Leonard arrives from...

[altivo]

Indiana? Well that's where he was shipped from, and he arrived via UPS today.

Here he is, just emerging from his birth caul:

(Click photo to view additional images.) Leonard is a 30 inch lion in the Cuddlekins line, and quite appropriately regal.

In other news, yesterday I updated the maps in my Garmin GPS. This is noteworthy because it is so agonizingly slow that I resist the process until the maps are obviously full of errors. At work, on a T1 connection, it took over five hours. I have no idea what the volume of data transferred actually might be, but these are only the default US and Canada maps that came with the unit. The last experience, about 14 months ago, was similarly slow. Why should this be so difficult? You'd think it was NASA updating the program of a Mars rover, one bit at a time.

Weather report: it actually rained today. For about three minutes. Continued forecasts of rain and even thunder and lightning, continue. Actual fulfillment of those forecasts? Somewhat less than 10% of the time period involved.

Comments

[calydor.livejournal.com]

When I updated our GPS to the 2010 maps it similarly took several hours to download the Europe maps. I believe the file size was somewhere in the vicinity of 4-5 GB, and the update itself after downloading the data took about two hours if not more.

Obviously you're downloading ALL the data instead of just information about what's changed, which is just so incredibly wasteful I have no words. There aren't THAT many changes to the roads in a year or two.

I am now on a 384/384 connection, the GPS is begging to be updated, and I just can't bring myself to even try. It'll take days now - on a connection that gets forcibly reset every 24 hours.

[hrrunka]

Transferring data to a Garmin unit seems to take ten times as long as the actual data quantity being transferred seems to indicate. I suspect there's a hideous amount of DRM-ish chit-chat going on.

[altivo]

I suspect a bunch of it is failsafe stuff to make sure that a crash doesn't brick the GPS itself. At least, I hope that's what it is, and not Garmin collecting a log of everyplace you've been for the last year and forwarding it to Homeland Security.

[hrrunka]

It sometimes seems as if Garmin use a 300baud emulation to actually transfer the data...

[altivo]

Yeah, I just can't understand what's going on with this. Even with DRM, a file transfer that takes that long would exceed the memory in the entire GPS by nearly double. Yet after the update, the amount of freespace remains just about the same.

[hrrunka]

A very fine lion he is, too. :)

[altivo]

Somehow he feels bigger than the 30-inch wolf I got last year. Maybe it's just the "big hair" that does it.

[merik]

Leonard is a very noble looking lion, indeed! My twin lions send their warmest regards to their kin there. :-)

[altivo]

And Leonard sends a RAWR back to the twins. I'm wondering what can be used to keep that mane combed out without pulling hairs. It has a very nice feel to it right now.