Seems to have been a very bad week for my geocaches. I’ve had one reported destroyed (Wild Blue Yonder), one that I had to pull because someone forgot to put the lid on (Bush Baby) and it got soaked, and three more reported missing (Kissing Tree, Colt’s Run, and Rockfence) which I have not had a chance to go check on yet.

I should have Bush Baby back out tomorrow, but the others, I’m not sure when I’ll get a chance to check on. Hopefully tomorrow morning.

I was really hoping that I could have Sarah’s fish here for her birthday, but after getting it almost close enough for me to go get it, someone took it back another 92 miles further away. That makes it a little far to go get on a weekend. It has travelled more than 5000 miles, and is getting pretty close, but I don’t suppose there’s much way for it to get here in the next 2 weeks.

I’m looking for a walking staff with a compass, like the one that jeep carries, but without paying for the Jeep name brand. And I came across the Wilderness Walking Staff.

But the thing is, I’m really not sure whether they are serious or not. They have an order form.

Today I found two, and hid one, geocache.

Found “Neither Hill Nor Dale”, which was an interesting hiding place. Actually, I looked at this spot when I went out there the first time, and could not figure out how it could be a cache hiding spot, but thought it would be neat if someone could figure out how.

Found “Graven Images” which is in a graveyard a few feet from a busy road in Lexington. It’s really quite sad, as it is unmaintained, and all of the headstones are in terrible condition. One grave reads only “In loving memory of”, which is sad and ironic at the same time. I’m inclined to do some research on this family, but I know, given my schedule, that I will never get around to it. The graves date to the 1880s, I think, although it’s rather hard to make out. So … not so very long ago, really.

I hid “Little red riding HOOD”, which, since it has not been approved yet, I won’t tell you where it is. But I got rather cut up with thorns in the process of hiding it.

Today, in direct violation of common sense, I decided to go geocaching.

Actually, I decided several days ago, but any sane person would have changed their mind, based on the weather, which was snowy and very cold. Particularly since I had decidfed to go out to Red River and do several of the caches out there.

In particular, I wanted to do “Kentucky 4×4 Adventure”. This is a cache in the national park that only one person has found in the year and a half it’s been up there. The instructions say that you’re likely to need a 4WD vehicle to get anywhere near the cache.

On the way out there, a few miles down I75, I nearly died. Crossing the bridge, a semi pulled up next to me, and I saw what I thought was his turn signals blinking to turn into my lane. Turns out it was actually his hazards, but being next to him I could not see that. I tried to slow down, and at that moment hit a patch of snow and ice and started to lose control. I regained control reasonably fast, but in the process I spun most of the way around, and missed being clipped by the back end of the semi by *maybe* 12 inches. Also, the dozens of cars and trucks behind me came real close to ploughing into me. There were 3 other accidents on that bridge too.

So … I almost saw good sense then and turned around, but, alas, I was not to be deterred.

When I arrived in the general vicinity of the cache, several miles up highway 11, I started looking for the road that I had planned to turn up – Sinking Fork Road. Turns out that just because it says “Road” on the map does not necessarily mean that normal people would bestow that moniker upon it. Other words come to mind, such as “rut” and “cow path”. This turns out to be the first time that I actually needed to put the Jeep into 4L.

Another “road” that I turned down started out OK, but about 100 yards off of the real road, there were two parallel planks across a river. I don’t *think* so.

The closest I actually got at any one time was 2.45 miles. If it had been 30 degrees warmer, and 3 hours earlier in the day, I would have parked and hiked to it, but given that it was 4:30 and 30 degrees by this time, I decided that I’ll have to come back another day.

On the technology front, this was the first time to use GPSDrive, and it was very cool. The only problem was that as I was approaching the cache, I think I must have blown a fuse, because my laptop lost power, and started running on battery. And because my laptop does very strange things when it’s on battery (like going to sleep, and then losing the mouse and/or keyboard when it wakes up) I turned it off. Need to find out what fuse it was and replace that. Having a larger view of where I am and where I’m going makes it much easier to make intelligent choices about where to turn. However, the jumping around from one scale to another turns out to be somewhat disorienting.

While at ApacheCon, legobuff showed me GPSDrive. It was very cool. But then his battery died, and I didn’t get to play with it much.

Last night, I got it working, and wow it is cool.

Tips for folks searching for stuff, as I did last night, finding very little.

* With the Magellan SporTrak Pro (or other Magellan devices, I expect) you have to turn on NMEA and set the baud rate to 4800, otherwise it won’t see your GPS.

* Installing the RPMs on RedHat 8 proved to be dependency hell, and I gave up on it. Installing PCRE from source proved to be the fastest way to get ./configure to run correctly, and then installing gpsdrive from source. I’ll omit my package management rant here, since I’m short on time.

* Very important! West longitude is negative. If you don’t use negative numbers, your waypoints end up somewhere in Uzbekistan or something.

The general idea here is that gpsdrive receives gps signals from your gpsr on the serial port, and then superimposes your position on top of maps downloaded from mapquest or Expedia. The Expedia maps seem to be more up-to-date.

The cool thing here is that it’s not downloading vector maps, just gif images, so they are very small, and whatever scale you want. It automatically chooses the best map that you have for the location you’re in, zooming in and out depending on how detailed a map you have for that position. If you’re online, you just click download, and it downloads the map for your current position.

Really, the only downside here is the increased tendency to run into things because you have a laptop sitting on the seat next to you, so a co-pilot is recommended. 😉

So, now I need to hack up some Perl scripts to convert my Geocaching.com GPX files into waypoint files for GPSdrive. The syntax is very simple, so I should be able to do that pretty quick. Unless someone has already done it.

So, thanks, Legobuff!

Having long wondered exactly where Stuff was located, yesterday I was pleased to discover that it is located, exactly, at N38°01.714, W84°16.722, and at 1036ft elevation.

In case you care, Stuff is a military surplus store, and they reportedly are a great place to get ammo cans for geocaching. However, they were closed when I got there, so I don’t know.

On the way back from a birthday party on Saturday, I was rear-ended. They messed up my bumper, and tore my tire cover.

Getting out of the Blazer, they mentioned that I was the first geocacher that they had met in person since they started geocaching. They knew from my bumper stickers which they had just smushed. They were admiring the stickers when they ran into me.

So I invited them to a geocaching party that evening.

I’m pretty sure this is the first time I’ve invited someone to a party after they have crashed into me. I somehow guess this is rather uncommon.

Ran out between talks and traded some travel bugs, which will now make their way down to Los Angeles. 🙂

Now I’m in the TicketMaster talk. It is somewhat content-free, but I like these guys because they have hired Stas Bekman (a long time ago) and recently hired Geoffrey Young and Ask Bjorn Hansen, under what basically amounts to a patronage. They get to sit at home and work on mod_perl, and not have to worry about things like income and insurance. They also give a lot of money and resources to the Perl foundation and Perl.org.

I feel like a complete idiot, and I’m sure that someone is cursing my existence. I was suposed to meet someone at 5:30 this morning to go caching. I waited for an entire hour for him to show up, and then went to check for his full name, so that I could call his room. I had been waiting in the wrong place. I’m amazingly disappointed, as I was really looking forward to doing some difficult caches. Not to mention having gotten up at an ungodly hour to do it.