Google Maps and Google Navigation are some of the best apps on the Android platform. The unattractive, computerized female voice of the Navigation app has guided me to many locations, whether I’m in my car or in my motorcycle. I don’t like to look at my mobile phone while I’m driving, and I can’t look at it when I’m on my motorcycle. As such, one of the most important features of the Navigation app is the audible turn by turn directions.

Unfortunately, the latest updates to Google Maps replaced the street names with directional prompts, and it made the app unusable for me.

For example, if I was supposed to turn left on Center street in a quarter mile, the older versions of Google Navigation would announce:

“In a quarter mile, turn left onto Cen-ter street.”

now it just says:

“In a quarter mile, turn left.”

If you live in a larger town or city like I do, these directional prompts are useless. Often many streets and exits are close together so mumbling “exit left” during my commute home might mean taking a separate highway or exiting onto two different surface streets.

The prompts are even more confusing because often Google Navigation will tell you to “turn” in order to stay on a road that might fork into different roads, or change names. I was told to turn right two days ago, when all I needed to do was bear right and stay on the same street I was already on.

So, the latest two versions of Google Maps / Navigation are broken. How do you get your street names back?
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Zak, the author of the very entertaining and insightful Playing D&D With Porn Stars blog, created an event called International Anklebiter Illustrator Day.

You should read the whole article, but here’s the idea:

Find a young person (probably the younger, the better) to draw two pictures for your role playing game. The first picture can be anything you want. As Zak states, it could be redrawing a crappy map for you, or drawing a special item you found. Maybe it could be your character. The second drawing must be a Displacer beast, which sort of resembles a cat with tentacles.

For their work, each young artist is to receive $1USD (or local equivalent) for each drawing.

My current D&D character is a nihilistic, dirty shaman. He has an object called a Hungry Spirits Totem that unleashes the grumpy spirits of his ancestors under certain conditions. I am not really sure what that is supposed to look like, but in my mind I see a totem pole with Scooby-Doo style giant goofy screaming mouths. I figured this would be a great item for Sedagive?’s six year old son to draw.

Drawings are supposed to be uploaded by May 29. You can forward your links on to Zak via his blog, or just keep the artwork to yourself.

I know a lot of you play D&D — this is a fun thing to do and I hope some of my other readers participate.

In September of 2010 I wrote about a few different magazine carriers that I own, and how different form factors can be more or less useful for those of us who carry a firearm concealed. I purchased and used a single, horizontal magazine carrier made by Parlux for quite some time.

In December of last year, I reached for my spare magazine and it felt out of place. Hrm. It turns out the Kydex hook had cracked, leaving the magazine flopping around on my belt. Not the best way to carry a spare mag.

I think the thinness of the Kydex and sharp angle led to a premature failure.

I wrote to Parlux and never received a response. It’s a shame, as I really liked carrying a spare mag horizontally. I had to move on.

I used the BlackHawk mag carrier (also discussed in my write-up) for about five months. It did the job, but it was too bulky, stuck out too far, and had a habit of knocking against things as I sat down.

One of my firearms instructors let me try out his magazine carrier made by Comp-Tac. I was hooked, and here’s my review.
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I shaved my beard off in early March and I knew I was going to have to shave more frequently than I have the last year and a half. I burned up my last Mach 3 razor cartridge, and thought I would try my hand at shaving with a double edge safety razor.

I am going to write about my experience and the products I use in future posts, but let me just get this off my chest. It’s going to sound weird to some of you, but it’s true.

I love shaving.

I never would have written that before shaving with a double edge safety razor. If I didn’t nick myself with a cartridge, I’d irritate my skin or develop in-grown hairs.

However, shaving with a double edge (DE) razor requires some skill, some practice, some additional steps and products, and most importantly, a lot more time.

