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!

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 320×480 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.

–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!

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.

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. 🙂

As the resident “computer guy”, I’m asked for advice on fixing computer problems all the time. I get queries from friends, family, acquaintances and occasionally random people I’ve just met. Usually the questions are pretty vague and it’s often difficult to figure out exactly what the problem is so I spend a lot of time asking different questions back which can sometimes be pretty frustrating.

Usually when you go to a website and ask for tech support, you’re asked to specify all kinds of information in advance – usually way more than is actually important – so the people on the other end won’t have to ask you later.

I found a site that went the opposite route.

From the GPSBabel FAQ:

What’s the worst way to get help with a problem?
There may be worse ways than this, but it’s a start.

* Vaguely describe a problem you’re having some place other than the GPSBabel-misc mailing list
* don’t list the operating system in use
* don’t list the versions of anything involved
* don’t offer a test case.
* Be evasive when asked about the precise steps to reproduce the problem.

Classic.

Damn, that’s funny.

A team of volunteers launched a rocket up 77 miles above earth last week. Very cool. Who needs NASA?

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about why I find Geocaching so compelling. There hasn’t been many things in my life that have caused such a difference in what I do in my spare time.

There are some things that’s I’ve stopped doing entirely and others that I do much less – like sleeping. Weeknights are for solving puzzles, creating tools that make geocaching quicker and more efficient, and plotting my next trips. Early weekend mornings, while Anne is still asleep, is for going out and grabbing a few caches before whatever we decide to do that day, which might just be more Geocaching.

What could possibly make going on long hikes, risking snake bites, ticks, poison oak and other personal injury just to find some tupperware with cheap trinkets inside? And repeat it coming up on 1000 times? Here’s what I’ve come up with so far:

1) You get to play with gadgets. A GPS is a pretty amazing device on its own, but you get to use all kinds of geek equipment like my Treo and hiking gear.

2) You get to play with maps. Maps are very interesting to look at. There’s near infinite detail and it’s personally relevant. It’s not just your paper fold-out maps either. Most of the maps I use are on my laptop, the web, or the GPS itself. There are street maps, arial maps, satellite maps, and topographical maps providing more and more detail. I spend hours looking at caches overlaid on these maps and creating new ones based on my travels.

3 I’ve always enjoyed hiking, ever since my trips with the MOTD back in high school. There’s a lot of hiking involved in geocaching if you choose to go for those.

4) Geocaching, especially in the Bay Area is about mental challeges as well as physical. Puzzles here range from looking up simple information to solving complex crytography. Others have no particular strategy – you just have to stare at them long enough until you see the pattern and can produce coordinate numbers from it. While my job is full of intellectual challenges, I don’t often have the time to sit down and focus on a particular problem which is purely intellectual.

Sometimes the mental effort comes when you actually go to find the cache to unveil some clever camoflauge. Caches can be disguised as sprinkler heads, stumps, rocks, dirt, fences, or have plants glued to them.

5) Geocaching is a great way to satisfy your curiosity of your environment.
When I was a kid, I would often go ‘exploring’ which just meant wandering through the small wood behind our backyard. I guess I’m still just exploring.
I’ve seen amazing places I never would have known existed, just a few miles from home. I’ve certainly gotten to know my way around the Bay Area much better than before too.

If you were to ask Anne why she’ll go with me on hunts, this is the reason (and probably the only ONLY one she’d give).

6) Every kid imagines he’s a spy on a secret mission. In the real world there aren’t many secret missions (except if you really are a spy) but geocaching is pretty close. Not everyone would leave a geocache intact if they were to run across it by accident, so they’re hidden and you have be stealthy when looking for a cache. This can be a real challenge in busy places like a store parking lot.

7) I wouldn’t call myself a particularly social person, but I do enjoy sharing my experiences geocaching and reading about other peoples experiences at the same caches. Through event caches, trading hints, and group gatherings for hikes, I’ve met some interesting people and some really nerdy and strange people as well!

8) People like to collect things. It could be baseball cards or tea cups for some people, but for me it’s collecting caches. My particular aim is to see how big a radius I can create from home where I’ve found all the caches. With a few exeptions I’m at about 9 miles right now. It’s challenging because as you clear out an area, new caches are more likely to appear and then you have to go back. It also means that you can’t skip any of them, including all the super-difficult puzzles created by silicon valley engineers.

Other people have different goals, like finding 365 in one year or solving just the puzzles.

That’s quite a few reasons why I cache, but caching is also good for me in ways I never expected.

For one it’s great exercise. On a typical weekend I’ll end up getting outside and hiking or walking 20 miles.

Apparently it’s also a good way to lose weight. Someone recently asked me if I had lost weight and I responded with “I don’t think so.” I found a scale and decided to see. To my astonishment, I had lost 20 pounds since I last checked!
I used to run to try to keep in shape, but it was always hard to motivate myself to do it and I never really lost any weight because of it (not that it was ever the primary goal.) Since geocaching I’ve given up on running because I’m much better at exercising when there is an easily identifiable goal – in my case, a cache!

I’ve definitely learned a lot from geocaching, in areas I never would have thought of. To find caches, I’ve had to learn braille, several foreign languages, cryptogrphy, trivia of all sorts and had to refresh some of my math skills. Oh, and I’m now an expert at identifying poison oak.

Geocaching.com also promotes its “Cache In Trash Out” program so I’m picking up trash at the same time.

Finally I’ve made some new friends through caching. We didn’t know many people in the bay area when we moved here two years ago except for those people we had met in other places and happened to be living here now and most of them have moved away by now.

Most of the friends we’ve made are not people we would have met otherwise. For some reason, we don’t fit the Geocaching demographic. They mostly seem to much older – often with kids that are of signifigant age themselves. No matter – they’re still good people and we’ve come to know pretty much all the serious cachers in the area, often running into them at cache sites.

I’m not sure when or if I will burn out on caching. Sometimes when I’m finishing a long weekend of 30+ caches I think I’ve done enough, but a few days later I’m motivated again to go out and find a bunch more. There are over 3000 caches I haven’t found within a hundred miles of home, so it’s unlikely I’m going to run out. The top geocachers have thousands of finds. Having close to 1000 puts me at only #16 – in just the bay area.

If you haven’t tried Geocaching yet, I highly recommend you pick up a cheap gps and go for a few. It’s simply a lot of fun.

“Somebody would have to be sitting near your network to do this. And they’d have to hate you.”
– Mani Dhillon, product marketing manager at Linksys, talking the real probability of a hacker breaking into your wireless network

I guess that’s a good reason not to play your music too loud.