Sunday Mail: December 16, 2007

Posting a cartoon every weekday leaves no room for me to simply share news, ideas, and other stuff with you. So welcome to 'Sunday Mail: Letters from Dry Bones', the new, once-a-week Dry Bones feature.

I'm Living In The Future!

The other day I took a cab in Tel Aviv and gave the driver an obscure address in nearby Ramat Gan. "Do you know how to get there?" I asked. "I do not need to know" the driver responded in a lovely Russian-accented baritone voice, "I have GPS map!" There, mounted on his dashboard was a beautiful computer screen which was tracing our position against a local street map.

I've gotten used to the doors that slide open when you approach them (first seen in the original Captain Kirk Star Trek TV show). I'm comfortable carrying a mobile phone which is exactly like a Star Trek Communicator (likewise from Star Trek season one). But this guy's GPS map really got me. It "runs" on his Pocket PC. He flicked on the audio "voice" and the two of us enjoyed the "back seat" driving of a computer entity. "Was it expensive?" I asked. "At first they were, but the price has come way down", he answered.

I had forgotten about it until this morning when a friend in Jerusalem told me that he was ordering a GPS "map set" of Israel and Europe from an online site that he knew and trusted.

I checked it out. It looks really interesting. Part of an Israel-oriented online catalog site. If you feel like checking it out too, just click on Israeli GPS maps