The Starrenburg’s Website

Well it’s here! My site’s all new, fully designed for WordPress 1.5, theme - “The Low Sky”.

I had wanted for a while to update my blog to a native WordPress 1.5 theme, and had looked at all of the themes submitted to the recent theme competition on Alex King’s blog. But, to be honest, none of them had really caught my attention. Too many similar variations on a “theme”, and too little real estate for displaying content.

I looked at my then current theme (a converted 1.2 template) which actually had only been in use for a short time (from when I had started using WordPress) and thought - well I basically liked the main layout of the theme but wanted to have it as a native 1.5 theme. What to do - in the end I decided if there was none available which I could customise, then I would get a blog designer to develop one with me.

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If you live in Europe and drive a car eventually, unless you have a) a photographic memory and/or b) two heads so you can look at two things at once (a map and the road ahead), you are going to have that awful experience of saying “where the heck are we”. And for those of you old enough to remember the old sitcom comedy F-Troop you’ll wish, like the fictional “we’re the Hekawi” Indians in the show, that you had a GPS navigation system. Well… they didn’t wish they had one… GPS hadn’t even been invented in 1967 let alone 1867, but they sure as heck could have used one.

Well fast forward to 2005, and I have a GPS navigation system in my car, and I love it - it’s the best marriage saver since… well anything. Better than having your own private, on-tap, marriage counsellor sitting in the car with you!

Now while the technology of GPS would have been new to the (native American) Indians, the “forked tongue” double-talk I am experiencing coming out of the supplier of the GPS map navigation software needed for the system would, I believe, be very familiar to them. I am getting the impression that the supplier’s customer service belongs back in the 1860’s.

Here’s the problem. A GPS system obviously needs updated GPS map navigation software - roads are changing all the time and you don’t want to do something like following directions from a GPS system which is using old maps, and drive off the end of an unfinished flyover, or into the sea. So you need to obtain (at some regular interval) updated CDs of navigation maps for your GPS system. Uh oh… enter stage left - TeleAtlas one of the world’s major GPS map navigation suppliers.

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