Directions

At what price though?

Some days I feel like this country’s going to shits.

There’s one fugitive on the loose, there’s one crime in a safe shopping mall, there’s one listed company that’s pissed off a hitherto loyal customer, and the most commonly used online streetdirectory is no more.

The last point is something close to my heart. I use the internet for everything. When Naomi tells me the toilet flush is broken, she sees me a few seconds later at the computer, and asks me if I’m trying to scour online forums for people with similar flush defects and how to fix them, and I say yes because the internet is an authority on everything, including why there was no CCTV inside the toilet at the Whitley Road Detention Centre.

Maps and streetdirectories are extremely important, given the price of fuel – you don’t want to go round and round like in an F1 race or an empty ferris wheel and get nowhere.

Thank goodness there’s Google Maps and Nokia Maps, both of which do a reasonably good job of letting me know where I’m going, and whether I’m on or off track.

Google Maps is particularly cool if you’ve got cash to burn on your data subscription with your mobile phone company. I pay a fixed rate to Starhub, and on my Nokia E65 that doesn’t have a built in GPS, the application still tells me where I am within a 1.7km radius. Which means you can be lost, but not hopelessly lost.

Both applications also allow you to prepare your driving routes before you head out, with planned routes, and in the case of Nokia Maps, a voice navigation (subscription based), tells you to turn left or right or go straight, so you can memorise the directions before going out, just like when you were using streetdirectory.com.

Last week, we were only half an hour late going to pick up Naomi’s mum from her home, because I was at home ensuring we would go the shortest distance in the shortest time based on what the mapping software told me.

My brother thought of a cool prank – record your voice saying turn left, turn right and go straight and save it as a ring tone and set it on one of your friend’s GPS enabled phones, and call him when he’s driving.

OK, maybe not so cool. OK, maybe a bit dangerous. Let me go tell him it’s not so funny any more.

But yeah, no need for streetdirectory.com. Their interface sucked anyway, and their pages were chock full of ads you had to navigate through before you could help navigate yourself.

Useful link: Lancerlord provides (via Indian Stallion) a list of online maps you can use.