Synthesis Studios

So many of our products come from other countries that it’s easy to ignore the ever-present “Made in …” hidden in the packaging. Apple goes so far as to prominently declare that their products are “Designed by Apple in California,” conveniently downplaying the fact that most are manufactured in Asia. The Garmin GPS I ordered has a similar message, which completely escaped my notice when I opened the package. Watching the device’s output, however, I was greeted with an impersonal but powerful reminder of just where it came from.

Our office has very little GPS coverage, even if you hang an antenna out the window. Thus, when I connected the Garmin to my computer, I was greeted with the following output:

$GPGGA,012013,2503.7070,N,12138.4160,E,0,00,,,M,,M,,*52

For those of you that don’t speak NMEA, that means the GPS was reporting a location of 25° 3.7070′ North, 121° 38.4160′ East, but with no visible satellite. In the other words, it was lost, and repeatedly outputting its last known location.

Once I realized what was happening, I had to had to find out where the GPS thought it was. A quick zoom through Google Maps (with the help of the Get Lat/Long mapplet) revealed the following building:

There it was: the birthplace of my GPS (in Taiwan, of course). You can almost tell which window it was looking out before being packed up and shipped off.

If any members of our international audience want to check out the place for themselves, here’s a map to point you in the right direction:

For the last few turns, you’ll probably want a GPS of your own.

Tags: Garmin GPS, Get Lat/Long mapplet, Google Maps, GPS, NMEA, Taiwan

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 26th, 2008 at 5:23 pm and is filed under Synthesis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.