My dad was never interested in geocaching, but my wife, kids and I are and we placed a new geocache – the only one we’ve ever placed – in the same general location as where we scattered his ashes. (Back a bit from the cliff edge, though.)

As the “owner” of the cache, I get updates every time someone finds it and I see their comments. They trickle in slowly, like unexpected presents.

So far, all have been appreciative of the view. Somehow it makes me feel good that my dad’s love of that view is being spread to others.

It feels as if he’s still making a positive difference on the living.

I got my first “micro-computer” in 1978 – a TRS-80 at the age of 13. Just like my modern day counterparts, I was obsessive about the computer. I taught myself to program it, taught myself the hardware and spent my time trying to make it do increasingly complex and interesting things.

I sold my first program that same year. It was nothing complex, just a simple stock portfolio tracker, but it was the start of my career.

I had three fields of interest when it came time to go to college. (There was never any doubt I would go to college and even to this day, kids who don’t want to go mystify me.) Ultimately for reasons I won’t expound upon here, I chose computer engineering over paleontology or forestry.

In 1983, while attending Arizona State University, I used a sizable chunk of trust fund to purchase an original IBM PC, with 2 floppy disk drives running IBM DOS 2.0.

It is not an exaggeration to say that I’ve worked with PCs every day of my adult life and while I don’t normally get down to the hardware level anymore, I am a long-time professional.

If you’ve not been living under a rock, you probably know that Microsoft Windows 8 came out recently and it hasn’t met with the greatest of reviews. This isn’t uncommon and you have to take these things with a grain of salt. Yes, I admit, my computer nerdy friends and I have looked at the asinine touch-screen laptops running Windows 8 at Best Buy and Costco and laughed at the once-mighty Windows, but the fact is, I’d not had a chance to actually use Windows 8 until yesterday.

All I had to do was setup a wireless network and a couple wireless printers, but I’ll say that Windows 8 seems to be the most illogical, counter-intuitive bag of hurt I’ve encountered in a long, long time.

Yes, I know that unfamiliarity makes things more obscure, but this isn’t entirely that. How many different places does one operating system need to call “devices” when none seem to contain any devices? (You know, like printers or something) Or how many places can you find that say “settings” or “change my PC’s settings” and still not find things like network settings?

While its certainly within Microsoft’s purview to change the names of things and make them less specific and confusing, I would argue it’s not a good idea to do so.

Did I find what I was looking for? Yes. But I had to force the machine into “Classic” Windows 7 mode where it was easily found on the task bar at the bottom of the screen.

And what’s up with the damned trackpad? I’d be using it to navigate and suddenly it was like a poltergeist was in the machine. I might be scroll right to left and suddenly screens would change or it was hop backwards a page. Irrelevant screens just kept popping up on the screen unbidden.

On another occasion, I popped a CD into the drive and a dialog popped up in the upper right-hand corner of the screen. First time it happened, I looked at it, started to read it and it went away. I could not find a way to get it back without ejecting the disk and putting it back in.

The second time I moved the mouse to the dialog, but it disappeared as my mouse crossed into the dialog box. I managed to click the box on the third try but it went away anyway. It’s completely unclear to me if it was just evil or there’s some trick that the trackpad holds and was playing wonky with me. Fourth time was the charm, but why it didn’t do the same on the third, I haven’t a clue.

Windows has, in general, be getting better over the years – with that minor detour for Windows Vista – but this was like a trip to bizarro world. What the hell are they thinking? Any IT manager would be a fool to implement this on their users, the costs in training and lost productivity would just be wasted money.

Roll on Windows 9.

I cannot help but self-censor myself a bit. If I have nothing burning to say, why force myself to say it? Too many people have to speak out just to hear themselves speak. Perhaps it drowns out the sound of the rushing of wind between the ears?

Let’s then explore a related topic: What is the urge that makes me want to promise to write something every day? I have, I feel at times, a compulsive urge to create things.

Not things like new Ikea furniture or a tray of shortbread, but the desire to make things wrought entirely from my own mind. It’s a strange compulsion, seldom accompanied by an actual idea, but with a rather helpless sense of longing. It often strikes me while driving on my way home from work.

I used to get that sense of creation from coding computer programs, although nowadays modern programming languages are more about cobbling together blocks than raw creativity – it rather feels like the Ikea of programming. Perhaps I’m just burned out on it. In my teens and 20s, like so many others, I could spend 20 hours a day fueled by Cheetos and Dr Pepper whilst spewing stream of consciousness programming onto the screen.

