Jeff Boulter's Weblog

Santa Teresa County Park kicked my butt

With Anne out of town, I decided to get some Geocaching done. From Friday night to Sunday afternoon I did 50. I really need to get a life.

I went down to clean out South San Jose on Sunday, an area that Anne has no interest in. She likes places with water and there's no water down there, just mostly grassy, barren hills.

I did a few easy ones and then I ended up in Santa Teresa County Park, which I had never been to before. I wasn't sure how many I would do there, but I ended up finding eight - actually all of them in that park.

Here's a map of my 8-mile trek through the park in a clockwise direction.

You can see the caches as well as the stupid decisions I made. I found myself nearly passing out in the 80 degree heat, scrambling up cliffs, fighting ticks, poison oak and the sun. This was probably not the best idea to do all by myself in a mostly deserted park, but I came back in one piece. Hopefully the technu worked and I won't start to break out in poison oak. We'll see. The views were rewarding though.

Here are the more interesting cache logs:

Predator Lives
Bay Area Multiple Hills - 3
Geocache
Adelante Escondite

Just as I reached the parking lot, the batteries in my GPSr died. Somehow that summarized about how I was feeling at that point too.

Update: no poison oak so far! Amazing.

Sounds that should never be played on the radio

1. Cars Honking
2. Sirens (Police, Fire, Ambulance)
3. Cars crashing

I'm listening to NPR on the way to work and they're doing this story on catching tropical fish. For some reason they're playing background sounds of cars honking. I'm looking around trying to figure out who keeps honking at me. These sounds are often omni-directonal, so it's hard to tell where they're coming from, especially when your car has speakers in every corner!

Likewise, these sounds are evil when played on a TV:
1. Phones ringing
2. Alarm clocks
3. Babies crying
4. Cats meowing
5. Doorbells

Maybe I should just kill my TV and listen only to my iPod in my car.

More Yahoo! RSS

We've been busy adding RSS feeds all over Yahoo!

We had previously released Yahooligans! Joke of the Day.

Today, Ask Earl (a daily question and answer for kids) is available too.

In Education, we now have Word of the Day and SAT Tip of the Day available.

More to come soon!

I'm famous

Or pathetic, depending on how you look at it.

A friend has placed a cache in my honor. How honoring/embarassing!

Dear YHOO Investors

Let me first say thank you for driving up the price of my stock 50% in the last 3 months. Second, I have no idea why you're doing this. Are we really worth that much more? Will the Google IPO bring lots of other fresh cash into the market? I have no idea. But apparently you know something that I don't know.

It's starting to feel like 1999 all over again. From what I remember that didn't turn out so well, but hey let's give it another go!

Anyway, just please just keep going, 60 would be nice. Thanks.

Phoons

What's a phoon? I just discovered them myself. Some guy runs a site that's a collection of photos with people in faux running positions in various places around the world. It's interesting, funny and bizarre.

Ridin' the Train

I had my first Caltrain experience today. We went up to see the Giants play the Red Sox. Unfortunately the Red Sox lost, but I guess I could just be happy that my current hometown team won.

Caltrain is actually quite a nice way to get to the game. They run special trains to get people to the game and they get very full. Anne took the train to and from work for a year, so this wasn't anything new for her, but I was kind of excited.
It's cheaper than parking and you don't have to drive.

It's certainly not as fast as driving though. Using my fancy new GPS, I observed that we only averaged 28 mph including time spent waiting at stops.

I proabably would have taken the train much sooner, but they stopped the weekend trains two years ago to do some major upgrades on the tracks. That was actually the weekend we came up for househunting and I remember watching the local news about it. The TV journalist informed people who were waiting for a train that wouldn't come for 2 days and got their reactions. Pretty funny.

One of the upgrades they made to the tracks was to add the ability for trains going the same direction to pass each other. We got to see this in action on the way back as our express train passed another train making all the local stops.

I could see why Anne was so grumpy on the days when she missed the express train - all those frequent stops were annoying.

I found it funny that I often knew what station we were at solely because I had been there before doing the series of geocaches placed near each station.

