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This past Christmas, my parents really scored with a random gift that I never asked for, didn’t realize I wanted, but turned out to be something that I really like. It has now been a couple months with my Garmin Nüvi 650 GPS navigation system and it’s awesome. I will start out with some of the positives and then dwell on some of the negatives that really bug me.

Positives

A few years ago, for me it was both unpractical to get a navigation system stock in a car or as an add on accessory because they cost too much. I still think that they’re a little unnecessary because I usually know when I’m going. These units have come down significantly in price and I believe improved their usability, screen size and features. I haven’t followed this segment of the market too closely because I wasn’t in the market for one.

Some features that I really like are the turn by turn voice directions, that tell you to turn or stay straight at the right time based on the distance and your speed, saving of favorite locations, searching for nearby landmarks such as restaurants, gas stations or parking garages, the large 4.3″ touch screen and of course the many stats that you can get about your current trip like max speed, average moving speed, average overall speed, time idle, etc. There are also many features that I will probably never use, like the ability to load audio books onto the onboard memory or SD card slot and the (painfully slow) picture viewer.

Most of all, the Garmin is super easy to use. In fact, it doesn’t even come with an instruction manual (but for those technologically challenged, the manual is available for viewing online). Once you fire it up for the first time, you answer a few setup questions and then you’re ready to go. The main menu has many quick options that are handy like, go home, go to favorites, find food/gas/lodging, etc. This becomes useful when you’re in an area (like MD!) where you don’t know where the hell anything is. I’ve used it a couple times around my new office building and on the way to work. But unfortunately like all or most map systems (online map or GPS unit), it might not give you the best directions. When you manually type in an address, it will pick up the street name, state, or city within the first three letters. This reduces the time to type in the whole street name. You can search by intersection, street name, or business name, so if you don’t know any of these - just get off the road and ask someone please.

Negatives

Of course there are negatives to every product, and this one is no different. The good news is that while they are annoying, for the amount that I use it, they are tolerable.

The first negative is the way that it’s charged and mounted. In order for you to suction cup the unit to your windshield, you need to lift the GPS antenna, then clip in a mount that has the charging port. For some reason, even if the unit is off, and the GPS antenna is up, the battery is still being used. This means that you have to remove the clip/charging unit to put down the antenna. So essentially mounting and un-mounting the GPS is a three step process and requires you to find places in your car to store all the random pieces. Quite annoying.

The battery lasts a decent time. It’s rated at 7-8 hours, but I find that it dies a couple hours sooner than that. And annoyingly, it doesn’t tell you that the battery is about to die, it just shuts off leaving you wondering when to take that next turn. Some features that I wish it had, but are available on more expensive models are live traffic updates (available with an expensive add-on), and bluetooth calling. With the traffic feature, I would probably tend to use this unit almost every day.

Conclusions

I would recommend this Garmin but with caution. If you’re lost all the time, and anticipate being a heavy user, opt for a more feature laden unit with traffic and bluetooth. I’m not sure if all the models have the same mount/charging issue, but it’s something else to look in to, or at least be aware of the nuisance. For the more casual user, this should be fine, and can find it for <$300 at Costco. I use mine probably about once every couple weeks, so it’s not too much of a pain to fire up whenever I need to find something.

Any questions?  Please leave a comment, or send me a message…

Garmin 650 Site

On Vimeo

After editing this video together, I realized that I’m not even in it. Think of it as supplementary to Dave’s video - his video proves I was really there!  And as a side-note, I’m kinda disappointed with iMovie 08’s lack of video editing.  Apparently that’s going to be addressed in future updates.

Dave just compiled a video of our trip to San Fran from a few months ago. Beware, it’s random, strange, extreme and contains a lot of slow motion videos! I guess that’s what happens when you get together with your old band from college. I can’t wait to get out there again soon. (on Vimeo)

Yesterday was my last day at AOL. After interning for two summers, more than five years as a full-timer and many dodged rounds of layoffs, I have decided to move onto the next step in my career. There are many reasons why I should stay at AOL, but there are some that make it necessary to leave. I owe a lot if not all of my development to AOL - after all it was my first job right out of college. I didn’t think that my last two weeks would be that difficult, but I have started to realize how many people I have worked and become friends with over the years.