Now I feel like I should be doing proper writing. Have I got the great American novel in me? I don’t feel that I do. My taste runs towards rather old-school science fiction. Perhaps if this were the classic days of pulp science fiction, I’d be right at home in good company – cranking out straightforward but ridiculous stories of life on Venus and, with a little luck, turning my ability to produce bullshit into a world-wide, tax-avoiding religion.

Ah, but I can dare to dream!

No. The plots, when they do come to mind, get quickly rejected by being scientifically impossible. It seems entertaining science fiction is dead because of the reality check. Damn you physicists and your “speed of light is inviolable” and “the electronic transmission of matter over a beam is impossible”!

You can only write old-style science fiction nonsense if you’re being quirky and ironic.

But wait! I am quirky and ironic!

There might be some hope yet.

The last post on this blog was over a year ago, concerning the death of my father, and it might appear that I stopped blogging in the wake of that. it just isn’t true. My posting prior to that have become infrequent, at best.

Twitter was killing it. My random thoughts, gripes and moments of my life were being siphoned away into little 140 character nuggets. By the time I felt like writing about something, I felt it was “old news” over on Twitter. If nothing else than an exercise for myself, I am going to force myself to blog something every day for a while. I have lost the art of writing “long form” I think.

I’ll start with a brief summary of what happened in the last year.

My dad is still dead – no surprises there. The rest of us are doing fine, although we’re all coming off some seasonal illness that is either 4 different illnesses or a single illness that manifested itself in four different sets of symptoms. I’m hoping for the latter, otherwise each of us has the likelihood of catching the other three illnesses in the household.

Speaking of dad, it took several months, but we finally honored his final request and scattered his ashes where he wanted. I made a video out of it, which might sound a bit ghoulish, but I found it cathartic.

The kids are doing well in school and are still maintaining straight A’s. Michelle has recently taken up violin, which she begged us for. Practice time is a bit of a chore – more for me than her, though.

You can listen here, if you dare: Violin Lessons, early days

In July we vacationed in California. First for a little while around Los Angeles, then up into the nearby mountains and the town of Wrightwood.

Wrightwood itself wasn’t the object of our trip. Michelle went to her first week-long summer camp at Camp Quest West. Chu-Wan also spent a week at camp as a counselor. I might have done the same, but James was one year too young to attend. Instead, he and I went father-son camping. Much like I used to do with my dad.

Michelle and Chu-Wan had a great time at Camp Quest and we’ll be discussing that more on the blog later.

James and my adventure was very different. We were not at all familiar with the area around the camp, so I relied on the Internet to identify potential campgrounds in the area of the camp. There were four forest service campgrounds, only one of which accepted reservations. I loathe making campground reservations, but because we had to camp in the area, I chose to play it safe.

The one campground that accepted reservations had over 100 sites available – only 2 were unreserved several months early. Apparently the proximity to Los Angeles makes this a popular campground. While the summer camp was in the 6,000ft altitude range, the campground was over 8,000ft. Again, with no experience in the area, I could only guess what July temperatures might be.

On the first day, before I dropped off Chu-Wan and Michelle at camp, we all arrived at the campground. As we pulled up to the reserved spot and got out of the car, I knew why this spot was the last puppy in the shop. It was awful! It had no trees. It was slanted at a 25º angle. The ground was tufty grass with abundant rodent holes in it. The metal table sat in the glaring sun and the whole site was 20 feet downwind of one of the smelliest pit toilets I’ve ever had the misfortune to experience. It was going to be a bad week.

My opinion of the suitability of the spot was confirmed when, as we surveyed the disaster that was the site, the campground hosts pulled up in their truck and said, “You’re not liking your spot very well, are you?”

Chu-Wan escaped sleeping in the tent as she had to be dropped off at camp the night before the session began. Michelle, James and I spent the night listening to the sound of unidentified rodents scurrying under the floor of the tent.

Michelle got dropped off the next day, leaving James and I alone in a packed campground… but not for long.

The campground hosts told me that, come Sunday afternoon, the campground would empty out completely and I was free to move my tent wherever I wanted. True to their word, by the time we returned from dropping off Michelle the campground was a ghost town.