The new baby bullet trains are very nice. Some of the seats even have small tables. The ride is smooth, especially considering that we reached speeds over 80 mph. Wow. Seeing these trains from the road, they don't seem to be going that fast.

The new trains also have power outlets. What would be even better would be WiFi. Strangely, Pac Bell park does have it. I've never seen someone bring a laptop to a baseball game.

We wanted to make sure that we caught the express train on the way back, so we darted out the second the last strike was called and literally ran the four balcks to the train. The express is supposed to leave 15 minutes after the last out or when full. Once we arrived on the train, completely winded, we waited 25 minutes for the train to fill up.

The ride back was a bit bumpier on one of the older trains, but still relaxing. If you live far away from work, a train isn't a bad way to commute. But living a mile away from work like me is definitely better. :-)

Maybe Anne said it best as we left the train platform: "Now do you understand why I bought a car?"

SJC Sucks

San Jose's airport is close and convenient for us, but it sure sucks once you get there. It seems that it's been continually under construction for several years and everytime you go, the traffic patterns are different. You used to be able to get right onto 101 from the airport. Now you have to sit at several lights and take a couple of poorly-labelled turns.

The other stupid thing is that there's absolutely nowhere to wait for someone. Today we had to go there to buy a ticket. I had to drive around the airport several times because I didn't want to deal with the short-term parking where you have to drive in, park, walk to the terminal, walk back, then pay $1 for every fifteen minutes while waiting for the booth person to slowly record your license plate number into some useless database. I wonder how much gas people waste doing the same thing. This is probably the only situation where I WANT to get stuck in traffic. It beats making yet another lap around, avoid jersey barriers, traffic cones and confused drivers.

LAX at least had metered parking so you could just stay a few minutes without 'checking out" and paying in increments of $1.

On the bright side, it's really fast to get FROM 101 to the airport with the new ramp, but everything else about getting around there just sucks.

Another reason to stop typing 'www'

Large parts of the web were broken this morning because Akamai, a company that provides critical infrastructure to the Internet, went down.

Have I convinced you to stop typing 'www' yet?

Thanks, Dave!

--

Akamai DNS problem

Starting at around 8:30 am EDT (12:30 UTC), a number of sources started to report a widespread Akamai DNS issue. Large web sites, which use Akamai for its DNS service, did no longer resolve. Effected sites are Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, Fedex, Xerox, Apple and likely many others.

At this time (10:30 am EDT), some effected domains removed the Akamai DNS servers and are reachable again using their own DNS servers.

Typically, the domain itself (e.g. 'google.com') still resolves, but popular hostnames, like 'www.google.com' will not resolve. As a result, the web site is no longer reachable.

The effect appears to be world wide. Some of the Akamai servers do respond to pings, but do not respond to DNS queries.

1000 Caches Found!

This weekend I found cache #1000. Wow, what a waste of time. :-)

The actual cache was Ardenwood Scrabble, another excellent multi-cache from GeoWomyn_SF_CA. It was great to do it with friends as well.

I did 455 caches in my first year, so I set a goal of 1000 by the end of the year. Oops, I did it in 6 months! My next goal is to average 2 finds per day. I'd like to find all the caches within 10 miles of my house. Then I think it's just about having fun.

You'd think that finding 1000 caches would be fairly unique. In fact, I'm only the 17th person in the Bay Area to do it.

I pretty much spent all weekend caching, and I'm backlogged on actually logging them all on the website. This sure is a lot of fun.

Meeeeooooow x 2

We went to visit our friends Dave and Amy last weekend. They had three cats and they were a lot of fun.

We've been thinking about getting a companion for Pixel for a while, hopefully to keep him entertained while we're away and maybe get him used to other cats so he doesn't freak out and attack us when another cat enters our yard.

Saturday we woke up and decided we would go see about a kitten. After running some errands, we went to the Humane Society Silicon Valley. At first all we saw was older cats, but then we went in the back and they had all kinds of cats including kittens. We looked around at a few in this cramped and smelly kennel and saw this cute little gray one sleeping in the back while his siblings were playing and meowing. He was 'owner surrendered' which was good (we didn't want a stray that didn't like humans) and he was only 2 months old. His name was Brazil. I have no idea why. We held him for a bit, went outside and decided to get him. That kennel was such a horrible place; I felt that we HAD to liberate at least one of those animals.

