As you may have suspected, the government has roughly 92.37% of all word processors in existence today, as evidenced by the number of “official” documents generated daily.  Actually, the newest wing of the capitol building houses no offices at all, but is a huge word processor spewing out documents for the legislative branch as fast as the paper can be loaded.  The military has their own word processors, which occupy the first and second sub-levels of the Chrysler building, er, Pentagon.  These documents are destroyed as soon as they’re printed, for purposes of secrecy.

Now, my computer is old.  As a matter of fact, by industry standards, my computer is archaic.  I believe it was manufactured by the Mesopotamian Electronics and Pyramid Co., LLC and required a specialized operating system to utilize English instead of hieroglyphics.  Still, it is electronic in nature, sending, at the touch of a key, an electronic signal from the keyboard into a little electronic file cabinet in the computer.  When you recall this information, the electronic signals run from the little file out to the printer which places that information on paper with very few moving parts – kinda’ like a state highway crew.

“Of course,” you say, “but just how do you adjust dollars for fifty years of inflation?”

Well, the easiest way to do this is to have a “program” for such calculations loaded in your computer.  This program is simply a list of instructions, electronic of course, which tell the machine what steps to take to figure out the answer to a specific problem, such as “which came first, the bacon or the egg?”  Are these instructions in there, stored in some electronic language written in electrons?  Yes, sort of.  This operating memory is stored on “microchips” in tiny, bitty switches.  The language of the computer is binary, which basically means the alphabet of the computer consists of zeros (0) and ones (1).  If you were to open your computer and use a really, really, really, REALLY big microscope, you would see the memory right there on the chip in 1’s and 0’s:

“_{10101000000011111101010001001111111010100000111110100100101010100100111010000001111110100100011101011101010110001110101011101000000001111110101010101101001001001111111010010010010100001000100100010001000100101000100010010100010010100000000111111111110100100101000010001000000000000111101001000100010010100010100000000111111010010011111101010100011111111100101000101000100100001001001000100101000010010010010100100100100001001111010101000100100010001001001001001001000100100010000010111111101010001001000100100010010101000101010010101001″}

which, as everyone knows, is the typing exercise “the quick red fox jumped over the lazy brown dog.”  Actually, that’s not true.  If you were to open your computer, like most of the rest of us who are, largely, mechanical morons, you would probably just drop your screwdriver into the main processor, arcing to the primary power supply and fry the whole unit.  I would suggest you take my word for it.

Naturally, each word in a two letter alphabet is quite long and requires a great deal of memory.  However, since the computer “thinks” at the speed of electricity flow it can zip through these long statements faster than the human mind can decide between regular and decaffeinated.  Also, because the computer is not distracted by outside noise, kids, hunger, drowsiness, stress, cute guys or large breasted brunettes it doesn’t have to go back to read that last paragraph over again and again.

And it can go through long strings of comparisons with an efficiency about 18 gazillion times greater than humans.

Obviously this is an over-simplification, but it gives you an idea of how the computerization and miniaturization of electronics operates.  It is based on the near-light-speed flow of electrons, the conductivity of silicon chips and the ability of manufacturing to reproduce these fascinating items quickly and inexpensively…  Essentially, it has something to do with magic.

From this point in the technology we can see it was only a short step to apply these principles to other, more advanced applications.  Today we have computer systems in automobiles constantly monitoring and adjusting key systems.  Televisions have small processors to check and maintain the picture quality on your screen.  Even exercise equipment is computerized so you can tell how many more hours you have to spend putting your knees behind your ears before you lose those extra pounds and look like the actor hired to portray the real person who lost 87 pounds in 7 weeks and won some handsome person contest and married another rich handsome person and made the person on whom they had a crush, but who ignored them for years, live to regret their mistake (satisfaction guaranteed provided you exercise with the device regularly and follow the enclosed diet plan, these results not typical).

Even the cell phone you carry every day is a technological electronic marvel which makes phone calls, sends texts, updates social media, holds your calendar, notes, music, videos and still has more processing power left than my old computer ALL in a small, hand-held package which would actually be useful except the typing keys are too small to actually use.