Another day in the Land of Inversion, where the obvious is not an option. I heard more interviews with learned politicians informing me that “drilling for oil” will not affect anything, least of all the quantity of oil. We must apparently wait until 2015, when a magic engine that runs on unicorn flatulence is invented. I have to ask: why is anyone investing in unicorn flatulence today, when it won’t make any difference for several years? The answer’s simple: the engine will Appear at the chosen moment, borne from the clouds by starlings, but only if we have repented of our foul ways, and the last of the sinners has left the cul-de-sac to reside in a home located a sustainable distance from his or her place of employment. When the last suburban outlying development is empty, when the homes of whose size we disapprove has been abandoned, when the last citizen has been gathered unto the bosom of the urban center, where his profligate ways are sneered upon and the measure of his yard shall be no greater than the standard lot size decreed in 1902, then shall the magic engine appear. Until then, the wind and the sun will bear us onward.

There is nothing to add that will not result in a diminishing of these hallowed words. Amen!

WANDA: You walk like an old man.

DAD: I am.

Pixar's latest offering, Wall*e, is nothing short of an all-out propoganda film for the Church of Environmentalism. Pixar pulls out all the stops, utilizing their dazzling animation, clever story-telling -- including a minor love story -- all in an effort that would make the KGB balk and Leni Riefenstahl blush. (No I'm not comparing Pixar with the Nazis. This is a comparison of propoganda efforts)

I want to start every support call with, "Hi. I already know more about this than you do. What I need is to speak with somebody who knows more than I do. I've done all the basic things you will ask so can we skip the part where you ask me to reboot the device and you try to explain how to log on? Just pass me up the line to the next level so we can get this solved quickly."

Wouldn't it be cool if there was some kind of way to universally skip first-tier secretaries and get right at the more knowledgeable people? A membership number to something that you can enter during the phone intro to jump to the second-tier support folks.

Hey, you! Get to work on that!

Foolishly hoping to avoid taking the Bangalore Express to phone support, I emailed support with my issue. Nothing. Not even a confirmation email. A couple days later I sent another.

Eventually I bit the hour-wait bullet and actually got a decently-speaking Indian who ran me through the basics. (I resisted the urge to explain that while I was waiting I swapped out wireless NICs in my Belkin F5D8230-4 router in hopes of getting DD-WRT running on it.)

Ultimately, the bridge is bad and has to be returned so I'm stuck with that terrible Airport Extreme until I get an alternate working.

It will be fun to see how long (if ever) before I get a response from their email support team. Clock is ticking, DLink!

Even the trailer is boring.

Oh, how the mighty have fallen. Spielberg and Lucas used to know how to make fun movies but both have lost their way for, likely, different reasons.

Lucas: Never a great director or writer he at least knew the difference between a good story and a bad one. Now he seems to have surrounded himself with sycophants and worshippers and not a single person with the balls to speak up when a bad idea is on the table.

Spielberg: Perhaps the best director of the 80's, if judged by box office. Somebody poured sweet lies into Steven's ear, telling him that he must use his talents to make important movies, that he needed to use his power and money to promote important issues in his films. Too bad he listened to those Hollywood vipers because they stole his creative sole.

I don't know when I will subject myself to the latest Indy offering but when I do I will take the time to report on it here.

Two of the riders bailed last month. The final one, Mark, pulled the plug today. He was the mastermind of the trip where I was just the videographer who volunteered to record the adventure.

After the test ride Saturday it became evident that he would lose more than he gained if he continued with the project. Carol and I will find something else to work on this summer. Somehow I expect to turn this into a good thing.

At least I got a new Pathfinder out of the deal.

We headed out for a test ride yesterday. Turned out to be the hottest day of the year so far, a milestone that could have been achieved even ten degrees cooler.

The route we picked took us into the Olympic mountains. Even though we reached a maximum altitude of 3086 ft. that was significantly below what was intended. Snow turned us back. Twice.

Dean and Bryce joined us on the ride even though they won't be on the Big Ride. Wish they were going along.