We admitted that our method of choosing a kitten was pretty arbitrary. The gray one looked nice. But how else can you really test-drive a cat? We were hoping he'd be a quiet one, which he seemed to be. We've had enough meowing from Pixel.

We filled out the short application and then we were told to wait. Problem was, no one told us how long we had to wait. They usually had six volunteers processing applications on a Saturday, but today they only had three.
While we were waiting, another 'shipment' of kittens came in. Apparently it's kitten season and they get 100 CATS A DAY. We ended up waiting two hours before they called us.

The actual adoption process went smoothly and they handed him over quickly. He didn't really enjoy the ride home in the box and meowed the whole time, but I can't blame him for that.

The humane society advised us to follow this protocol for introducing the cat to his new home, so we brought him directly into the study after Pixel was safely locked in another room.

I expected the cat to refuse to come out of the box, or make break for the closet, but he carefully stepped out, sniffed around and started making little meowing noises. Soon after he was rubbing up against me and looking to be pet. He's a couragous fellow. Pixel hid under the bathroom sink for a week when we got him.

He was equally affectionate with Anne and spent most of his time through weekend either sleeping in the chair, playing, or sleeping in our laps on the chair.

He's very good. He scratches his scratching board, he eats his food, drinks his water, and uses his litter box. He even likes Pixel's hand-me-down toys. He is very curious and is trying desperately to get out his room. When we leave, he meows at the door for a few minutes. Occasionally Pixel will hear this and hiss at the door, but otherwise, he seems oblivious to the fact that there's another cat in the house. Well, at least he'll be that way for another 7 days. Then it should get interesting.

He's not as quiet as he advertised at the shelter. He meows pretty much continuously when you visit him. Thankfully, it's not much of a meow right now, more like a scratchy 'mow'. If this keeps up, we could have two very loud cats. The idea was to make one shut up, not have two mobile noisemakers!

We haven't quite decided on a name yet. We thought of Signal, which is the name of the Geocaching mascot. The cat spent a lot of time walking across the keyboard this weekend, so I thought Qwerty might be a cute name.

I think our favorite right now might be 'PC'. For one, it's computer-related, just like Pixel. Second, there's a comic strip called PC and Pixel. We didn't know of it when we named Pixel. Though in the comic, PC is a human. We primarily got this cat to keep Pixel occupied, so it's less our cat, and more Pixel's. You could say he's Pixel's Companion. Look at that, a triple entendre. A little geeky, but meaningful.

Other suggestions for names?

The next few weeks should be interesting. Hopefully they won't kill each other. I should say hopefully Pixel won't kill the new one.

In any event, the cat is damn cute, as you can see from the pictures. He makes Pixel, who's scrawny next to any other adult cat, look huge. He's still a little smelly from the kennel, but I'm hoping that will wear off in a few days or maybe we'll see if he'll take to a bath. Maybe before I attempt that, I should invest in some very thick gloves. I've already got quite a few scratches. Ahh, the joy of kittens.

My new subtitle

Jeremy's post about a new sub-title reminded me that I had a post all written up about the same thing that I haven't published yet. So I thought this would be a good time.

Every once in a while I think of a few more subtitles for my blog. What the hell is this thing about anyway?

Here's a few I've been trying out:

"Stories to bore my grandchildren with"

"Because I have a very poor memory of even my own life"

"Just appreciate I'm not taking it out on you"

"More than my coworkers really want to know about me"

I've decided to retire "Because personal home pages are so 1997" with something a bit more descriptive: "The tale of a Yahoo!, Geocacher, New Hampshire native, husband and owner of the world's loudest cats."

Note that cats is plural. More about that soon!

