Quick bottom line:

The GlobalSat GH615 watch is falling apart.

I like the watch form-factor for GPS.

What to do?

Turns out, GPS watches are rare. I’ll sadly share credit with GlobalSat for ruining the GH615’s excellent chances for success in the market. Garmin Forerunners can be had for a bit over $100 on eBay. Forerunners look kind of klunky, at best. And, new, they are overpriced.

So what to do?

A web search found Chinavasion and the unfortunately named Travel Honey watch.

It took a two or three weeks to get the watch by mail from Hong Kong. No problem there. ‘Bout what you’d expect.

Out of box:

The shipping box perfectly fit around the product’s box. Wow!

Software

The included iTravel software is a finished product. Its Google Maps code is better than my TrodTrack code – faster and with a couple of nice spiffs. The track point editor is a nice thing. The UI layout looks good and well thought out.

It took a product key to get the program to talk to the watch. The key was not in the box so I got one from Chinavasion by on-line chat and email. Who knows whether it’s paid for. Anyway, it worked.

But I won’t be using the iTravel software except on the laptop while traveling. I have used an open source Linux program to pull the tracks off the watch. The watch protocol is documented and if I were to use the watch, I’d probably end up writing Python code to talk to it. But I won’t be using this watch as a primary GPS.

Watch

The watch is smaller than the GH615. That’s nice.

The time-keeping part of the watch, itself, is bargain basement. “Uselessly inaccurate” might be the most accurate description. And, since it’s not a GPS-time watch, it cannot be used to sync the camera time.

The GPS is provided by a SkyTraq Venus 6 GPS chip. In this watch the GPS is clearly inferior to the SirfIII in the GH-615. It loses its way in Northwest forests often and without fail.

This is a killer.

There are other problems. For instance, I have the GPS set for 1-second samples. It occasionally switches to 5-second samples and/or no sampling. The only way to get the watch back working is to reset the settings through the PC software.

So, this Travel Honey watch was a nice experiment. I’d wanted to see how another GPS chip matched up against the SirfIII. Now I know. It could be that the weakness of this GPS is in the small, watch packaging. But why chance it? I’ll probably get a normal GPS logger that uses the SirfIII chip. And, knowing me, I’ll probably end up using the GH-615 for another couple of years.

I’m inclined to get another gadget from Chinavasion. They (and many other outlets like them) certainly open a window in to another world. … so many gadgets at cut-rate prices of probable cut-rate quality.

This other world is interesting. During the 80’s and 90’s Taiwan cranked out a lot of PC boards and such-like in white boxes for low prices. One would have expected that the quality of such devices would be low. But that was not the case. Compared to the “name” brands, they were almost always:

• Cheaper
• Simpler to install and use
• Higher quality
• More powerful
• Even with fractured English, often better (geekier) documented

My gut feeling is that these eleven-teen jillion Chinese gadgets are not like that. They give off an aura that matches the Travel Honey watch: cheap junk with a promising core. Think Japanese products from the 50’s and early 60’s.

Anyway, this evolutionary process will be fun to watch.

Picked up yet another gutter fixer thingee to try at Costco.

This one is called RainFilter.

Installation was quick and easy. Just stash the foam strips in the gutter. Finshing off the odd-length end was easy, too, as the foam rips easily and accurately.

It hasn’t rained yet.

I am not hopeful for this gutter “solution”, though.

After I put the foam in the lower, garage roof, I swept the main, upper roof, sending lots of pine needles, etc. down to the garage roof. After resweeping the lower roof, here is what it looks like:

Which shows that, after some rain and wind, one can expect that there will be a pretty nice layer of needles and leaves stuck on top of the foam. The foam is not slick, that’s for sure.

Anyway, we’ll see.

At Costco.com I got a new Hanns G 28″ LCD monitor to semi-replace the ailing Acer 24″.

The Acer has a very hard time turning on after the PC has gone to screen-saver black. It takes 10-20 minutes and several power cycles to get a flickery image and then another few minutes for the image to settle down. The text mode display seen during BIOS boot never settles down. Vertical flicker.

Anyway, the Hanns is big and cheap (~ $325). As on-line reviews indicate, the default color settings are pretty bad. I don’t mind bright. I want bright. But washed out? No.

I ended up with X-Contrast turned on (turned on after the other settings are made). And user color settings of R:100 G:88 B:67.

The color is still a bit washed, nice and bright, and not too bad, viewed straight on.

It’s the “straight on” part that’s the rub.

This monitor is very sensitive to viewing angle. And, at 28″, unless it’s used as a sit-back monitor for TV, you can see that the color at the top of the monitor is different from the bottom. So, for image editing, I’ll probably move the images over to the Acer for final look-see.

Other thoughts:

It’s nice to have two same-size monitors (1920×1200). And very nice to have a 2nd monitor that isn’t dark, dark, dark.

Together, they push out some heat. Sorta like feeling the sun on your face on a warm day.

Listened to the CD of Richard A. Clarke’s “Your Government Failed You” a couple weeks ago.

Figured it would be a tedious screed about Iraq. But what the heck. As a guy who’s always been 51/49 or 49/51 on American 200x Iraq involvement, I could at least hear it out.

Turns out that he’d already put his Iraq thoughts in an earlier book. Yes, this one had a lot on Iraq, but he used it as a springboard to what he considered more important things: how to organize certain national security functions of the US government.

Bottom line: He came across as exactly what he said he was: A self-respecting, professional, government guy specializing in national security. That his specialty is the core purpose of the federal government helped make the book quite readable. And he spelled out the case for his kind of person having great control over national security policy and procedures. He went a bit schizo when acknowledging that the professionals’ job is to implement the political policy makers’ policies – at the same time being driven, himself, by being in strong, strong disagreement with the Bush peoples’ particular policies. But, there’s never a perfect balance in things of that sort. So whaddayagunnado?

For me, all that was not the most interesting thing in the book.

Let’s go back to Saigon, ’70. My bicycle had worn out break pads. No problem. I had walked most every street of that town, taking pictures, so I knew where the bike shops were. Zinged over there. Walked in the first shop and asked how much brake pads were. Got a price. Har. Har. Well, of course, it must have been 10 times what it should be. Right? No problem. I go to the next shop. Same price. Hmmm. That’s odd. Prices from tourist-rip-off people are generally all over the map. Third shop. Same price.

What I learned: Around a military base, you’ll find a whole crowd of people whose every moment is spent, as a cell phone company exec once said in a meeting, “Extracting value from the customer.” In other words, bases are surrounded by con artists, crooks, etc.

But, in those bicycle shops I was not near the base. These shops were run as normal businesses for normal people. They had no thought or inclination to pull any scams. That I was not their ordinary customer didn’t change a thing.

The thing is, the interface between the base, with its transient, military people, and the surrounding people “servicing” that base is like the shore ‘tween land and sea.

Now, in the world I live in, the shore is where everything important happens. Innovation happens on the shore.

Back to Clarke’s book.

The book dripped with disdain and suspicion for private contractors involved with national security. And tech. That attitude was very, very nearly the attitude of any aware military person toward the scammers just outside the base. And, that attitude was clearly a result of Clarke’s experience! In other words, it was not out of line.

Now, here I am, on the other side of the fence, with much the same attitude toward professional government people.

But, though I disagreed with some of what Clarke recommended, I never doubted that he could be right and that his heart is in the right place. He came across as a guy running a bicycle shop.

So, is it a law of nature that the worst sort of behavior is concentrated at the interface between two different worlds? Does the nature of such interfaces require that behavior be “bad”?