Cartography
January 30th, 2004
Contrary to what FedEx may think our house has an address that does actually exist. One of the perils of living in new construction is that our street doesn’t yet show up on maps. Whenever we have something delivered to the house I end up trying to explain that the address is in fact correct and that their maps are simply out of date. Even after I manage to convince them and get the item delivered we end up going through it again the next time they have something to deliver.
Hopefully they will get updated area maps soon.
That has to be really annoying. It must be hard to keep maps up to date though, with all the construction going on everywhere. I’ve had a similar problem, though not as annoying as yours. I bought a “new to me” used car when I moved up to Hokkaido and it was equipped with GPS, along with a little monitor showing your position and everything. I thought that was pretty cool for an eight year old car. The only problem is, the GPS software is also eight years old thus everything is out of date. My apartment building is only five years old and some of the roads around the area are rather new, so they aren’t included in the GPS software. Yesterday when I was driving back home the GPS was telling me that I was driving in the middle of a forest. It’s pretty funny but I have realized that it’s usless since it’s so out of date.
Hey Jonah,
Honestly I think it would be more annoying to have a in-car GPS system be out of date. I would think that is something you could get updated content for. Last year when I was in California for LinuxWorld we had a similar GPS snafu in the streets of San Francisco. I guess because of all of the hills we were having problems getting a good signal so our car kept showing up off the roads on the map.