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There are also waking moments when I have concerns about finding my car. BWI airport has dozens of huge parking lots, and there was an occasion when I spent considerable time wandering to find my car. It felt like a bad dream, only it wasn't. The fact is that I have never lost a car.  The fact is that I have not run out of gas in probably 20 years, but I do think about it when the gas gauge approaches empty. The fact is that I have not had a flat or broken down on the road in a long, long time.  But if I hear a strange noise it is concerning.

The other day I was browsing the flood of applications available for my HTC Android Incredible smart phone. I noticed one called "Car Locator" and bought it for $3.98. It is just amazing, especially for less money than a Caramel Macchiato at Starbucks.

When you step out of your parked car, you touch a prompt to save the location. When you get ready to return, your phone can take you there. It gives you the direction and exact distance. Then it shows a map with a green dot at your location and a red one where your car is parked. It also shows a "radar screen" that updates as you approach. It appears to work flawlessly. You can also send this information to another phone or computer, save notes about it, or set a timer to alert you if you need to return by a certain time. 

What will they think of next? Who can tell? There seem to be no limits on human ingenuity and resourcefulness.

No limits until you observe the great dichotomy here. As individuals or in small groups, people can devote themselves to difficult tasks and often work wonders. But as societies, especially democratic ones, we fumble around in a daze. Like a bad dream of loosing your car.

A recent poll by the Washington Post/ABC news finds that 77 percent of us think the military "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy should be done away with. But our elected leaders have argued, wrangled, postured, and been unable to make a decision on this for months, even years. The policy itself defies any common sense. It entices gay people to serve in the military by making it illegal for recruiters to ask them about their sexual orientation. But after they join, they can be dismissed for revealing it. This makes as much sense as forbidding the army from asking if you came from Mississippi, but kicking you out in disgrace if they later discover that you did.

This is a current example, but others abound.

We know many things are broken and need fixing, but as a society we lack the collective will to do so. We keep driving on bad roads, overcrowding the prisons, fighting useless wars, spending beyond our means, and watching our health care decline even as the cost of it soars. We keep falling behind the rest of the world in education and blaming each other as if that would fix the problem. We continue to spoil and pollute our once beautiful land. Predatory lenders and investment schemers profit without restriction.  The rich get richer, the poor poorer, and fewer and fewer remain in the middle. We hand over our liberties to those who promise to make us safer. Distortion and lies are accepted and news and information. Equal justice is a fanciful notion because the more money you spend in court the better deal you get. As individuals or small groups we may be caring and generous, but our social order remains based on greed and exploitation of the helpless. People who would shrink from killing or torturing another human being personally give it wholehearted support when practiced by the group.

It would be nice if loosing a car was our biggest challenge.

The upside of having a GPS in your car is that you’re never lost.  The downside is that you’ll be lost without it.  Increasingly you’ll become dependent on this electronic guide and pay for it by degrading your “sense of direction.”  Marshall McLuhen described this phenomenon in his 1967 best-selling “The Medium Is the Message.”  One of his illustrations was use of the microphone.  The microphone greatly extends the power and range of a speaker or singer’s voice.  But in the process the person becomes a microphone-dependent and will need one each time she speaks or performs.  I pay this price gladly with my GPS.

My GPS is a portable unit.  The advantage of a portable is that you can keep it when you trade cars and you can use it in multiple cars, including rentals. You can carry it in your luggage on airplanes and then use it in a rental car upon landing.  Built in units generally have larger screens and are less prone to theft.

A GPS draws on information from two main sources.  It communicates with satellites to determine location, and it draws from a database of its own to display roads, lakes, restaurants, and many other points of interest.  The satellite information is constantly updated.  The map information stored locally will get out of date unless it’s kept current.  For my unit, a one-time update with the current road information costs about $50.  You can also purchase lifetime updates for about twice that.  Updates are conveniently done over the Internet through a USB connection to your computer.  You can also download and install newer versions of the software and different voices for giving you directions.  I’m partial to the lady with the British accent, although the Australian man is good for a change.  One thing you need to figure out early is how to mute the sound.  There can be times when the spoken directions are both unneeded and distracting.  The on-screen directions are enough for many occasions.

If you do get a portable unit, I suggest you experiment to find the best location in your car.  My unit came with a sandbag mount and a suction cup mount that sticks to glass.  After trying the locations those would allow, I searched on Ebay and found a suction cup mount with a long flexible stem that would let me position the GPS right below my rear view mirror.  It also placed it closer than the other options.  Then I came upon my present solution, again from Ebay, that mounts the unit on a device that clips to one of the air vents.  Bingo.  Having placement options are another advantage of the portables.

The most obvious and common use of a GPS is to find your way to an unknown address.  You put in the address, touch “go,” and follow the directions to get there.  If you make a wrong turn, the GPS detects it and immediately recalculates and tells you what to do.  Fast recalculation is one of the big improvements from the early models.  You can use it to your advantage when you know things about your route that the GPS may not.  You may know that the proposed route has construction going on.  All you need to do is start out another way and the GPS will soon adjust everything based on your insistence.  Remember that it is working for you and not the other way around.

