THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1997, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, January 19, 1997 TAG: 9701160117
SECTION: CAROLINA COAST PAGE: 02 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
SOURCE: Ronald L. Speer
LENGTH: 70 lines
As you may know, electronic devices have never been my bag. It took me years to feel comfortable writing on an electric typewriter, and by then it had been replaced by computers.
In the computer revolution, I've been a heel-dragger, a Neanderthal in the eyes of first- and second-graders who can play a keyboard better than I could milk a cow when I was their age.
I realized years ago that I was out of the mainstream electronically when I first played a game called PacMan, where you were supposed to evade a little critter out to get you in a maze.
Everybody I knew loved it. I hated the stupid game.
My heart went boom! boom! boom! when I was threatened, and I nearly had a stroke. I never managed to zap my foe. Quickly trapped and soundly beaten, I was a nervous wreck. My teenage niece, who giggled while I cowered, has looked at me with a lot less awe ever since.
I never played PacMan again. And I've never risked my health or sanity against any of its ever-more-stressful successors like Super Nintendo and Sega.
But I have mellowed a bit in my beliefs that computers are the work of the devil and someday will take over the world because nobody will know how to do anything except play on the Internet.
My pals call it ``The Net'' and talk about it like they used to talk about sex - passionately, 24 hours a day.
The reason I've gotten soft on software is because of a navigational device known as a GPS - Global Positioning System.
My favorite boat catalog last fall featured a sale on a GPS for $149, one of the cheaper toys sold to sailors. I folded the catalog to the GPS page and left it for weeks on a living room table.
And as Christmas approached, I praised the attributes of the little computer as the best safety device ever for a sailor on the waters of the Albemarle and Pamlico sounds.
``If I had a GPS you'd never again have to worry about me on the Wind Gypsy,'' I'd assure my wife over breakfast. At dinner, I'd say, ``That GPS is so cheap I'm going to buy it after Christmas if I have any money left after your gifts and getting things for the kids.''
Gee, was I surprised to get a GPS as a present under the tree on Christmas morning!
And it's a marvel. The gadget, about the size of a package of long cigarettes, tells time to the second. It tells how fast you're traveling.
And using several fixes on satellites, it gives your location in latitude and longitude in degrees, minutes and seconds.
It's accurate to less than 50 feet - which is amazing since I figured anything within five miles was pretty good when I took shots with a sextant to find my position.
You can also plug in the location of a place far away - say the entrance to Bull Bay at Columbia - and that little bugger will immediately tell the compass course to the mark and how far away it is in nautical miles. And when you head there, it tells you whether you're off course and how to steer to get right.
You can plug in scores of what they call waypoints and find out how to reach them. And Ralph (I give human names to devices I like so they don't seem like computers) can tell me how far I've come since I left home.
That's all I've learned so far. Usually I advance only as far as I need to on computers. And that's all I need from Ralph now. I took Ralph with me on the Wind Gypsy in a race on New Year's Day, which was cold and windy. All the navigational advice I needed that day came from a member of the crew, a plaintive cry: ``Head for home, dummy.''
Come spring and better sailing weather, I'll find out what else Ralph can do.
But I'm still amazed that the GPS was under the tree, My wife knows I don't like computers.