I looked around and considered what a hassle it would be to collapse the tent and re-build it. I decided to limit my move to the nearest suitable site that I could pick up the standing tent and move it to. This was across the road and up a hill. It was a beautiful site, heavily wooded and flat, with hard-packed ground that had seen many a tent. At the back site of the site, you could see west into the valley and in the evening it had beautiful sunsets and twinkling lights from the small towns below. It also had intermittent cell phone coverage, which made it better than the other spot, which was a complete dead zone.

I told the campground hosts where I’d moved to. One of them said, “That’s fine. It’s a lovely spot. A bit windy, though.”

The other said, “Oh, well, it’s not as windy as the ones down on the lower loop.”

“That’s true,” said the first, “those get really windy!”

They had put their finger on the problem: That beautiful view down into the hot desert valley below meant that each night a prevailing wind blew up the canyons all night long. On the first night, the tent was at time whipped around like we were in a storm. I was kept awake most of the night by it and James clung to me in terror.

In the morning, while James was still asleep, I trekked down to the nearest restroom. I also had to trek around the campground a bit because the wind during the night had blown most everything in our camp a hundred yards away. Even the camp chairs had been picked up and sent flying.

While I was out of site of the campsite, I pondered how utterly alone we were. How my only family was at the summer camp, and they also had no cell phone signal. How anyone I knew was 7 hours or more away and no one really knew where we were. I realized how often my dad and I had been in such a similar situation. With my mother and grandparents dead, we camped all over Arizona, alone, without anyone knowing where we were. If something had happened to my dad, I would have been in serious trouble, but that had never occurred to me. I was actually scared. What would James do if I got hurt?

And at that moment, a dense, spiky pine cone, weighing a couple pounds at least, about the size of my head fell out of a tree and missed beaning me on the head by about 4 inches. It put my position clearly in perspective and after James woke up, we spent a good deal of time talking about what to do in the case of emergency. It didn’t change things, of course, but at least I felt like he stood a chance if something happened.

The next night was even worse! I was awoken at about midnight by what I could only assume was a bear trying to rip the tent apart. The whole tent was shaking and the flexible tent poles were being halfway to the ground. Then the rain fly ripped loose and blew off, expose the top of the tent to the night sky. Now the wind was blowing straight into the tent and puffing it out from the inside. One side broke away from the ground and started lifting up. I was only the weight of me on the air mattress that held it on the ground.

When it calmed down a bit, I got out, found the rainfly and put it back in place. The ropes had been torn off and I had to improvise a way to secure it. I figured I’d fix it in the morning.

That was not to be. surveying the damage to the tent revealed that it hadn’t caused the ropes to come loose, the canvas of the tent that secured them was ripped off. The tent stakes hadn’t come out of the group. The web stake loops had been ripped free of the tent.

I made an executive decision: The tent was deposited in the garbage at the campsite and James and I found our way back to greater Los Angeles to stay in a hotel. My first and so far only father-son camping trip had ended in defeat.

The rest of the year has been mostly routine save for one thing: Camp Quest Arizona.

In 2011, several of us came together to form Camp Quest Arizona, a summer camp for the children of atheists like us.

Summer camp with the Boy Scouts was the highlight of my year when I was young, but I have become increasingly disgusted with what they’ve become.

While the Boy Scouts have increasingly come under fire for their exclusion of gays, they discriminate against atheists as well. Atheists and even Scouts who speak out against their exclusionary policies are actively kicked out of the Scouts now.

Today as I write this, the Boy Scouts are expected to reverse their ban on gays due to public outrage. There has been no public outrage of their intolerance towards atheists and no repeal of that ban is forthcoming.

Camp Quest was formed years ago to provide an alternative to scout camps and bible camps, the two prevalent types of “camp by the lake” summer camps in the US. It is open to all children and is not intended to foster atheism, but is instead a place for kids to have fun at camp just like everyone else and to have a place to be with others with similar world views. Camp Quest teaches tolerance of different religious views and provides positive atheist role models for kids who live a world surrounded by people who too often claim that without religion there can be no morality. The weight of history proves that to be nonsense, but it doesn’t stop the people shouting it to the sky.

Currently, I have the privilege to serve as chairman of the board Camp Quest Arizona, the local chapter of Camp Quest. We’re in the thick of preparing for the 2013 camp session this June and it is a massively time-consuming, but rewarding task.

I shall save that for another day, though.