I learned a few things about the run-and-gun style of filming. I have to get faster at getting out and setting up the shot. I took shots with the Fig Rig and without. The Figg shots were very nice but it is such a hassle jumping out and getting the thing out and ready, then putting it back in the seatbelts to secure it from flying around the Pathfinder's cabin. Ended up taking the final few shots completely hand-held.

Now the issue is how to clear out those waypoints without going one-by-one through the 6 click process of deleting them. On some sites people have resorted to simply resetting their devices (as I did myself one time). However, there is a better way.

* Connect the GPS device to the computer
* Open MapSource on the computer
* Load up current.gpx from the GPS device
* Edit the waypoints, etc.
* Do a "Save As" to a different file name on your computer. Be sure to save as a GPX file.
* Disconnect the GPS device and boot it up.
* From the menus, use the "delete all" feature to remove all of your favorites.
* Right now current.gpx on the GPS has nothing in it. This is a good thing.
* Reconnect the GPS to the computer
* Copy the edited GPX file to the GPS into the same directory as current.gpx
* Disconnect the GPS and boot it up. You'll find only your new set of waypoints on the device.

TIP: If you are going to load up a ton of waypoints into your Garmn, it makes sense to save a copy of current.gpx onto your computer beforehand to make reverting that much simpler.

Instead, ask yourself, "What would Ender Wiggins do?" Ender is the fictional prodigy hero in Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game . As a child in kindergarten he quickly discovers self-reliance as a survival tool. Ender is extremely advanced for his age and has skipped several grades and is the target for the class bully.

Not only does he decide that he must win confrontations with older, bigger kids without the (non-existent) help from adults but to make matters easier for himself he chooses to win all the future battles up-front.

He wants to stop future bullying by beating the bully so badly now that not only will that bully never bother him again but nobody else will even consider coming after him.

As parents, we are faced with the Butterfly Conundrum.

And yet.

Garmin has found a way to limit their phone support. My stupid old, tiny Motorola BT headset can talk to any capable phone but Garmin can't figure out how to do that. Their list of supported phones is miniscule and doesn't include several of the hot LG models (or phones, for that matter).

I'd think that if the idiots at Motorolla can find a way to stuff BT into their headsets that are the size of rabbit turds, well, then, the big brains at Garmin (who are famous for aircraft avionics) could read up on BT standards and get all the phones online with their GPS systems.

C'mon Garmin, get with the program.

Where does it fall down? It seems somebody slept through the design meetings or the endless spec reviews so the phone (stupidly) does not send the turn-by-turn navigation audio over Bluetooth. In fact, in order to hear the audio she has to disconnect the phone from her handsfree system in her car. Otherwise: silence.

Hello? Any one home?

Let's think about this for a second. You are using navigation on your phone. In your car. While driving. But you have the bad taste to have a built-in handsfree system in your car. You get to either a) use the BT and divert your eyes from the road to watch the little video screen or b) disconnect your phone from BT and then have to ignore all incoming calls while navigating.

Frankly the engineers and designers were all asleep at the switch when they made (or failed to make) that decision.

Adminutia is the tedious administrative details that drive creative people insane. Some people thrive on adminutia, thankfully. I am very glad those people exist.

We will track, from the comfort of a new Nissan Pathfinder, a small group of motorcyclists 6000 miles from Seattle to the Artic Circle in Alaska. The exact composition of the bike gang is rather fluid for this late in the game but that is largely due to family health issues for some members. We hope all the best for the ailing family members.

We have a great deal of work to do before we leave. The first order of business is acquiring the Pathfinder, which will take place on April 30th if all goes according to plan. It better, since a test ride will happen on May 17th and there's no way the old Maxima will be chasing bikes up logging roads.

I also want to sell my Sennheiser ME80/K3U and get a ME66/K6. The K6 uses normal AA batteries. Wouldn't mind handing on to the ME80 but once I have the ME66 there's not much point.

I'll be blogging about the Alaska project prior to leaving and perhaps I'll have enough notes from the drive to write at longer stops and when we return.