Leibson's Law

I just read Jack Ganssle’s column “Misguided” on his recent GPS woes. Today’s my first day at work after a week and a half car trip of nearly 2000 miles, heavily relying on my V7 NAV730 GPS unit. It was invaluable, but not infallible, so I have written my own blog entry on GPS. (Note: I’ve written about my GPS unit before: NAV730 GPS is my Copilot.)

First, the good:

1. The GPS nearly always was right. It took us to places we’d never have found with a map. It did so efficiently and quickly, when it worked.

2. Together with the Internet, we boldly went to restaurants in strange places we’d never have gone without the GPS, such as the hole-in-the-wall Hunan Plaza Restaurant, in the basement of a building on the town square in Arcata, California. Pretty good food, very funky ambiance. Just right for us. By the way, the reverse GPS/Internet connection works well too. There’s a statue of US president William McKinley in the center of the Arcata town square. Why? Just ask Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McKinley_statue).

3. The NAV730 is tiny, about the size of a pack of cards. I always remove it from the car and holster it when I leave, especially because there has been a recent rash of break-ins and thefts of GPS units from cars in my condo. I guess GPS theft is to the naughties what car-stereo thefts were to the 1970s and 1980s. I like not having the GPS built into the car. It’s portable and inexpensively replaceable.

Now, the bad:

1. The GPS sometimes gave me bad routes. We were driving through Fulton, California and were about to enter Highway 101. It was a simple “turn-right-onto-the-ramp-and-enter-the-freeway” sort of route. But the GPS didn’t understand this for some reason and wanted us to turn left before reaching Highway 101 and then asked us to perform some sort of vehicular arabesque. For these sorts of routes, which seem to occur in the more remote regions, common sense must override the GPS recommendation, as Jack notes. Because my GPS speaks directions to me, I usually reply “I don’t think so” out loud using a snarky voice so that my passengers know I’m not slaved to the device and am not following the NAV730’s commands.

2. Several times over the course of the trip, with no action on my part, a blue window popped up with the message “Fatal Error Occurred, Rebooting” and the GPS would go off line for a couple of minutes. It would reboot into a command screen and I’d have to manually push the “navigation” icon to put the device back into the proper mode (as opposed to playing MP3 files or video). Now the NAV730 runs Windows CE 5.0 and I’ll not comment on Microsoft’s OS crashiness versus other OSes. Suffice it to say that when we stuff ginormous operating systems in these embedded devices, memory leaks and other bad software things happen and the devices crash. It seems to be the forced tradeoff between high-function operating systems with lots of graphics and I/O support and lean operating systems that crash less often (but still crash at the most inconvenient times, like on Mars).

3. The GPS isn’t always up to date. One hotel we stayed at in McKinleyville, California was “off the map.” The hotel was located on a road that had obviously been built less than a couple of years ago. Yet the GPS blithely and confidently routed us to a nearby street with a similar name. Fortunately, the hotel’s signage overrode the GPS’ determination to send us astray. A day later, the GPS failed to find a destination address for a house clearly built before the GPS maps were made. The street was there in the GPS’ map data base, but the GPS recognized a range of addresses for that street that didn’t include the target house. We got close enough however. This “out of address range” error happens to me often enough so that it’s irritating because the GPS merely complains “Address out of range” and I have to guess an address that will satisfy the unit and get me close to my actual destination.

4. In Monte Rio, California, the GPS attempted to save us a little time by taking a short cut off of Route 116, a nice and level 2-lane blacktop road in good condition, and instead directed us up a sketchy gravel road that went nearly straight up a hill only to reconnect with Route 116 on the other side of the hill. “I don’t think so” I said, common sense coming into play as I followed the convoy of cars I found myself driving in.

In all, I am still delighted to have the NAV730 GPS. For $129.99, it’s very useful. However, it doesn’t replace good navigational skills and common sense. Neither do calculators, spreadsheets, or spelling checkers, but I like having those too.