Text 1963, 61 rader
Skriven 2006-06-05 10:43:10 av DAVE SACERDOTE (1:123/140)
     Kommentar till en text av DALE SHIPP
Ärende: Re: A Visit With The For
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DSac> Plenty of signs announcing the shad bake,
DSac> none of which noted the address of the school.  Grrrrr.  We drove

DSh> Wonder if the Magellan would have helped?   I expect that 
DSh> Burton had it in his car.

Okay, now I'm going to tell The Magellan Story.

On Friday night, Burt drove when we went to Empire Buffet.  On the 
way home, we set up the Magellan and burt punched in my address so
we could see how it worked, and it was pretty cool except for a 
small glitch in the database that wanted to send us around the
block instead of into my driveway.  Minor, and up to then pretty
much the only flaw I saw in the software.  I was pretty impressed,
actually, to the point of checking out prices (it wouldn't be a
necessity for me, though, just a toy, so I can't justify it.)

Anyway, the next day, to go to Essex, I suggested that we bring
the Magellan with us since I remembered last year and having a 
little difficulty finding the place back then.  The only thing
Madge needs is a powerpoint - it's completely portable.

I asked Burt first to plug in the address for Office Depot in
Manchester and promised I'd follow the turn-by-turn voice.  The
original instructions, when we previewed them, were exactly the
route I normally take to that shopping area; but for some reason
the wrong adress loaded from the phone book (I believe it was a 
PEBKAC error*) and it took us off the highway and onto a deadend
street in Windsor.  Checking the destination programmed, however,
soon showed that we had told Madge to bring us to some guy's 
house on the dead end street.  [Lynn said we should knock on the
guy's door and demand to know why our GPS had brought us to
him, heh.]  We set the correct destination and then the only
problem was that Madge wanted us to get off the freeway, follow
a US route for 1/2 a mile, and then get back on the same freeway.

In Essex, Madge was helpless, thanks to the quaint New England
custom of having "villages" within  towns (my town, for example,
is Enfield, but within Enfield there is Thompsonville, North
Thompsonville, Enfield, Scitico, Shaker Pines, and Hazardville.)
The Essex Elementary School is in the village of Centerbrook.
We had no street address for the school (and none was noted on
the signs or the tickets) and when Madge searched the database
simply for "elementary schools" near "Essex [Town Of]" it brought
up something like 2000 schools from a huge swatch of southcentral
CT from Middletown to the Sound.

Burt joked that he was glad he wasn't trying to sell us one, but
despite the small problems it was pretty cool even if at times
we thought it should have been named after Corrigan instead of
Magellan.**


* - PEBKAC:  Problem Exists Between Keypad And Chair

** - Youngsters may wish to Google "Douglas Corrigan".

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