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.

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.

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!

Or pathetic, depending on how you look at it.

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

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.

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.

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?”

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.

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.

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.