That we, his family – that I, his only child – would have accepted that burden without complaint is without question. He knew that and so he chose not to involve us in the decision he made about his life.

I cannot change that.

I can say, in my mind and in my principles – those that he instilled in me – that he had every right to do what he did. Everyone does. (No. Everyone should have the right to choose the point where they feel life offers more suffering than it does benefits. I say “should” because our laws, made by well-meaning but misguided busybodies, say we don’t have that right. A discussion for another time.)

In my mind I know those things, but that does not close the hole in my heart. I weep for my loss. I weep more for the loss my children feel and for the things they’ll never share with or know about a man who loved them more than anything else in the world.

That I cannot ever fill that hole is certain, but I have begun chronicling my father’s life as best I can and will be posting parts of it here online.

Here then iS the preface:

When information is no longer refreshed and maintained, it starts to deteriorate. When a primary source is lost, only the secondary traces remain.

Amongst so many other things, I lost a primary source of information yesterday with the death of my father, Phil Glover.

Never again will I hear about the fantastic the pizza from the Bottlecap Inn in Miami, FL in the 1950’s, or about how a misspelling in the local newspaper earned my dad the nickname, “Flip” or how a random automobile license plate and a blizzard lead to my birth.

My father’s story has come to an end, and parts of it has been told, in pieces, over 47 years, to me.

For my entire life, I’ve been keenly aware of the disconnect between first and secondhand recollection of a life’s story. My mother died when I was shy of 3 years old. I have had no memory of her for as long as I can remember, and I know so little of her story as to be nothing more than a paragraph or two on a page, and even that is contradictory.

Virtually, my only source for that info was my father and he either didn’t know, or didn’t care to discuss it much. I admit, I never pressed him on it because I thought it might be painful for him and my mother was really nothing more than a stranger to me. She was a loss to me intellectually rather than emotionally. I knew I should feel it, but I didn’t really feel it.

My father, on the other hand, has been the one fixed-point throughout my entire life. At any point in my lifetime, until yesterday, he was always there for me to reach out to for help, advice or just an ear to bend.

Did I take that for granted? I hope not. I think my dad knew how much I loved and appreciated him, even though neither of us said it very often.

Now I find myself thinking not about my loss, but that of my kids. They lost a man who loved them more than anything in the world and they can never know him as well as I did. No one else alive could.

The kids are older than I was when my mother died, but younger than when my grandparents (who helped raise me after that) died. My memories of them are varied, but I realize how little I knew of them either. My loss.

What memories they’ll hold of their “papa” I can only guess.

This is the start of my attempt to record that which I know about my father.

When information is no longer refreshed and maintained, it starts to deteriorate.

For my kids and for myself, this is the story of my father, Phil Glover, 1931-2012.

Now, with the advent of the iPad 2, Apple has revamped iMovie to be a universal iPhone 4/iPad 2 app. I’ve recently had the opportunity to try out the iPad version in a real-world situation.

We recently had an employee appreciation event at my work and a co-worker and I used our iPhone 4′s to record video and pictures of the event. I then proceeded, at the event, to edit the video on my iPad.

Combined with editing my last vlog entry, I reel I have a good basic grasp of the new iPad iMovie experience.

First, the good.

iMovie has become considerably more stable. They’ve added more themes, more upload options and improved the audio editing, including the ability to record narration.

Using it on the iPad is a huge improvement over using it on the iPhone. With a larger work (and touch) area, grabbing and trimming clips with precision is much easier. In fact, the interface metaphor of iMovie on the Mac now seems obviously originally intended to be finger driven rather than mouse driven. iMovie on the iPad just feels like a logical way to edit.

Now, the bad.

All that said, it still comes up short in too many areas.

There are more themes, but they’re still just as restrictive. You can only pick one theme and its elements, and the only thing that does is give you a style for the titles (opening/closing/middle), one style of transition fits all. You have a choice of a hard cut, a cross-dissolve or the theme’s one transition.

Change the theme and all of the theme transitions change to the new theme — which can be desirable or not desirable, depending on the circumstances.

I wish Apple would get their upload options on the same page. For example, iMovie on the iPad can upload directly to YouTube, Facebook, Vimeo and CNN’s iReport but not Apple’s own MobileMe!. iMovie on the Mac allows upload all of those and MobileMe.

