Weighing the border

Years ago Susan used some mapping software to plot a route from North Hatley to (I think) New Brunswick. This was back when software came from a CD-ROM, not a web server. The software routed her through the USA. She added (I suspect) Rimouski to her itinerary as a way of by-passing the USA. It still routed her through Maine. As I remember, she then contacted tech support, who said they'd fix it in the next release. Remember, this was back when software was burned on CD-ROMs so they couldn't just tweak something and have it available next morning.

Because really, what you want is to give a border crossing a very high weight, so the AI will give it a low priority. CD-ROMs might also make you think of a time when crossing a border consisted of answering "yes, $DESTINATION, no, no" to a surly border guard. Nowadays it requires passports, finger printing and the possibility that you get shot when you go to reach for your glove compartment. So whatever the weight used to be, multiply it by 5. Or you could have a user configuration "USA border guards scare the hell out of me."

All this makes me wonder if there's someone at Google Maps who's job is to evaluate the relative difficulty of crossing various borders, updating the system as foreign policy deteriorates.

What brought this back to mind is that I'm currently IN Shediac, New Brunswick.

In semi-related news: I've finally mastered wireless connection setup in CentOS. Delete ifcfg-eth1 (in both /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts AND /etc/sysconfig/networking/devices), run nm-connection-editor, let the wizard to its work. NetworkManager stores its config in ~/.gconf/system/networking/connections. The WEP key is stored somewhere else. Yes, the place I'm staying uses WEP, which takes less then a minute to crack but more then a minute for the owner to write down for you.