Yeah, it’s a shit picture, but hey… at least I bought it. It had occurred to me, as I clicked to buy this thing, that this was not only cutting a rug out of my wallet but that there were obviously a great many tasks ahead of me that I hadn’t even thought of. I have no doubt that Avery will love this thing until a) it falls the fuck apart or b) he grows out of it and into a bigger one. No doubts there. I’ve had more than a few people question me on my decision to go through with this, but it just doesn’t seem like that big of a deal to me. If he learns something and has fun with it, that’s all I really give a shit about. Will I feel like a complete and utter fucking tool if he drives it once and hates it? Probably. But that’s improbable and so I put it out of my mind.

A new feature for the season on rob-morrow.com is the inclusion of a cost counter to see just how commercialized Hallowthankschristmas is becoming. This should be no shock to most people, but I’ve never really monitored how much I spend on my son in a given year. With that in mind, the first entry…

Avery Christmas Counter: 1 present, $1000 spent.

I received my GPS receiver yesterday in the mail and I spent most of last night learning about NMEA and GPS standards. I’m a little dismayed at how long it takes for the receiver to get three locks to triangulate my position, but I finally figured out that it doesn’t work exactly like wireless (which easily passes through walls because it’s a hell of a lot closer than three miles away, which is the approximate distance into the sky that GPS satellites are locked into an asynchronous orbit) and so it would take a minute or two to connect through three floors worth of house and many, many, many feet into the air. As an experiment I walked outside and had a lock in under a second. Figures. It’s no longer the season to be sitting outside and it’s now that I’m choosing to start work on the navigational systems for my upcoming nMotion in-car PC project.

I must say, however, that programming for GPS is remarkably easy. I had a library (re-usable, accessible code) built by the night’s end that could not only give me my coordinates, but give them to me on a map. Seems paltry until you consider that I have to hand create everything, as opposed to just running Microsoft Streets and Trips. Werd.