I received my Garmin C330 Street Pilot yesterday and I've gotta say that it works great! So far I'm pretty happy with it. There are a couple of small things that I'm not thrilled about but they are probably not directly related to my model... I think these are things that are inherent of all GPS systems. I've summarized a short list of the things I've noticed:

1. The maps are out of date, I don't know by how long? I was hoping that this would be alleviated by updating through the USB cable, but it seems that it is still out of date by at least 6 or 8 months.
2. I purposefully missed some turns so that the re-calculation would take affect and there are times when the GPS system takes me out of the way. I assume that this has something to do with a ranking order with the roads that the GPS has in it's maps.
3. Exits are a bit dicey. There is an exit where I live that has three possible off ramp directions and the GPS voice dictation was confusing though the visual dictation not as much. I'm not sure how well I would have been able to follow these directions if I had not been familiar with the area.
   

I'll keep posting here with other findings too. All in all I'm glad that I did purchase a GPS system. I can't wait to put it to the test when I drive to the Monday Night football game.

-Warren

You really have to love open source software.

I was listening to a podcast called Windows Weekly with Paul Thurrott and Leo Laporte. I usually listen to this podcast weekly as there are pretty interesting topics centered around the world of Microsoft. This week I learned of an interesting little application called Handbrake. According to the Handbrake website:

"Handbrake is an Open-Source, GPL-licensed, multiplatform, multithreaded DVD to MPEG-4 Converter, available for Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows."

I have a video ipod so I was interested in what I might be able to do with this fine little app. I downloaded Handbrake and I investigated what it can do. It turns out that it can encode video for most every device from Apple Tv to PSP. It also makes it very easy to create the video for your device because there are "Presets" built into Handbrake. So I chose the preset for ipod at high rez and then proceeded to select a VIDEO_TS folder for the source of my video. (I own a copy of the matrix so I ripped it to my hard drive using AnyDVD)

I placed the .m4v file in a movies folder under my itunes program folder and simply imported it from within itunes. I synced my ipod and Voilà the video displays perfect on the ipod and weighs in around 1.5 Gig (high rez). There are actually two options for ipod video. One option is high rez and the other is low rez. The low rez version weighs in around 850 Mb.

I just think this is the coolest little application! Check it out.

-Warren

I've been meaning to purchase a GPS system for a while now. This past summer I did quite a bit of traveling and got lost quite a few times. I always print out my directions before the trip using google maps. Let me tell you, as I'm sure a lot of you will agree, it's not fun when you have to get back on an interstate just to reverse your directions.

Recently I purchased tickets to a Monday Night football game, Buffalo Bills vs. Dallas Cowboys in Buffalo. I'm leaving Monday morning and I've got about a 5 hour drive to get to Buffalo and then find the stadium, plus I'll probably have to find a hotel either near the stadium or more closer to home... the game starts at 8:30 and ends about 11:30. Well... as you can imagine I'm not keen on getting lost in Buffalo at 11:30 at night.

All of this has prompted me to start looking for GPS solutions. I was browsing the web and noticed that Cicuit City had a Refurbished Garmin StreetPilot c330 GPS Receiver which was 300.00 cheaper just because it was refurbished... This particular model had pretty good customer ratings so I decided to give it a go and purchased it. I probably wouldn't have purchased a GPS if I couldn't get it so cheap.

I'll be interested to see how my trip goes without pre-printed google maps. I plan to use the upcoming week to practice using it. If anyone reading this post has anything to say about Garmin or this model in general please post a comment.

I'll also post more about my trip when I return.

-Warren

Well... more than 1 year since I've posted... gotta admit I'm a slacker, not just on my blog but on almost everything else too!

Let's see where do I begin catching up all you non-readers.

I've recently purchased a new Dell computer, a Dimension E520 with a dual core processor and 2 Gigs of RAM... this thing is quite a step forward from what I was using... but I wont go into detail on that though I don't want to bore all you people who might be reading this :-)

One of the first things I did with this new machine is partition the heck out of it. I usually create a C: partition with about 20 Gig of space just for the core Windows installation (gotta leave room for all those updates)... I also create a E: partition 150 Gig for all installed applications and I create a D: partition 50 Gig for all virtual machines. (by the way I now wish I had reversed my space allocations and gave E: 50 Gig and D: 150 Gig) I run VMWare as my virtual machine platform... If you know anything about VMWare you know that there are a lot of capabilities. I've never been a fan of dual boot configurations instead I prefer virtual machines. I'll go into more detail on how I use VMWare in a later post.

I'm also still heavy into web development. As many of you know Adobe has purchased Macromedia. Adobe has also purchased one of my favorite 3rd party extension developers InterAKT. I haven't really used the new CS3 suite as of yet. I simply don't want to fork over all the cash at this point. I'm just starting to get into ColdFusion 8 so I'll be posting more about my experiences with it as I use it more.

This summer we purchased a vinyl fence from Lowes and they also installed it. The experience from start to finish with Lowes was a 6 on a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being very pleasant. Parts were missing, deadlines were broken and the project manager was a jerk! (the jerk part takes two points away)

Other than this skimpy update there have been other changes and events that I haven't mentioned but I'll post more later.

-Warren