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I used the excuse of needing another crossword puzzle book to go to Fayetteville today. I had to go to three different book stores to find the ones I like from the Los Angeles Times. The editors there are very clever. Their puzzle clues are not like getting the right answers right on a game show or on a classroom test. They use a lotta puns that are often impossible to guess.
When I go to Fayetteville these days my visits are redundant and routine. I go to the same places about every time I go over there. I acquired this routine from when I worked nearby at Fort Bragg. Back then I had a little money to spend and would wander through some of the stores looking for stuff I could later pretend I didn't want and give away as gifts.
The health food store I discovered is one of the new stops on my circuit through Fayetteville. It's actually been there all the time I thought there was one one half-way decent health food store in town. I found out it was there through Google Maps. I don't know why I haven't used it to find shops before. I used it as, well, a map to find the routes to place.
I was looking for a place called The Whole Food Store up in the Research Triangle area around the capitol. It turned out they have stores in Raleigh, Durham, and Cary. Fortunately, Google Maps also listed several other stores in the area that carried health foods and those other stores made me realize I could do generic searches for types of stores. This feature has been available for a while. Why am I always the last to know?
When I decided to drive down to Wilmington to look for seaweed on the beach I decided to use the same search technique to find health food stores there, and there were five of them when I only thought there was one or maybe two. My sister-in-law found another one, the best one yet, a health food cooperative to add to that shopping list.
I really am way behind in the digital world. The iPhone has been on the market for some time now. I might could afford the iPhone, but I can't afford the AT&T service. Both my friend Rainey and my brother have an iPhone, and they're constantly showing off the little programs they download they find fascinating. No blame. It really makes them happy.
The method I described above using Google Maps I did here at home and then went to where the maps indicated, but they would have gone to the towns first, and then did the research from maybe a cafe there. and then used the GPS devices on their iPhones to show them exactly how to get where they wanted to go in real time.
I'm in no hurry to get a smart phone. I don't question that I'll eventually get one. Apple is coming out with their new iPad tablet computer that I'm led to believe is simply a bigger iPhone. I have refused to read the previews on it. It might be vaporware like so much other stuff I got excited about that never made it through to the prototype, much less actually end up in the store for sale.
Google now has its own smart phones they're calling Android. The reviews I've skimmed over suggest they're not that far technically behind the iPhone. I find myself wishing they would offer some competition and bring the prices of phone service down to a more reasonable level. But, they're just another huge corporation trying to fill their stockholders pockets, so I'm not holding my breath. I'm thinking it may be as much as a year or more before a smart phone get stuck in my greasy palms.
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I do not attempt to tell the God's own truth here because I don't know what the truth is or hardly ever. I try to capture the drifting thoughts that randomly appear in my imagination for reasons I may not understand. I don't know if the content I capture with these words is true or false. The Comments settings are turned off to prevent me from having to defend what amounts to little more than fanciful, sometime crude speculation. Great moments in our lives never return.
