GPS Tracking ROI

SUSAN SCHWARTZ, The Gazette

Published: Monday, January 29, 2007

To broadcast that you are looking for love, whether it’s online or in personal ads or at singles events or in bars, to be out there like that, is to be way braver than I could ever be.

I can’t even bring myself to read personals or to look at online profiles: I always find it too sad. Even the ones that try to be jaunty or funny project longing and loneliness more than anything…. the rest of Susan’s article is here:

I guess the headline was a tongue firmly in cheek attempt at humor … but then again, I’ve had reporters call me and ask how much I’d charge to find something lost by the magic of GPS so that they could get a scoop. Perhaps some truly don’t know that GPS can not find anything. So much of the media is taken with writing about “spy” satellites that they forget that the principle of GPS is not that the satellite finds you, but that you find the satellites … and then with a little simple spherical trigonometry, since it knows where the satellites are, your GPS receiver can tell you where you are.

A few years ago when I lived in Tokyo these were very popular… they’re called LoveGetys, you can’t see very well in the picture but the undersides are pink for ladies and blue for men … at least conventionally oriented folks. You set yours to any of three levels of “interest” from “meet” to “get” (get what? Ummm I dunno, whatever, Susan could probably fill you in) and when a “gety” holder of the opposite color comes in range with the same interest mode set, both pocket ‘eggs’ light up and beep to let the carriers know that a true match is near. I can’t give you a real-world report since I never carried one … they were very popular with school girls and I didn’t want to be the only guy in my end of the train car having to make a decision how to handle my beeper going of in response to a 14 year old.

But Susan, imperfect technology as it may be, you have a better hope with the Love Gety than with GPS.

For a couple weeks now I’ve been reading a lot of blog posts regarding a popular meme (by the way I’m so clueless I never even really knew what “meme” meant. It’s kind of appropriate:

As defined by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene (1976): “a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation.” “Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation.

We’re all imitators to some degree or another and I have been hanging around the periphery of problogging for some time now. Hero worshipping some of the big names and, at times, shamelessly trying to do what they do.

Anyway, the baton has now been passed to me. Tim Hibbard, world famous (literally) for his “Where’s Tim?” site has been kind enough to “tag” me. Thanks, Tim (I think).

Why the hesitancy regarding the “thanks”? Oh it’s not from being bashful about writing about myself … that part comes easy … it’s about how much my mind is occupied with trying to think of five more people to tag at the end of the post. I’ve just been engaging in a back-channel conversation with Brendon regarding recent post he made about relationship building, and in the course of writing an email and doing some thinking on the subject I realized just how rotten I have been myself on that subject. I’m not big on new years resolutions but here’s a great start at keeping what should have been one of my most important ones for 2007.

1. As Tim mentioned about himself, I’m a terrible salesman. I tried selling GPS systems as a paid career for about a year and had zilch success. My wife and I ran our own sales business for a couple years and we did OK, but if I had to depend on selling to feed me, I’d be skinny as a rail.
2. I am a great procrastinator. This has caused me a lot of problems in life, but the salvation will come at the end … I know I’ll be late to my own funeral. I plan to organize and get rich from a dies-paying International Procrastinator’s Society one of these days now … as soon as I can get around to it.
3. I was a computer “geek” long before most computer folk these days were thinking in ones and zeros. If you know what core memory is, can set the read, write and inhibit currents in a core unit, or you know how to tell the difference between Teletype paper tape punched in ASCII or Baudot code, then you are a contemporary. EBCIDIC anyone?
4. My first job for the USAF involved crawling around inside the wings of B-52s to fix fuel leaks. Did you know an early model B-52 has more than 76 individual rubber fuel cells? Did you know that every time Dubya flies Air Force One to Saudi Arabia for lunch with his old business partners the fuel burn is in the neighborhood of 35,000 gallons, each way?
5. Next to my lovely wife and my children my great love is aviation and airplanes … I started my first aviation-related job when I was six, wiping oil off the bellies and landing gear of airplanes owned by the fellow who maintained this plane: (note, this is not the airplane she was flying when she disappeared)

6. I’m a big fan of Microsoft’s Live Writer blog management software … it’s not just for their abysmal “Live Writer” blogging service, it works better than any other product I’ve found for Wordpress on my own leased server.

Ooops, that’s six. Well consider the sixth one a penalty item imposed on me for tardiness.

Now for the hard part. I hereby tag the lovely and delightful Unofficial Cook, Brendon, Aviatrix, Sean and a player to be named later.

Kind of a day late and a dollar short here you might say, but getting something worthwhile done is better than never doing it at all, just because you put it off.

Most humans in the civilized world make New year resolutions. Many of my Chinese friends make two sets because they happily celebrate the 1 January date as well as the “real” Chinese (Lunar) New Year (18 February this coming year). So I’ve decided to make some New year resolution for this blog … they may never happen but they for sure won’t happen if I don’t put them up there for the world to see.

1. A minimum of one post per day. I’m falling a little behind on that but catching up nicely … there is so much going on in the GPS world that it’s inexcusable to miss a day.
2. Get the blog on it’s own dedicated (not a sub-domain) URL. Remove the remnants of my old SatViz.com business and give the blog the scope it needs.
3. Revamp the blog …perhaps change format to more of a CMS so I an post news items more effectively.
4. Increase reader participation … comments, anyone?
5. Make the blog more of a resource by finding and highlighting more GPS tracking systems. There are perhaps a dozen or more blogs covering GPS car navigators and pocket caching tools and even golf GPS, I’m the only one I know who has the business experience and writes about implementing GPS tracking in the commercial and government world and how to calculate the ROI of these ventures.

A few designs I have been toying with:

Elifoner

Bright House

Bosco

So what do you think …about my goals or my appearance upgrades? Write me at; davestarr (at) gmail (dot) com or call me at 1-719-423-8872 or text to 63-0919-231-5625. And have a GREAT 2007!

Hi fellows and gals. I’ve been a bit tied up in more ways than one. Normal posting should resume RSN (Real Soon Now). In the meantime. let me make acouple things perfectly clear.

If you don’t like this blog, then don’t read it. If you care to, write me a line to say where you feel I missed the mark, or just stop coming without a word. No foul no problems, that’s what the internet is all about.

If you feel I said something wrong or too outlandish, leave a comment … that’s why I have comments turned on.

If you like the blog, great. No need to say or do anything. My daily page counts and my advertising income tells me that many people do like it. Absolutely no need for any ‘ego building’ posts like ‘Great Blog’. Especially if you have a lot of web site spam attached.

All my comments are ‘no follow’, so you are not getting any ‘link love’ from any comment, pro or con … but you penis enhancer, porn, debt erasing, vitamin pyramid scheme folks have got to stop filling the inbox with your crap. It’s worthless, it won’t be seen and I may have to turn off comments … or take action with your ISP’s if this pollution continues. I would make a guess that most of you are normal people following the advice of some brain-dead ‘net guru’. Well, I’m a net guru too … since before there was a web. So stop wasting your time and the time of others, please?

Just a quick note to answer a question or two on the time stamps of posts to this blog. 

Since I have visitors from six of the seven continents, I run the blog server on GMT or UTC, World Coordinated Universal Time (Zulu Time).  The actual postings are made in US Mountain Time here in Colorado Springs GMT -7. 

This post, for example is going up at 0847 MST on 14 March 2006.