I seem to have a thing lately for posts griping about the state of technology. Here’s another thing that bugs me.

I own a GPS. It’s a couple years old, but it has maps of the entire US, and can give text-to-speech directions. It also has WAAS support to help improve the accuracy of GPS. (That receiving signals from space can pinpoint my location to a few feet is pretty marvelous, if you think about it.) A few of the roads are wrong, but not really around here, just when I was driving to a conference at Clark a couple years ago. It gives me excellent directions, and can seamlessly recalculate when I take a wrong turn or overrule it.

I also own a good smartphone. It has 3G Internet access. It can determine my position, but not very well. It accesses Google Maps, so the maps are continually updated. It also pulls in traffic data, from wherever Google gets it. It also has a database of everyone I know and their address, plus the app on the iPhone is really slick at allowing me to put in “Pizza” and showing me all the nearby establishments. It can show me satellite imagery, which is occasionally handy.

It can do turn-by-turn directions, but I have to manually hit “Next,” and the font is tiny. It’s bailed me out once or twice, but usually only enough to get me to a couple steps of the way before I have to pull over and try to read what it’s telling me. Plus, if you take a wrong turn, it won’t ever adjust. Selecting “Wherever the heck I am right now” as the “From” location is counter-intuitive. Oh, and sometimes it does foolish things like assuming that, if I’m 500 feet past an exit on the highway, I can still take the exit, or it shows me driving on the wrong side of the highway, or having abruptly jumped from the highway to a parallel road. Maybe it’s just a function of not having very good accuracy.

If someone could merge the two devices, it would be amazing. A GPS that always had accurate maps. A GPS that would give directions and recalculate the route if I took a wrong turn. A GPS that knew about traffic, and would reroute you. A GPS that knew where your friends lived, or would let you look things up. A GPS that didn’t use 10-point font when it knew I was driving 70 miles an hour and that there was traffic.

It just seems weird that no one has really made the killer combo. Smartphones still have shoddy GPS receivers. Maybe it’s to save power, or maybe it’s because no one wants a big antenna on their GPS. (But, cell phone makers — if you made a cradle that cost about $50 and merely gave a better antenna and a car-powered battery source to my phone, I’d pay! And a cradle that just has a GPS antenna and a power cord to your cigarette lighter should cost all of $0.79 to make.) The software lags even further behind the GPS hardware on phones. My iPhone is capable of amazing graphics, complete with animated transitions slicker than on most computers, drop shadows, and so on. It just feels like a really polished device. The Maps interface feels like the polar opposite. And it has little quirks: the phone always shows north at the top of the map, which is really counter-intuitive to me. (If I’m driving south, I still expect to see myself going “up” on the map, towards my destination. But it’s not capable of rotating the map so that “up” is forward.)

There is enormous potential for someone to combine the two and wow everyone. And really, I think a lot of people would pay for it. But so far, I remain unimpressed, and carry a GPS, lamenting the lack of features on my iPhone, and carry an iPhone, lamenting the lack of features on my GPS.

I just got an invitation to my high school class’s fifth reunion. (Yikes!)

They mention a memorial mass and then list those who have passed away from all the classes that are included in the reunion. Here are all of the classes included, and the count of students from that class who died:

• 1959: 1, at the girl’s school that merged with ours
• 1969: 5
• 1974: 5, plus 3 from the all-girl’s school
• 1979: 2
• 1999: 1
• 2004: 2

Besides the fact that it’s pretty scary to realize that two people from my class — both of whom I knew — have died, the numbers just seem really strange to me. (Yes, I realize that we only include classes every 5 years.) In particular, among all the included classes between 1979 and 1999, there were zero deaths, yet 1974 saw eight deaths.

The only explanation I can think of is the Vietnam War, which would explain the surges in ’69 and ’74. However, my parents back up Wikipedia in suggesting that there weren’t many soldiers in Vietnam by 1974, so it doesn’t seem likely that very many people who graduated high school in 1974 would have been sent to Vietnam, nor would it explain why there was still an apparent “tail” from the class of 1979, who would have graduated several years after the war was over.

If you write ’69 and ’74 off as being related to the Vietnam War, even though I’m not sure that’s the case, it’s still troubling that the class of 2004 had what is now the greatest number of deaths of any year, although it’s tied with 1979.

I’d really be interested in seeing a graph of this data across all years, not just those ending in 4 or 9. But it seems like it would be in poor taste to try to contact the alumni office to request it. The numbers just don’t make sense to me, though; it’s too wide a fluctuation to be random chance, I think.

If you live in New England like me, odds are good that your yard is covered in acorns right now. In fact, odds aren’t so bad that, like me, you have acorns bouncing off your car, hitting you in the head, and just littering your lawn and driveway.

What might you do? One idea is to rake. Another is to use power equipment.

But someone at the Pottery Barn had a much better idea. They appear to be calling them “oak seeds” and selling them in gift boxes, 2 for $24.

If anyone is interested and doesn’t need a gift box, I’ll flip the numbers and sell you 24 for $2. They’ll be harvested fresh from a New Hampshire farm home.