You can, of course, save your video to the Camera Roll on the iPad, in which case you can upload it to MobileMe and YouTube, but not Vimeo, Facebook or iReport.

While designed mainly for photographs, Apple seems to want people to store and organize their video files in iPhoto or Aperture, but they can only upload to MobileMe, Facebook and Flickr.

Apple really needs to get on the ball and work this out. Naturally, I only noticed it because I wanted to upload my finished video to MobileMe and realized I couldn’t without intermediary steps.

You can now control the volume of clips, and even see their waveform, but you can’t, as far as I can tell, replace the audio from one clip with the audio from another. You can lay down sound effects or record narration. It does a great job, you select the location you want the narration to start, hit record and it backs up, gives a count down and begins recording while showing you the video. This is just how it is done in the Mac version of iMovie and it’s really easy.

Narration audio appears as separate audio tracks on the timeline… As do sound effects, if you add them… but, adding music is a totally confusing experience. Most of the time, if you select a music track, it’s laid down as a background track, but sometimes, and I can’t find the pattern, it’s laid down as a separate audio track, just like narration and sound effects.

I’ve tried every combination I can think of tapping, untapping, positioning, turning wave forms on and off, and I can’t consistently get it to add audio as a separate track.

I also couldn’t find anything online to suggest you even can add songs as tracks – although I know from experience that you can. (See picture showing a background track, SFX and a music track.)

The bin is sorted newest to oldest and shows you a timeline of the videos, but there’s no information about them and you can’t play them to see what they are. You can select the clip and trim the beginning and ending, and that will show you the screen at the trim point in the viewer, but the visual info only. It isn’t really “scrubbing” and you can’t hear the clip.

Consider recording an interview, you might have a bin that looks like this:

There’s also no mechanism for organizing the clips. If you could toss them into subfolders or sub projects, add some explanatory metadata or description or even mark them as “favorites” or “rejected” as you can in iMovie on the Mac, it would be much more manageable. As it is, it’s a trial and error process of you inserting clips and then removing them from the timeline until you find the right one. Unless the clips are very visually distinct, this is extremely painful.

Finally, if there’s one thing that is the most frustrating about iMovie on the iPad, it’s the lack of editing options.

Typically in editing you have the basic “assembly” process, which is laying clips one after the other into the timeline. This recreates the process of linear editing from the olden times of video tape. Often a rough cut of a video, using master shots can be created this way. iMovie has no problem with this.

Then you move onto the more complicated editing. “Inserting” takes a secondary clip and inserts it into the middle of the master track, by splitting and pushing the two halves of the master apart. iMovie has no problem with this, although it appears you have to manually split the master track at the place you want the insert.

Next up is an “overwrite”, which is similar to an insert except that the master track isn’t pushed apart, instead a chunk of the master, of the same duration as the secondary clip is removed and replaced with the secondary clip. This simulates what’s called an “A B Roll” and is useful when switching between multiple camera recording the same event. With an overwrite edit, you may also wish to only overwrite the video only, the audio only or both. This is the real power of the overwrite and it’s sadly missing in iMovie.

You can also achieve much the same effect with a “superimposition” or “overlay” which represents “stacking” one layer of video over the top of another concurrent piece of video. Since this isn’t available in iMovie either, there is no good way to do a two-camera shoot.

Insert editing is inadequate to the task because not only is it more difficult to synchronize, but you cannot mix the audio tracks. (For a live event you would typically designate one camera’s audio as the master audio and discard the audio from the other camera.)

Overall, the promise of iMovie on the iPad is amazing, but the implementation, for an Apple product, is remarkably short-sighted. It’s as if their programmers never actually bothered to try editing anything beyond the demo videos Apple uses in their promotions.

For $5 you can hardly complain, but still… It isn’t good enough. They need to roll out most, if not all, of the basic feature set of iMovie for the Mac.

I’ll vlog about it later, but I shan’t edit it with iMovie on the iPad.

- Posted from my iPad 2.

This time I’m looking at my new Logitech Harmony 700 Universal Remote.

My experiment of combining two great tastes, the Cornish Pasty and the Australian Meat Pie, into the hybrid Aussie Pasty.

Answer: This video right here. Wow, how tedious. Don’t bother watching, it’s terrible, but it gets the preface out of the way. The next one is much better.

