Year: 2009

Shoulda Stayed Home

After watching the TDF Donna talked me into going on a quick geocaching run. The first one was a multi-stage cache in a small park. It was on our remedial cache list so it was an ammo can, but we didn’t see that the first stage was a nano, AKA itty bitty!! Donna found the nano on the second pass and it held the coords for the second stage ammo can. We then spent the next 15 minutes poking around where it should have been without success. Dang another DNF.

Throwing caution to the wind, we headed off to the next nearest cache .6 miles away. It was not on the easy list, in fact it was one of those pesky 35mm film canister well integrated into the environment. And it stayed that way. DNF number two.

There was one more multi on the way home with the second stage being an ammo can. At least the first stage was bigger than a film canister. All the logs showed that this was a unique hide and the GPSr lead us first to a crape myrtle and then to a second one about 10 feet away, but poke as we might we once again came up empty. Another 0 for 3 night.

Watch ebay for a used and quite possibly inaccurate Garmin eTrex Venture HC. 😉

Started up, went down, went up, back down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 296

This Is Either Madness…Or Brilliance

Geocaching Mirror TagTo quote that famous philosopher, Captain Jack Sparrow, “It’s remarkable how often those two traits coincide.”

This is either the lamest thing ever I have ever come across related to geocaching, or the coolest.*

Imagine you are driving down a back country road looking for a cache. Your navigator is in the right seat watching the readout on the GPSr. The direction arrow is pointing straight ahead and the mileage to your target is dropping steadily. Two miles, mile and a half, under one now. Point five, less than a quarter mile, so you ease off the gas. The numbers continue to decrease and once you get below a tenth of a mile the display swaps to showing the distance to your target in feet. Four hundred, 250, less than eighty and the needle is starting to point a little to the right. BAM! Twenty four feet and the compass needle points 90° to the right. You slam on the brakes and steer quickly to the side of the road and succeed in getting almost all the way off the pavement. Both of your heart rates have ticked up a notch. “Hurry, its got to be in that small patch of woods,” she tells you.

“Oh wait a minute dear,” you reply, “Where is that placard? We need to put that on the mirror in case anyone comes along so they’ll know what we are doing.” Riiight.

* I actually printed on of these out and laminated it. My intention was to hang it from the mirror of the Emperor and snap a photo just to have a picture for this post. But I never got around to it.

If you think this is brilliant, get your own at the Geocacher’s University. (also available in French)

Started down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 293

Another DNF

Nope, didn’t go geocaching today. Nor yesterday either for that matter. The F in this case stands for finish, not find. We started to watch a movie from 2001 called Happy Accidents that stars Marisa Tomei and Vincent D’Onofrio, but stopped after 15 minutes. It seems like we are on a streak here with not finishing movies. In the last six weeks we have received 16 discs from Netflix and we have DNF’d 6 of them or almost 38%. The ratio is even worse because there were 6 discs of West Wing which are golden to us, so if we forget about WW the ratio jumps to 60%!

The search for good movies for us is kind of like geocaching. The stars of the movie are the coordinates and the blurb on the Netflix page is the cache description. Roger Ebert’s Review is the hint and all those reviews on the Netflix movie page equate to the logs of fellow geocachers. With all that information, finding a good movie should be easy, but sometimes you just can’t see it.

The car has sat in the garage all day because we rode the tandem around town early this morning paying 3 bills and saving $1.32, so I was going to title this post “The Emperor’s Day Off”, but there is now a possibility that we may have to make a run to the store for some essentials that were missed the other day when we did our weekly grocery shopping.

Started down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 292

Untitled

Stage 8 of the TDF resulted in zero change at the top of the leader board. Old Man Lance is still in third place 8 seconds out. We are in the Pyrenees Mountains, but today and tomorrow’s stages are the kind that probably won’t determine who will win the Tour, but can decide who will lose it. While there are two or more big ass climbs on the stage, they don’t end at the tops, there are 30 to 40 miles of downhill & flats before the finish line allowing any of the contenders who is dropped on the climb to catch back up.

Appears that some of the blog’s theme CSS conflicts with the theme stuff that is produced by the stats generator and I’m not smart enough to know if there is an easy fix and don’t want to spend the time, so I took the easy way out. Just click on this link – Geocaching Statistics

I guess it is OK to blog about this because the FRS apparently don’t need me to jinx tonight’s victory over the supposedly lousy Kansas City Royals because right now their relief pitching is busily snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. When John Smoltz left the game after pitching 5 solid innings they had a 9 to 1 lead. KC scored 5 runs in the sixth. Now after a solo homer in the 7th they have a men on first and second with nobody out, so now the current batter represents the go ahead run!

At the pool party with the MMC this morning it was pointed out to me that I had misspelled retirement in my countdown widget in the right sidebar. What happened here, either all of my readers are as bad as I am when it comes to spelling or you all enjoyed watching me humiliate myself with the Internet equivalent of toilet paper stuck on the bottom of my shoe.

Started down, went up, back down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 292

Geo Stats

After last night’s 3 for 3 DNFs I’ve found out how to generate some ‘negative’ stats. I use a program called GSAK (Geocaching Swiss Army Knife) to do my off line organizing of caches to hunt and transfering data to the PDA for paperless caching. There is a nifty macro for creating a mind boggling array of statistics, but only of your finds. I guess not too many people really want to put a face on their misses. Me I don’t mind, it is all part of the game and fortunately someone else felt the same way. He has written a couple macros to use the GSAK stats engine to create a nice look of our Did Not Finds.

If you are a member over at geocaching dot com you can see my stats on my public profile page, but if you are not you can’t. I tried dumping them into a blog post, but the formatting got all weird. Oh, well, give me something to mess with in all my spare time.

Started down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 290

Oh Fer

Posterized EmperorWe had to make a run to get gas this evening, so while we were out we decided to attempt a cache that was just published yesterday. We would be like the third to find if we did find it. While we didn’t expect to find it, it was one of those that purposely left off the size and gave no hint to make it more difficult, but we were still slightly disappointed when we didn’t. 0 for 1.

There was another cache just up the street that we had logged a DNF on the first attempt, so we headed to it hoping for a second chance find. We didn’t. 0 for 2.

Dang. How about that cache over by the lawyer’s office that we missed the first time? OK, let’s go, it’s just one block over from our intended route home. On our first visit the GPSr was leading us to a bush that looked like it had recently been chopped in half. When we didn’t find it we just assumed that it must have gone missing during the pruning. Not long after we didn’t find it, another cacher tried and they failed too. The cache owner went and checked on it and reported it was still there. Some one else has found it since, so we figured we should find it this time. We didn’t. 0 for 3

Gonna have to go back to ammo cans…

Started up, went down, back up, down again, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 290

No Real Excuse

Normally because this is Wednesday I could use the upcoming broadcast of TDTVS as an excuse for not writing anything here, but we have at minimum 197 days before that happens again, so I have no real excuse.

Lets Go Krogering

Started up, went down, back up, down again, up again, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 287