My next company is a small ~130 person company in Rockville, MD called InvestorPlace Media. I’m not too excited about having 495 and 270 in my commute, but I am really excited about the level of responsibility and potential for influence that I can have. I will be expanding on some of my natural curiosity of internet as a Web Analyst, analyzing traffic trends and hopefully maximizing nerdy buzz words for them like ROI, Page Views and Unique Visitors. There is much to learn about web analytics, so currently I have my nose buried in Avinash Kaushik’s excellent and extremely thorough book Web Analytics: An Hour a Day. I saw him speak when he came to AOL, and that definitely piqued my interest in the subject.I’ll miss all the good times, beer bashes, team outtings, the gym, bowling, but mostly the people. It has been an extremely tough choice for me to leave, and it may end up being a great decision or a terrible decision, but I won’t know until I try…

For those of you who have just met my Grandpa, I’m sorry to tell you that he passed away at the age of 96. He was a great man who is partially responsible for bringing over our family from China in the early 1900’s and faced all the challenges and hardships of immigrating to the United States to provide a better lifestyle for his future generations.

I am in charge of compiling a collage of images of him for the services this week. I am lucky enough to be able to go through all their photo albums through the years and find great pictures of my grandparents and family members having fun times with him through the years. The one above is one of my favorites of the 100 or so that I scanned tonight. It’s a picture of him at Dulles Airport. He is wearing a suit, vest and tie, because that’s just how he dressed. He would wear suits, or at the very least, dress pants and a button down shirt and a sweater almost all the time. My grandmother is in the foreground. I’ll miss him.

Scanned Pictures of Grandparents Set on Flickr. Any comments, send them here.

It has been a while since I’ve posted a video to Vimeo. I still have yet to mess around with iMovie long enough to feel comfortable editing together some videos from San Francisco and ones of my Grandma teaching us how to make some Chinese dumplings and pastries.

This video was taken last Christmas (2006). My grandfather has a tradition of “feeding” my great grandparents whenever there’s a family get together during the holidays. It usually involves chicken, oranges, whiskey and burning incense. In this clip my grandfather on my mom’s side tells us the names of my great grandparents.

My first semester of grad school is done. I really eased into the process by only taking one class this time around but plan on taking two per semester and one per summer from here on out, allowing me to graduate in about 2 years from now. I was lucky enough to have a class with little to no homework. My grade will be based on the mid-term paper that I wrote on Approaches to Architecting Systems (nerdy!) and a 16 question final split between memorization and quantitative questions. I briefly scored myself after finishing, and I think I should get a solid to high B on the final - we’ll see how I actually did in a couple weeks though.

So far, I have only good impressions and experiences of pursuing my Masters…now onto much belated Christmas shopping.

update: I emailed my professor, and he said that I got a “solid A” for the course. So far so good…

I don’t enjoy studying for school, but if I make studying into a game or if there’s a computer involved, it becomes much easier to bear. I have a pretty extensive list of items to study for my first final next Monday, but it doesn’t help when the answers are right next to the topic. Rather than painstakingly writing out all my own flash cards, I found this cool site called FlashcardMachine.com where you can type in the front and back of each card and save them. Once you have all your cards created, you have a couple of options: print them out and study the old school way, flip the “virtual” cards over all online, or you can share your flashcards with classmates, etc. for everyone to study.

I’ve found that 1/2 the benefit of studying from flashcards is actually making them yourself. I’m a repetition learner, so the more I type out any definitions or key terms the better. This makes it easier to crank through the process of making flashcards without tiring out my hand from writing. If you really want to study along with me, check out the flashcards I’ve made so far. Still have quite a few to make.