A good Sunday...

While the GpsDrive program appears to work well, my attempt this afternoon to take the laptop and the GPS for a spin in Drew's car ran into two major problems.

First, the ouput from the LCD screen is overpowered by the ambient light. Unless you feel like sitting in the car with a blanket over your head, you can't see a thing. Second - and this was the controlling factor today - the battery on the eSlate is good for little more than a couple of minutes, and we could not find the dingus that plugs into the cigarette lighter and provides 120-VAC at the other end.

So, I went back to seeing if I could get the data I need with the NEC-8201. I was able to do that, but the combination of the GPS, the interface cord, the adapters to plug the cord into the NEC and the computer itself - while suitable for automotive use - is still too bulky to use on foot. The only real solution here is to use something that will run on a Palm. I have a book that provides a sample GPS application, but it only goes so far as to display coordinates on the screen in text mode; I'd have to tweak the application to allow for coordinates to be captured, preferably with some notation as to what is notable about the location.

* * *The pending translation took about 7 hours, as I did a lot of research on some arcane terminology having to do with turbopump assemblies for liquid-propellant rocket engines. It finally got done, and I sent the file off to Igor.

* * *Dinner was an impromptu affair (as it so often at our house). I made a mushroom soup with last year's dried boletes, supplemented with some store-bought dried shiitake mushrooms. As we had no potatoes, we made up the vegetable part of the soup with some frozen mixed vegetables and then added some strange pasta I bought a while back that Galina initially thought was rice.

While pawing through the freezer, we ran across some cuts of beef, which we defrosted and then grilled. It was a nice meal.

* * *After dinner, I sat down with Galina and we played some Ca$hFlow. She ended up being a mechanic, making peanuts, and I drew the card that made me an engineer, with a suitably high salary (and suitably high - and murderous - expenses). She bought and sold a house and used the profit to buy a deal that put her on the "fast track," while I sat and accumulated a bit of money, and actually acheieved 60% of my goal (to have passive income exceed expenses), but I ran out of time as she racked up deals on the fast track.

The game took us less than two hours, and as is the case every time I play the game, I end up thinking hard about how to get out of the real-life "rat race" that we find ourselves in.

It's something to sleep on, at least.

Cheers...