Category Archives: News & Reviews

John and I took lots of photos while on our recent trip to Russia and Israel.
Lots as in: over one thousand. We sorted and deleted some while travelling
(I love digital cameras!) and John has been working hard since we came home
to get them posted for friends and family to see. He is using
Coppermine Photo Gallery
software and it seems to work well.

I am noticing as I page through the thumbnail images how many pictures of walls, ceilings and floors we took. Images by John Plocher or Katy Dickinson
(Copyright 2006):

Mosaic floor, Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg:

Heraldic wall, Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg:

Bathhouse wall, Masada:

Baptismal Font (gift of Queen Victoria), St. George’s Cathedral, Jerusalem:

Wall with Crosses cut by Pilgrims, Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem:

Dome – Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem:

Last Friday, I took a vacation day to go shopping and to
see a show in San Francisco. Sally and Lorene and I worked
together at Atari Research Labs and we have gone shopping
together in Chinatown between Thanksgiving and Christmas
every year since 1982. We have a regular route, starting with
a CalTrain trip up the peninsula, a bus ride from the
train station to the Lion Gate, and a stroll down Grant Street.
We have favorite shops where we usually find silly stuff, linens,
ceramics, jewelry, and toys but we find new places every year
too. We eat lunch at Sam Wo and get fresh cookies at the
Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Factory on Ross Alley. I have been
going to Sam Wo since I was a little girl. The whole restaurant
is about twelve feet wide and three storeys tall. You enter through
the kichen and go up stairs. Orders are shouted down and food is
delivered up the dumbwaiter.

After Lorene and Sally went home, my husband John met me for dinner and
a show. We saw Circo Zero
at Counter Pulse in the
Mission District. Circo Zero presented a cabaret of individual
circus acts of remarkable creativity and physical skill. There were
dancers, aerial acts, spoken and musical performances. Some of the
spoken material was more crude than entertaining but the aerial acts
were awesome. Performances by Circo Zero founders Keith Hennessy and
Susan Voyticky were particularly excellent.

We went back to Fry’s and returned our first
attempt at buying a car-based GPS: the

Lowrance Automotive (iWAY 500c). Fry’s was very pleasant about
taking the return.

We reviewed the other options at Fry’s and picked out the GPS from
Thales Nagivation (Magellan RoadMate 300).
This cost about $500- ($260 cheaper than the iWAY 500c). There are two higher
end versions of the Magellan but they did not offer anything we really wanted
to pay for. We have been using the Magellan 300 for several days now and are
very pleased with it.

• What Works
  • It shows you where you are on a clear, understandable map
  • Big choices (like Locate and Option) are side buttons but smaller choices
    are on the touch screen

  • It plugs into the lighter socket – no special wiring required
  • Good graphics, good contrast, very visible
  • The back is stuck to the windshield with a suction cup – it does not slide around
  • Vocal directions are clear and come with enough time to respond
  • Maps are current
  • Autocomplete of typing works well
  • It easily takes the command to record the current location as a bookmark
  • If you go a different route than the one recommended (to avoid a traffic
    jam, for example), it tries to send you back a few times but then adjusts and
    recalculates the new route

  • Allows you to program a several stop route – for example, starting from
    home, dropping off first kid at school, dropping off second kid at a different
    school, then driving to work

  • Magellan’s points of interest list included more places we often go than
    did the list on the iWAY 500c. For example, Szechwan Cafe on California in Palo Alto
    is in the Magellan list but not in the iWAY list

  • Allows bookmark lists for more than one driver
• What Doesn’t Work
  • The 300 only comes with major roadways pre-installed – it took several hours
    to load the small road detail on our part of California into memory. If we
    often drove long distances, this would be a bigger disadvantage.

  • Had to purchase extra memory
  • It sometimes sends you on strange routes – we have been fiddling with
    the preferences for freeways vs. local roads to adjust this

  • Typing is slow on the touch screen – but autocomplete helps
  • More glare on the Magellan 300 display screen than with the iWAY 500c
  • Magellan 300 display screen is smaller than that of the iWAY 500c
  • The little picture of the satellite comes on frequently – indicating
    that it is looking for an update? – but this does not seem to get in the
    way of actual navigation

  See
  “GPS from Lowrance Automotive (iWAY 500c)” for prior blog entry

After years of discussion, we decided that my lack of sense of physical
direction could be helped by having an in-car GPS navigation system.
This is supposedly a birthday present but I am not sure if it is for
me (the Birthday Girl) or for my husband John who is tired of giving
directions over the cell phone when I get lost.