If you want to start shaving with a double edge razor I recommend starting with this article about preparing your face for a shave. You can even do this with your cartridge razor (I did), so when you get your first DE razor you’ll already have this part down pat.
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About six weeks ago, I wrote about Draw Something, a collaborative drawing game for the Android and iOS operating systems. At that point, Draw Something had just exploded in popularity. Users were creating 3000 drawings per second, there were over 36 million players, and the makers of the game, OMGPOP, was just purchased by online game giant Zynga for over $200 million dollars.

At one point I had over 40 games going at the same time. I was making so many in-game coins I never had to pay money to buy bombs or colors. One Saturday morning I spent two hours catching up with all of my Draw Something games. I eventually had to stop – so many friends were responding to my drawings that I could have possibly played all morning.

And then, all of a sudden, the game ran out of steam.

Most of my friends stopped playing, or played very sporadically. I deleted all games with less than 10 turns, and then two weeks later deleted all games with less than 25 turns. On Friday I’m going to drop everyone with less than 50 turns.

There were some technical issues during this time, including weird Facebook login issues, and also problems loading specific games. My friend and I couldn’t play our game for several days, but we could play with other people just fine. Frequent players like myself exhausted most of the words in the game’s dictionary, and I think by the time updates were released to address these issues some people got bored or frustrated.

Mobile app tracking service AppData reports that 1.7 million people stopped using Draw Something in the last seven days. Draw Something’s rise in popularity seems to be equaled only by its rapid decline.

So, what will it take to get Draw Something back on track?
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This April I started filming my motorcycle commutes to work. I live about 23 miles from work, and have to ride downtown. This can be a bit hairy at times, and I figured my commutes might be able to help other motorcyclists who decide to use their bikes instead of their cars to go to work.

I’m still figuring out the best way to chronicle my rides, but I will start putting up some lessons learned soon.

However, I wanted to get a jump on things and talk about an interesting lane incursion that happened to me last week.
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Some lessons cannot be taught. They cannot be passed down from one to the next, no matter how well-structured, well-meaning, or well-presented. Trying to express an elusive life lesson is like trying to describe the color blue to a blind person.

The unexpected death of someone we love is an experience you have to go through to understand. And then, it’s at an incredible cost.

My sister passed away thirteen years ago today. I remember my mother’s voice on the phone as clearly as the day it happened. The panic. My disbelief. How could this happen? I had so much left to say.

I learned The Lesson that day: you can’t take anyone or anything for granted. I’ve spent every waking moment trying to correct the only regret in my life: make sure you tell everyone you care about just how much they mean to you.
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Hi folks! Last night I went to the midnight showing of Marvel’s Avengers, the ensemble cast superhero action movie. The Avengers team is made up mostly of characters who already have made at least one movie appearance: Thor, Iron Man, the Hulk, Captain America, Nick Fury, and the Black Widow. Newcomer to this latest iteration of the Avengers on the big screen is the character Hawkeye, who is sort of a cross between DC Comics’s Green Arrow and, well … no one. No one really knows WTF Hawkeye is on the Avengers; he just is.

Anyway, here are some brief thoughts on the movie, and yet another test of

The Patented DrFaulken Movie Prediction System™.

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Happy birthday to my youngest dog Pearl, who is turning five years old today. I don’t know what is more mind-bending: remembering Pearl as a puppy, or realizing all of the things that have changed in my live since she came into it.
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Sedagive? and I were watching the television show Big Bang Theory several months ago. Leonard went into the kitchen, walked over to a set of plastic cylinders mounted to the wall, and turned a dial. Suddenly he had cereal!

Big Bang Theory set designer Ann Shea apparently found the Zevro WM300 in 2010, and they made their way onto the show shortly thereafter. This three chamber container system is really easy to install and use.

We had to find out more about these wall-mounted dispensers, and I was confident they were super expensive.

We were triply fortunate – we found them, they were pretty inexpensive, and they work really well … within limits.

Here’s my review on this mouthful: the Zevro WM300 Indispensable SmartSpace Wall Mount Triple Dry-Food Dispenser.
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