Welcome Back Mr. Salad. How Was Your Trip?

11/24/2015  -  12:51 CDT


About four hours ago, I noticed that the Accuweather notifications on my smart watch were for "3903 Swiss Avenue." The location setting was Dallas, Texas, so I set it back to San Antonio, but it went back to Dallas. I rebooted my wristwatch (yeah, I know) but it went back to Dallas as soon as I enabled location services. I turned the watch off and looked at my phone which had the same issue---Not surprising because the watch is a member of the same techno-cult and they're buddies. I fired up my Chromebook and it thinks were in Dallas too, but yeah, same cult. I knew my trusty Win8 box would be OK, but when I went to check on what had happened to geo-loaction in the Googleverse, the same thing---Dallas Freaking Texas!

A Rod Serling narration started up in my head, but then I started wondering if DoD had scrambled the GPS signals (Yes, they can do that.) I went out to my car which has an embarrassing number of GPS receivers. One showed the San Antonio map briefly before switching to Dallas, another one showed the Dallas map, and the third one, embedded in a mobile ham radio with no Map, gave me the following coordinates: 32.79;-96.78. It was Dallas all the way down.

Now, all of this stuff communicates with the outside world on other channels, so to eliminate the possibility that it had been reinstructed (hacked), I dug out my old-school Geo-caching GPS unit---it only has one job, so when the Dallas coordinates came up on that  I started praying and looking for my sunglasses  because I only know of one reason DoD would scramble GPS.  I was still looking at it and contemplating the grim implications of temporary survival when it went back to good old 29.62,-98.68.

I checked all the other stuff and it all agreed that we were back in San Antonio. Outside of a temporarily frightening headline on the Drudge Report, there's nothing on major news sites about any of it, so I just marked it down to a local system glitch, until I looked up 3903 Swiss Avenue, Dallas, Texas and discovered that's the address for the Dallas Theological Seminary! If that's not a harbinger of doom, I don't know what is.

Seriously though, I just wanted to post this for insanity prevention reasons, and unlike at least 20% of the stuff I usually post on this blog, this is all true.

Temporarily Frightening Headline