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.