Your GPS will likely have more features than you want or need.  But you may be missing out on some really useful stuff if you don’t try these out and at least see what they can do.

The main menu of my unit is pretty typical.  “Address” is where you set up a location you need to go to.  You can later name and save the location for use at a later time.  “Go Home” allows you to set up your home address and then be directed there with one touch of the screen.  I like to use this feature to see how the GPS proposes to get me home, even when I know quite well how to get there myself.  The route I would take may not be the best.  I have learned many shortcuts and saved time and gasoline by using the GPS routinely in territory I’ve been traveling for years.

“Food, Lodging” gives you a search for restaurants, gas stations, parks, and anything you can locate with a key word such as “hotel” or “stage” or whatever.  You can even search on partial words.  There’s a built in hierarchy for commercial locations that lets you, for example, search on all restaurants or just for those listed under “Chinese food.”  Search results are returned already sorted with the nearest locations first and the distance already calculated.  An arrow also shows the general direction from where you are.  When you click on one of these results you will often have a phone number in addition to the street address.  Being able to call ahead with the phone number can be really useful.  My wife is a knitter and sometimes when we are traveling will type in “knit” and see what nearby shops come up.  She has learned to call ahead and get information before investing in a 10 mile detour.

“Recently Found” is a highly useful function.  All of the results of your previous searches are saved here for future use, sorted with the latest being at the top.  This helps you out if you need to go back to a location you forgot to save for future use.

“Favorites” is where you do save locations for future use.  I think my GPS will keep 500 or so of these.  As with your computer, when in doubt SAVE!  It’s easy to do and you can always delete any saved locations.  By default, you can quickly save using the street address only.  But taking the time to save as “Joe’s Garage” instead of “35112 Broad Street” will be better for future reference.  “Intersections” may be helpful in getting you somewhere you don’t have an address for, but can get close by defining a nearby intersection.  The small “Near . . .” prompt is extremely useful in planning advance travel.  If you search on “Marriott” the GPS thinks you want the one nearest your present location.  Using “Near . . .” you can ask to see those in Nashville or Denver.

This brings me to a use of the GPS that by itself is worth the cost of purchase.  Before I go on any vacation or travel involving an automobile, I do research and set up everything I can in advance using the “Favorites” feature.  The most convenient way to do this is to remove the unit from the car and take it inside where your computer is located.  (A portable GPS will run on its own rechargeable battery for several hours.  It doesn’t need to be attached to a car to fully function.)  Then you can do Google or Travelocity or other searches and input the results as GPS favorites.

For example, our last vacation was to British Columbia.  We flew to Vancouver, rented a car, and took a ferry to Vancouver Island.  We stayed in Victoria, Ucluelet, and Courtenay before crossing to the Sunshine Coast, lodging in Sechelt, then driving up to Whistler, and finally back to Vancouver.  I made reservations and marked the locations of all our lodging, researched nearby attractions and points of interest and marked them.  I carefully marked the location of the car rental location at the Vancouver Airport–highly useful on the return.

These marked locations are not only useful for initially finding places, they also assist in “free roaming.”  I love to head off like an explorer and do just that–explore.  With the GPS you can do this and never be lost.  Take any turn you wish, follow any signs to something that sounds interesting, and when you’re ready to go back, just select your motel from the favorites and instruct the GPS to take you there.  Since we have plans to return to BC again, I’ve saved all these marked locations in case we revisit some.

My GPS came with maps for North America.  You can purchase and install maps for other parts of the world as well.

I guess you can tell I’m sold on this amazing technology.  I seldom leave home without it.

1. To set up iGoogle, just go to google.com, download, and install in your browser.  I suggest Firefox.  After you install, make this your browser home page so that anytime you click the “home” icon it will load.
2. Also go to delicious.com and set up Delicious bookmarks (free) including installing the toolbar icons.  Using Delicious gives you access to all your bookmarks from any computer.
3. Once installed, Delicious give you a sidebar navigation to your bookmarks folders.  When you click on one of your named folders, its contents gets sorted out and listed in the window below (in this case “movies”).
4. iGoogle gives you easy access to Google searches, both basic and advanced.
5. “Add stuff” provides a huge choice of widgets (like “Google Map Search”) you can add to your desktop.  You can easily add, try them, them remove if you wish.
6. You can change the header graphic using this prompt.  I selected the one you see because it reminds me of roads in Cades Cove, Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
7. I simply LOVE Google Docs and the fact that you can create and store them online and have instant access to them anywhere in the world you are located.  Add this using “add stuff” just like any other.
8. I used to keep to-do lists on little pocket notebooks.  This widget has made a much better replacement.
9. If you use Gmail, your mail is accessible using this widget.  I think there are also widgets for other mail systems such as AOL.
10. You may often maximize one of the widgets to use it.  Clicking “home” restores your desktop and this toolbar also lets you navigate around among the widgets you have installed.
11. I also use the free Firefox toolbar and find the AutoFill function especially time-saving.  Firefox is available for both PC and Mac and can be downloaded from firefox.com.