The current series of Primeval is so ordinary that I have neither strong positive or negative feelings towards it. They aren’t screwing things up badly like they did last season, neither are they making me interested like they did in the first season. I’ve watched through this episode 3 times and still I’ve got nothing, so I decided to try my Fusion Patrol approach. I watch the show, take notes, fill in some comments and hope I have something to say.

Timeline/Notes

00:00 Five years ago a woman captures a bizarre baby anomaly animal and flushes it down the toilet. Yeah. I’m believing that. Looked too big to flush. Perhaps some kids would like to try some experimenting and report back to me on that one. What is the maximum size lizard you can flush. My guess is you’ll need to live in Australia or Indonesia to try that one.

00:04 Philip, “We’re poised on a new dawn” – hhhmmmmmmmm, New Dawn, that sounds fishy. What kind of scientific advancement is he hoping to get? Is it just an understanding of time, or is he perhaps trying to control time?

00:05 Danny Quinn still has a locker. They just keep reminding us about the missing Danny. Once again that seems to indicate Danny isn’t really gone yet.

00:06 Lot of old dumpy buildings in London, aren’t there? Actually, this looks like the same building they shot in during the second series.

00:07 Perky chick (what’s her name?) gives Conner the key to her apartment. Suspicious? Forward? Clueless? Not sure which. Isn’t she perky, though?

00:09 Rex is back. I hope he doesn’t feature in any more episodes. He’s such a technically stupid creature, that thing certainly couldn’t flap his wings and fly.

00:09 New guy (What’s his name?) is chatting with old guy (Is that an old Danny?) Clearly New Guy is spying for him.

00:10 We have our first fatality! Construction worker for dinner! It took 10 minutes for a fatality… this show is really slowing down.

00:11 Perky Girl’s apartment is nice. ARC must pay well well. At least she uses Macs.

00:14 Conner’s old friend, Duncan, has really moved up in the world, living rough and homeless and he has a collection of dinosaur poo! Nah, he’s not obsessing about the whole “best friend killed by dodo” thing at all.

00:20 Perky Girl has the hots for Becker!

00:21 “Are you (Abby) his (Connor’s) girlfriend?” “Wow, there’s hope for us all!” Best line in the entire series, although, I’m noticing that Abby is aging pretty fast, she’s never going to age well like Claudia Brown/Jenny Lewis. PLEASE bring Jenny back! At least we have Perky Girl.

00:24 It’s a Boar Croc (Kaprosuchus)

00:26 Abby has commandeered a boat. On what authority can she commandeer a boat? Do they carry ID?

00:27 Only the second killing. Not much of a body count. Ho hum

00:29 Becker to the rescue! Ever notice how the ARC has a team of crack military types, but none of them do anything except Becker?

00:30 Container breaks free with creature inside, falls 30+ feet… and the animal is still alive. Rubbish! Do we have to discuss the cube/square law?

00:32 I’m so glad the guys running this container port have stacked the containers in a convenient labyrinth pattern.

00:34 One utterly useless ARC soldier dead! Body count: 3

00:37 Conner has his job back! Was it ever in doubt? Wonder why they bothered with that subplot? Was it just to kill time?

00:39 Becker might have the hots for Perky Girl… and why not?

00:43 …and it’s all over. 43 minutes? That’s short!

Ah, but they didn’t, nearly two years later, Primeval is back. Is it better than before?

For those perhaps not in the loop, Primeval, an ITV science fiction program about temporal anomalies opening corridors between different times and the present, often allowing nasties such as dinosaurs into our own time, ran for 3 successful – if dubiously plotted and scientifically inaccurate – seasons, but, the global economic crisis combined with ITV financial difficulties lead to cost-cutting measures. Primeval, a CGI-heavy series, had to go, but creative financing has brought the show back to our screens. (Well, back to some people’s screens, anyway.)

Synopsis

At the end of the previous series, Danny Quinn, team leader at the Anomaly Research Center (the ARC) was trapped, perhaps forever, in the Pleistocene, having defeated Helen Cutter’s evil plans to destroy mankind. Helen had been killed by a velociraptor that had followed them through the anomaly and Quinn was cut off.

Meanwhile, Abby and Conner had been trapped in the Cretaceous, also with little hope of an anomaly opening on its own.

One year later, with a Spinosaur on their trail, Conner and Abby find Helen Cutter’s anomaly control device and manage to return to the present day, brining a Spinosaur with them. They find themselves face-to-face with the new ARC team and must all work together to stop the Spinosaur.

