Ever since I purchased my Garmin StreetPilot I have been built an obsession for all that is GPS. I even contemplated buying a Satellite phone , one can pick one up in eBay for a reasonable amount as well as pre-paid cards. Why? Just for those times when you are hiking in the middle of nowhere upstate New York and your cell phone goes blind. Just what happened last time we went upstate , no emergency it was just a little disconcerting to not be able to get in contact with a human being in case we were mauled by some bear. Anyhow, I did not buy the satellite phone, I’ll do that after we buy the Hummer H2 which goes very well with Satellite phones and GPS systems, which I agreed to only buy after we buy a place in the Poconos which we have not really started saving for yet. Of course in between all that is my next guitar which I will definitely get for my birthday next year. In the meanwhile I purchased another GPS unit from Garmin , the Etrex Vista C, great for hiking. One can download topographical maps as well as maps which include hiking trails, city maps. It also does cool things as tracking your path so that you can backtrack etc and lots more.

I guess one of the reasons why GPS stuff is fascinating to me is because I spent approx 4 years working among other things on a VisualWorks GIS application for a utility company. I would like to somehow add doing something with GPS and VisualWorks to my pet project list but that list keeps getting longer. Bruce Badger wrote a driver to his Magellan GPS unit a while back. Actually demoed it at NYC Smalltalk. Garmin also has an SDK which can be wrapped. JUN has API for doing topo stuff so it maps well to GIS. Smalltalk MT if recall correctly has a GIS framework available. I used and extended AppliedReasoning’s GeoSynchrony ( I may be hazy on the name) but they are no more last I heard and that and their graphics package sank with the ship.