• Katy: “Can you please help me, I’m lost!”
• John: “So, where are you?”
• Katy: “In the car!”

John went to Fry’s and picked out
the
Lowrance Automotive iWAY 500c last weekend. Since this is an
expensive gadget ($760), Fry’s has a good return-it-if-you-don’t-like-it-within-a-week
policy. We have been driving around and testing the iWAY for several days now
and are not particularly happy with it.

What Works

• It shows you where you are on a clear, understandable map
• Big choices (like Power and Find) are side buttons but smaller
  choices are on the touch screen

• There are 3 levels of screen brightness
• It plugs into the lighter socket – no special wiring required
• Good graphics, good contrast, very visible
• The back is stuck to the windshield with a suction cup – it does not slide around
• Vocal directions are clear and come with enough time to respond

What Doesn’t Work

• Programming it is very time consuming
• It frequently does not recognize common streets – you have to give it the
  exact street name in its database and it often still does not work. For example,
  if you type in “St Francis Drive” it searches for just “Francis” and cannot find
  the one you mean but if you type in “Saint Francis”, it says there is no such street.

• It sometimes directs you down the wrong way of one-way streets or to drive
  up freeway offramps

• The maps are not current – it says my office building is in the San Francisco Bay
• Interactions take time and are distracting – kind of like having a cat loose in
  the car

• Sometimes it gives directions when you have not asked it to
• Typing is slow on the touch screen – especially when you have to type in
  several variations of the street name – and it often requires several pokes to
  make it display a letter

• No autocomplete for commonly typed words and names – we have been typing in
  “Palo Alto” several times a day

We are going back to Fry’s to trade it in for another GPS this afternoon
to see if there is a better choice.

See
“GPS from Thales Nagivation (Magellan RoadMate 300)” blog entry for more

I found the obituary of surgical pioneer Hamilton Naki in the current issue of The
Economist fascinating and inspiring. Here is the story of a man who left
formal schooling at age 14 and yet, despite living in apartheid South Africa,
worked with Christiaan Barnard on the first successful heart transplant surgery.

This black man, with his steady, dexterous hands and razor-sharp mind, was simply too good at the delicate, bloody work of organ transplantation. The chief transplant surgeon, the young, handsome, famously temperamental Christiaan Barnard, had asked to have him on his team. So the hospital had agreed, saying, as Mr Naki remembered, “Look, we are allowing you to do this, but you must know that you are black and that’s the blood of the white. Nobody must know what you are doing.”

Mr Naki never learned the techniques formally; as he put it, “I stole with my eyes”. … Barnard admitted—though not until 2001, just before he died—that Mr Naki was probably technically better than he was, and certainly defter at stitching up afterwards.

The Economist (11 June 2005)

I looked up the obituary of Christiaan Barnard and found that in additon to being
a great surgeon, he was publicity-loving and a well-paid public speaker on the topic of
sex as the magic ingredient to longevity. Despite his quirks, Christiaan Barnard

“…campaigned
for black doctors to have equal pay with whites. He employed non-white nurses to treat white patients. He operated on blacks and whites according to their needs.”

The Economist (6 September 2001)

It is good to see the same full page celebrity obituary given to the self-taught and modest Hamilton Naki as to the flashy and famous Christiaan Barnard.

I admit to being a literary omnivore. I will read mostly anything but I do
not get pleasure from business books. They are usually written very badly.
In the last month or so, I have read or re-read:

• Alfred Lansing’s Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage
• Sara Paretsky’s V.I. Warshawski detective series (3 books, recommended by my teenage daughter)
• Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash (4th time)
• David Eddings “The Belgariad” series (5 books)
• Autobiography of Malcolm X, as told to Alex Haley (2nd time)
• St. Augustine Confessions (2nd time)

My son and I went to Costco today on the way between picking him up from
school (early dismissal day) and starting up work again at home. We found
presents to give to his teachers on the last day, tomorrow.

I was very pleased
to find in the book section that Alexander McCall Smith has a new book in his “No. 1 Ladies’
Detective Agency Series” called In the Company of Cheerful Ladies.
If you have not yet read these stories about Precious Ramotswe and her detective
adventures in Botswana, you are in for a treat. The series so far is:

• No.1 Ladies Detective Agency
• Tears of the Giraffe
• Morality for Beautiful Girls
• The Kalahari Typing School for Men
• The Full Cupboard of Life
• In the Company of Cheerful Ladies