Analysis

Typically the analysis section of these reviews is where I rip the piss-poor science and ridiculous temporal-plotting, but this episode is something new… there’s really nothing in it. It’s a straight-forward melodrama with no twists or turns and, once past the notion of the anomalies and creatures traveling through time there’s nothing in that to pick on, either.

There are a couple things to note, first, the ARC has been turned into a “public/private partnership” and new character, Philip, Nobel-prize winning genius and inventor of the room-temperature super-conductor now seems to co-own the ARC, and is clearly in a superior position – if equal on paper – with Ben Miller’s returning character of Lester.

Of the old crew, only Becker survived in the present, and he’s been made second-in-command to a new Irish guy who is so non-descript I have to wait for someone to call him by name before I can remember what it is. (OK, I just looked it up, his name is Matt.)

Matt has a secret, he seems to be collaborating with an elderly gentlemen and, if their remarks are to be believed, they’re working together to save the world, and Matt is searching for someone at the ARC.

My pet theory is that the old man is actually Danny Quinn, returned via anomaly to some point in the past and having lived his entire life waiting for this time. I’ve got nothing to support that; however, in the “summary” at the beginning of the episode, we saw the actors faces of Conner, Abby, even dead characters like Cutter and Helen, but we only ever saw the back of Danny Quinn’s head or a quick shot where his face was obscured. If the character has been written out of the show, why would they hide his face and not the others?

Considering it was such a long time coming, I’ve not got much to say about it.

I’m pleased to report that the unit came through with flying colors, in fact, it exceeded my expectations at every level. There was only one instance when I took a wrong turn and, to be honest, it was entirely my own fault. I made an assumption that the GPS was wrong and… it turns out I was wrong and it was right. We’ll say no more about that.

The 1490T has a large touchscreen interface, but unlike the iPhone’s glass screen, the 1490T has a soft plastic screen, which isn’t very responsive compared to the iPhone. I found myself having to push extra times on the screen, particularly when entering text. Apart from that, the interface is logical and easy to navigate.

The unit comes equipped with the ability to speak street names, and has several “voices” it can use. I’ve chosen to use the female “British” voice, but there are both male and female voices in American, British and Australian accents. The accents aren’t particularly strong, but it was initially confusing by the British voice’s insistent to call on-ramps and off-ramps “slip roads”. It’s a term I’ve never heard.

The GPS can also use a variety of voices in other languages, as well as ones you create and load yourself; however, these voice give only generic instructions such as “turn right” instead of speaking the street names, as in “turn right on N Beaver Rd.”

In particular, the feature that turned out to be the most helpful was the “free” traffic updates. These updates are supplied by FM radio in major metropolitan areas and are ad-sponsored, and so periodically, ads for Red Lobster pop up (discretely) on the screen. The GPS takes your current route and compares it to the traffic database and arrives at a delay estimate, which is displayed on the screen. The GPS compares your current route, including traffic delays, against other routes to the same destination. If an alternate route is determined to be faster the GPS changes your route to avoid the problem.

I’d tested this a number of times in Phoenix and it was less than impressive. The unit would show me that there was a delay of several minutes, but would not re-route me. You can have it show you where the traffic problems are and even “force” it to avoid the traffic; however, in every instance it would complain it me, telling me this really was the best route and even if I told it to avoid anyway, it didn’t seem to do so.

If you know anything about the route from Phoenix to Los Angeles, you’ll know there aren’t any practical alternatives to Interstate I-10. Once you’ve gotten a certain distance outside of Phoenix (around 400th Ave), I-10 is the only choice for crossing the vast wasteland in any kind of direct route. Other alternatives take you hundreds of miles out of the way.

As we left town on I-10, at around 130th Ave, the traffic delay indicator started to go crazy. FIrst it read 10 minutes delay, then 20, 30, 45 and finally 53 minutes before it announced it was recalculating due to severe traffic. It then routed us along a series of byways as we got progressively farther out into the middle of nowhere and it finally returned us to I-10 at 339th Ave, at which point we could see there was a major construction project and that traffic was backed up in both directions as far as the eye could see.

There was a second couple traveling in a different car about an hour behind us. They chose not to heed my warning and spent two hours stuck in the jam. For this event alone, the Garmin 1490T GPS has won a permanent place in my car on road trips.

I recommend this GPS.