Tag Archives: GPS

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GPS fails me … grrrr!

DRIPPING SPRINGS, Texas — I won’t spend a lot of time with this post, but here goes …

My normally reliable GPS, upon which I depend to blunder my way from point to point, let me down today as my son and I drove from North Texas to my brother-in-law’s home in Hays County.

No need to regale you with where it guided me. Suffice to say that I ended up in downtown Austin after getting caught in traffic. OK, so some of it was my fault; I could have positioned myself to be in the correct lane. Except that the GPS took me a way to my bro-in-law’s place with which I was unfamiliar.

The system does that to me on occasion. I guess it assesses current traffic conditions and then adjusts my route accordingly.

It just didn’t work this time.

But … we arrived and we’ll get caught up for the next day or so before we head for the house.

I think I will simply rely on the route I know well.

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Smart phone is smarter than I thought

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ON THE HIGHWAY BETWEEN HOLBROOK AND PAYSON, Ariz. — You’ve heard already about my addiction to my cell phone.

I’m about to tell you about another discovery my wife and I have made about this annoying device.

It has a Global Positioning System, which is good.

My wife programmed the GPS to guide us to our destination in Mesa, Ariz. Her cell phone, which is identical to mine, charted a route to our destination. It gave us the road directions and posted an estimated time of arrival, just like the other GPS devices we own.

Then it started beeping at us — or, more to the point, at me.

Why the beeping noise? The phone knew how fast I was driving and was beeping at me, the driver, to remind me that I was exceeding the speed limit. Not by a lot, mind you. If the speed limit on the highway was 65 mph, and I was traveling at 66 mph, four loud beeps went off.

This phone not only is smart, it’s damn smart. So smart, in fact, that it’s smartness annoyed the daylights out of me as we made our way through some gorgeous mountainous Arizona countryside.

I’ve noted already that I haven’t yet gotten acquainted with all the “apps” available for use on my cell phone. My wife, who keeps insisting she isn’t very tech-savvy, actually understates her expertise with these devices. She’s much better at finding various uses for the cell phone than I do.

I appreciated her finding the GPS in her cell phone. I do not appreciate the smart-alecky device reminding me with all those beeps that it’s watching me like a hawk.