The Oppenheimer Report - 6/25/12

Do you use a GPS in your daily travels? My wife Shauna has been trying to get me to use one now for three or four years, and I still prefer a decent map. The best GPS I owned was my first, an enormous Garmin, and it was Bluetooth enabled. The reason it was so big was that it had a great speaker. By the way, how did someone come up with Bluetooth as a term for wireless? I’ve got a new term I’ll call “Browntooth.” If something is Browntooth capable, that means it is codger friendly. I used that big GPS mainly as a hands free device for my cell phone and it worked fine. Infrequently I used it for navigation, usually if I was trying to get home from some unfamiliar location. Sadly it broke, probably because the suction cup which held it to the windshield kept letting go. After it dropped on the dashboard about forty times, it finally ceased to function. I have yet to find one of those windshield mounts that works properly, and the GPS always drops off when I’m least prepared to deal with it, frequently while I’m driving in traffic. I have owned two GPS devices since that first Garmin and both have been completely unsatisfactory. The problem I have with GPS devices is the problem I have with all new technology. Designed to make our lives easier, it often does just the opposite. My wife will spend an average of three minutes programming hers to guide her to a destination she should know by heart, only to discover that the location does not exist, because she has not performed the necessary, ongoing, and often time-consuming computer map updates. Don’t even get me started on the software glitches involved with that annoying task. Currently I own a TomTom and it might be the worst electronic device I have ever owned. This thing makes a salad shooter look indispensable. First of all, it is decidedly not Browntooth capable (i.e. codger friendly); requiring four or five steps on multiple screens (they all use touch screens, which I find annoying) to accomplish simple functions. Secondly, it malfunctions constantly. The latest problem is that it will not turn on. Even when it is plugged into an electrical source, it will not stay on, indicating to me the inaccessible rechargeable battery is kaput. When it did work, the most maddening glitch was that its Bluetooth (hands free) function periodically went haywire. Sometimes I’d be using the speaker function and the thing would go nuts, sounding a bit like a audio CD that is skipping. When this happened, it froze like a computer, and I could not even turn down the volume. This of course is horribly distracting when one is barreling down the highway at 65MPH. I think one day soon I will videotape myself batting this device into oblivion with my Louisville Slugger, and then post the video on YouTube. The catharsis will be worth every penny of it’s vastly depreciated value, and I‘ll wager other disgruntled codgers will empathize. As I said, give me a can with a string and a map.

June 20 has come and gone, and the first day of summer was a scorcher. Celsius is confusing to me; give me the real temperature. I’ve grown up with Fahrenheit readings and it’s all I understand. Multiply by this and divide by that and add 32 … that’s too much work for me. We’ve had a lot of crazy pop up thunderstorms up here in the GWN, with deluges of rain. Last Thursday there were damaging winds throughout Ontario. Down the road from us someone reported car-damaging hail. Last week I had our snowplow guy Harvey come by to fell some of our dead trees. With the winds we’ve been experiencing, it‘s just a matter of time before one of them falls over our driveway. The guy is over 70 and he can fell and cut up a tree in about the time it takes me to start my chainsaw. They grow ‘em tough up here.

In the news, former Penn State assistant coach Jerry Sandusky was convicted last week of 45 counts of sexual abuse on young men. It amazes me that so many complaints went unaddressed for so many years, but I guess nobody wants to mess with a winning football team. Somehow the defense argument that all his victims were looking for some kind of windfall did not fly with the jury, and Sandusky will likely spend the rest of his life in prison. I give him six months in the general prison population before some vigilante gives him a mortal “wedgey.” Nobody likes a child molester. Mohamad Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood is the new president of Egypt, and it will be fascinating to see how the balance of power shifts in that country. The Arab Spring might be over and it could be a long hot summer. And Syria just shot down a Turkish jet, increasing tensions in the Middle East. Final weather note: Will Debby do Dallas? Tropical Storm Debby is dumping copious amounts of rain on the Gulf Coast, but is it headed for Texas as a much bigger storm? Perhaps my next GPS will be able to tell me. Tyuh!

　



Written by Jamie Oppenheimer c2012 ALL RIGHTS RSERVED