I’m pretty excited to read about my friend David White building his own in-car navigation and entertainment system. He took a look at available systems and came away with the following opinions:

The problem with all these [existing systems] is three fold as far as I am concerned: 1) they are way too expensive, 2) they are not extendable (meaning I can’t program on them), and 3) they are not connected to the car. Imagine the last two put together!

<snip>

So what exactly is my thought? I mean there are people shoving Mac Minis and mini-ITX form factors in cars now right? Yes they are, but to me it is wrong tool for the job and just not that interesting (I would love to hear if you think I am wrong). I think there are problems with power consumption and conversion, instant on and off scenarios, dash placement, etc. So I thought to go out and build my own system. I mean build my own system -from the ground up board and all. Add a flip out screen with a wiring harness into the car bus network and away I go. I plan on using Windows mobile 5.0 and the .Net Compact Framework for the UI of applications and part way down the stack until the real time requirements outstrip what a garbage collected environment can do.

I’ve always had a hankering for learning embedded development, so I’ll be following David’s blog with great interest. I also love the title of his blog – Architect Must Implement.

Mark Schmidt from the WWF team built a nifty little app to import the NHL hockey schedule into Outlook. So I went to import the Caps schedule, only to find that the time zones don’t match up. All the game times are in east coast time and I am on the west coast. I was going to bug Mark for the code, but decided instead to change my current timezone to east coast, import the games into Outlook, and then change my timezone back. It’s a bit of a hack, but it was quicker than changing the code. Sometimes, simple is better.

Now, I just need Comcast to get HDNet.

Update: No word from Concast on getting HDNet. They hope to have more HD Channels “by the end of the year”. I found a petition online asking for HDNet on Comcast and a blog entry from Mark Cuban (co-owner of HDNet) that compares HDNet vs. InHD to “David vs. Goliath”. InHD is owned in part, I think, by Comcast. However, Comcast now owns the broadcast rights to the NHL via their OLN network. So I’m hoping we’ll eventually see HD NHL on Comcast, thought it sounds like I have to wait a few months. 😦