Anthony Licari

I decided to use my one month free trial of TeleNav on my BlackBerry 8330 on the Alltel Wireless network. TeleNav is an application that uses the GPS built into the phone to navigate the user to a destination. It can take you to your destination via the fastest route, shortest route, etc. The two are not the same as it can take into account traffic in major metropolitan areas and find a faster route.

Now this is all good in theory until you actually use the application. I'm not entirely sure what other GPS navigation products are like but my experience with TeleNav was one that will leave me uninstalling the application after this trial period. I first started using TeleNav about 200 miles from my final destination. I typed in my destination address and TeleNav began acquiring the GPS signal. After it acquired the GPS signal it would begin to find the route. Here's where I started to get problems. I was continually getting an error saying "GPS signal is weak. Please find a better sky view" What I was confused about was that I was standing outside of my car and on top of that the sky was completely clear. It was filled with stars. Which left me a little confused and thought maybe the satellites that TeleNav uses (which I assume are the low orbiting satellites the telecommunication companies bought a few years back) were not in the best possible position. I drove another 50 miles or so and tried to connect while driving. Finally at a rest area the GPS started connecting but a new error message was popping up that it was unable to find a route and to try again. Unable to find a route? My end destination is on the highway that I'm driving on and the highway is a major one as well as the size of my destination. Well, I kept driving and pulled off onto an exit and tried one last time, this time it worked. It knew that I was 200 feet away from the highway and what direction I was facing. It told me how to get back on the highway and then guided me 50 more miles to my final destination.

Well I suppose now that I'm moving to another state with a set of new experiences bound to happen that I fire this puppy up again. This fall, with work, I have been extremely busy. So busy that working seven days a week hasn't seemed like enough time. So, last night I came onto one of my ambitious streaks and thought "Hey, I'll unlock my site and build it in Ruby on Rails" and in my mind it seemed like a great idea.

It wasn't though. You see I have this problem of latching onto something and then doing it for how many hours necessary to get it done. So when the thought of rolling out my site in Ruby on Rails occurred I immediately withdrew that notion being as I am working more than full time at the moment and trying to relocate to another state. The days are gone when I can get passionate about something and then grind at it for 48 hours straight until I have it completed. These days I have to actually go to bed before 2 am and wake up before 9 am. I'm completely fine with that change but it's been a hard habit to break when I really want to do something and I can't because I have to sleep.

Obviously I don't have time anymore to take on large scale projects like I did in the past. I'm sure I have time to roll out CSS layouts, themes for Drupal, and mobile devices. Projects that have no set deadlines. Maybe I will even release them for free. I haven't decided yet. I don't like the idea of charging like I'm an ecommerce site or something. Although the automation is great it puts too much pressure on me being able to respond quickly when there are times I won't be able to get back to a request for a week or so. I think releasing them for free and then having a donations tab would work best. If you like what I made, chip in, if not then don't.