Last week for free Tungsten T3

I signed up for Ameritrade a few weeks ago and got a free Tungsten T3 with the deal. It's a pretty sweet PDA, worth $400. I ended up giving it to Anne to replace her aging m505. With a fast processor, big 320x480 color screen and bluetooth, it's pretty nice. She's definitely the most high-tech social worker in her department now!

There was a little app that displayed an Ameritrade logo when you turned it on, but that was easily disabled. Now I just need to wait for a WiFi SDIO card that supports this little puppy so we can surf the web from it.

Apparently I'm not as invisible as I thought

--This message was sent through the Geocaching.com web site--

Just wanted to share a funny story about you that you don't know. I live in Los Gatos across the street from the cemetary and noticed you looking for the "Travel Bug Pergatory" cache. At the time, I had no idea what geocaching was, or what was going on. All I saw was this "suspicious guy" digging around in the bushes then acting casual any time a car drove by. I thought it was strange so I kept watching. I didn't feel any better when you pulled an ammo box out of the bushes then start taking things out of it, writing things down and putting things in it. I thought I was witnessing some high-tech drug deal or something. I ended up calling the cops too afraid to go check it out myself for fear that someone would be watching their "stash". (I realize now how paranoid and ridiculous this sounds now). Anyway, the very next weekend, I read this article in the paper about geocaching and instantly thought of my paranoia. I walked right across the street and opened the container to find out that indeed that's exactly what it was! So, my first cache discovery is quite the story thanks to you!

signed,

a new geocache fanatic!

Garbaaaaaage

On my flight to Maryland last weekend, looking down over all that land, one thought came to mind - we have room for a lot more garbage.

But why should we spew our garbage over thr rockies, when it can be a moneymaking proposition? Sunnyvale has their old dump next to the bay. It's now a nice, though strangely shaped, grassy hill. More than just a nice place to take a walk or find a cache, it now produces enough energy from methane to power the sewage treatment plant next door, with some left over to sell to the state. Who said millions of diapers are a bad thing? There's something ironic about using human waste to process more human waste.

This has become such a valuable asset to the city that they've hired a group of 'experts' to carefully maintain the grass to prevent fires. Go by Caribbean drive and you'll see a very out-of-place herd of sheep and goats. They do a nice job though. Maybe I could steal a couple for a night and have them do my lawn.

New GPS on the way!

I ordered my Garmin GPSMap 60cs on Friday. Hooray! I had planned to wait until my birthday, but I'm getting some unexpected money from some website design I've been doing, which will more than cover the cost, so I decided to be a good American and spend it.

Another thing that piqued my interest was that Amazon had them on sale. I wrote a small script using some perl to check the price of a few of mu current gadget lusts. Lo and behold, on Tuesday they cut the price by $80. Nice. With my referral credit and money back from my Amazon credit card, the price should come down to $350 or so. Of course I ordered City Select too so I can get turn-by-turn direction on the 60cs. Sweet.

Auto-routing should save me a lot of time getting from place to place. It might even save me some u-turns. I mentioned this idea in a recent cache log and how it would eventually pay for itself in saved fuel. The next morning a spreadsheet arrived in my email from another cacher who had already done the same calculations to justify his 60cs purchase to his wife. I found this to be hilarious. Four months by his calculations.

It seems that the gps is a little backordered on Amazon, but I'm in no hurry for the deal I got. Hopefully I will actually get the Amazon referral credit this time. Recently Amazon started deducting fees from 'personal use' of their associates program and I didn't get any money back for my iPod purchase. Bummer. I'm not sure how they determine what's personal or not, so this time I ordered it from Anne's account. We'll see.

As for the unit itself, I'm looking forward most to the big color screen, faster display time, more memory and better antenna. I tried out a 60cs next to mine on a hike a few weeks ago. It was getting 5 satellites while mine was only getting one.

My eTrex Vista has certainly gotten a lot of use though. It has quite a few dings and scratches. The rubber around the outsides is coming off. Sometimes the clickstick on the fron doesn't work and I have to squeeze it for whatever inside to come in contact again.

I'm really excited about the new unit. Now I just need to figure out what to do with my current one. So far I haven't been able to convince Anne that she needs her own. :)