Dear News Media,

Can we please have fewer fear-mongering stories about H1N1? And also, can we have fewer stories with titles that basically begin “People Don’t Really Care about…”? Because I really don’t care to read a story about something that people don’t care about. The whole news story is full of people basically saying that the notion of suspending Halloween due to H1N1 is ridiculous. Really, no one sees how ridiculous this is?

The Today Show apparently did a segment on Halloween decoration, with the anchors dressed as Star Wars characters. Someone thought to hire two people to dress up as ewoks; one source claims that they were both midgets and drunk and has a hilarious video of the live broadcast going “increasingly awry.”

London’s Daily Mail has a fascinating story about Stephen Wiltshire, an artist diagnosed with autism. Often considered a disability, Wiltshire creates enormous sketches of famous skylines. Entirely from memory. In amazing detail.

After marveling at the best of humanity, the worst of humanity is an interesting read, too. In Italy, a Mafia execution in broad daylight was caught on camera in May. The police have released the video in the hopes that someone might drop the dime on who the shooter was. The killing, while chilling*, looks effortless and smooth. The article includes a quote from “Walter Veltroni, who is now a member of the Anti-Mafia Commission.” Something tells me that Mr. Veltroni always sleeps with one eye open.

• Sorry, I wasn’t going for a rhyme there, but I can’t change it now.

Between… Some time in college… and November 4, 2008, I looked at moving to the Netherlands. I was never particularly serious about it, but I preferred it to Canada. It had a bit to do with politics, a lot to do with not being as crazy as things were here, and nothing to do with legal prostitution or “coffee shops. What began as a not-really-serious “backup plan” to a third Republican term gave way to an appreciation for a really neat place. Obama won and I thought things might start to turn around. I’m still not entirely confident about that, but I stopped investigating emigration. (For what it’s worth, it turns out that the Netherlands, somewhat like Canada, really doesn’t want anyone to come unless they have a good job already lined up. Why a Dutch firm would want to hire someone who doesn’t speak a lick of Dutch is beyond me.)

However, I recently began thinking about moving to the Netherlands again. This time, it has nothing to do with Republicans, Glenn Beck, the economy, or anything of the sort. It has to do with stroopwafels. I bought some at Trader Joe’s. They’re soft crackers (not a very accurate description) filled with caramel. That’s not a great description either. Wikipedia does a better job. But really, you have to eat them to fully appreciate them. And then, when you read the Wikipedia page about huge stroopwafels, made with cinnamon, served hot, freshly made, on the streets of Amsterdam, you, too, are going to start looking at emigrating to the Netherlands.

We adopted the phrase “It’s not my cow” at work. Actually, I adopted that phrase. Everyone else says something else, but I could never remember what it was, so I stuck with “cow.” The reason for the phrase is that, with surprising frequency, we’d ask another developer a question and get the response, “I don’t care.” And then we’d rush to clarify that it’s not that we don’t care, but that we have no opinion one way or the other. So it’s now a bit clearer. “It’s not my cow” means, “I don’t have a preference either way, so I’ll defer to you.” “I don’t care” means, “I don’t give a crap.”

So what don’t I care about?

For one, the news that Kate Gosselin gave her dogs back. How could anyone care? At all? If she were run over with a steamroller tomorrow, I would only feel the slightest bit of sadness. Not that I dislike her (well, actually, I do, but that doesn’t mean I wish harm upon her), but I don’t find her life any more interesting than that of a random person picked out of the phonebook, and if some random person I don’t know died tomorrow, I wouldn’t care at all. (Otherwise, I’d have emotional breakdowns any time I read the news?)

Furthermore, if a close friend of mine were to tell me that they had given their dog back to its breeder because they didn’t have time to care for the dog, I would say, “Oh, I see,” and promptly forget about it, because I wouldn’t care.

Why, exactly, should I care about this? It’s not really that I don’t care; I don’t really care that much about 75% of the stuff in the news. Here are some other news stories (fictional) that I would consider about as interesting as Kate Gosselin and her dogs:

• Boston Resident Paints Shed a Different Color
• Kansas Teacher Applies for a Mortgage
• Governor Patrick Has a Cavity Filled at Dentist
• Elementary School Student Gets New Backpack
• Rural Mayor in Fender-Bender with No Damage or Injury
• Local Swim Instructor Purchases New iPod
• Detroit Businessman Purchases Guinea Pig for Daughter

Seriously, how are any of those any different from Kate Gosselin and her dogs?

If you ever, for some reason, need to find a day that is guaranteed to have poor weather, I’ve found a neat trick.

Plan your event on the day that NASA is launching something. It may only be something like high winds, but you’re pretty much guaranteed that the weather will be bad enough to delay the launch due to weather.

Fellow Massachusetts drivers, I would like to call your attention to Massachusetts G.L. c.89, §4B. Violation of this law occurs when the driver, “while operating a vehicle on a way, did fail to drive in the lane nearest the right side of the way when such lane was available for travel, the defendant not then overtaking another vehicle or preparing for a left turn.”

In other words, a law exists specifically to preclude people from just hanging out in the left lane on highways. Sadly, it carries only a $100 fine, not mandatory imprisonment.