Everything is getting like that. I barely have scratched the surface on GE, and just when I was starting to figure it out they changed the user interface on me. Right now I only know a few basic functions.

My GPS is the same way, I got mine at work, it was a tiny hand-held the surveyors used, and it was going to be surplussed so I rescued it. This was a few years ago, and it was already an obsolete unit (1996), a Garmin GPS45XL.

The damned thing can do everything but talk to god. Not only can it determine position instantaneously and continuously, it is a navigational computer, an extremely capable device which incorporates almost every possible function and feature a professional navigator could possibly want: bearings, ranges, cross-track error, waypoint management, multiple display, wag, wag, wag.

The only problem is its too complex to use. It's a gadget the size of a cell phone with a 60 page manual with tiny print I can't read without my glasses in bright sunlight, and which I can't read at all in the dark on a pitching boat.
I had to download the manual off the internet, because it was (of course), missing. It has multiple modes, functions, a baroque logical structure of intricate interlocking menus and options, all manipulated through just a few buttons, each of which can do a dozen different things depending on what "state" its in.

Why are modern machines like this? Why do engineers make things only teen- agers can learn to operate? And why is it that pea-brained dildoes who can't figure out how to use a compass or tie a bowline can learn how to navigate their way around gadgets like this? It must be an age thing.

It took me all day, in the comfort of my porch, just to get through the set-up procedure to configure it for marine use, but I quickly realized there was no way I was going to be able to confidently use this device to its full potential out on the water in realistic conditions. I came up with a compromise. I use it to give me a latitude and longitude (the one thing I can't do without mechanical help of some sort), which I then plot on the chart, lay out my dead reckoning track, and calculate my compass course, speed and progress by traditional piloting methods and paper and pencil calculations. I continue using visual bearings and DR to determine where I am, and occasionally verify my results with a GPS posit to make sure I'm not fooling myself. In other words, I use this incredible technology as a backup. It works for me, not the other way round..

Some day it will fail, or fall over the side, and I'll have to buy a new one. I dread it. By that time the engineers will have made so many "improvements" I'll never figure out how to use it.