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Jasmer Challenge
One of the more popular geocaching “side games” is called the “Jasmer Challenge”. The goal: for each month since geocaching began in May 2000 (when Selective Availability was turned off), find at least one geocache that was placed in that month. As of this writing, that means finding 214 caches: one placed in May 2000,…
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Frigid-er (sort of)
Today was my second really, really cold bike ride this week. Conditions today were a little different from Wednesday. The air temperature was a steady 10°F, slightly warmer than Wednesday. The real story was the wind, which was around 13mph when I left, and 17mph when I arrived, with gusts up around 25mph. The wind…
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Top 10 Geocache Finds, 2017
Continuing my tradition from last year, I’ve compiled a list of my 10 favorite geocache finds of 2017. It was tough to whittle the list down to just 10, but that’s sort of the point, I guess. In a departure from last year, I’m including a short blurb about why each individual cache made the…
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Frigid
My bike ride to work this morning was officially my coldest ever. I left home at 7:00am, rode approximately 12 miles (my phone battery died about 9 miles in, so I don’t have the exact figure), and arrived at work a little after 8. Official air temperature at BWI was 7°F at 6:54, and at…
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Top 10 Geocache Finds, 2013-2016
I thought I’d start a new tradition of picking my 10 favorite geocaches found each year. 2013 is the first year that I had 10 or more finds, so I’ll start with 2013 through 2016. These are in no particular order… 2016 Subterranean Adventure (Thunder Underground) (GC2PD3Q) Magna Cum Laude, My Hat’s Off to You!…
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Cloud
For a long time, I have been running an Ubuntu desktop in my basement “office”. However, lately, I’ve been using it less and less, in favor of my laptop. It runs a local web server which hosts a private wiki that we use for household stuff (recipes, scanned documents, etc); it also has two monitors,…
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Greetings Earthlings
I took a look at my long-neglected blog this afternoon, and realized that it has been about 2.5 years since I posted anything here. That’s right around the time I picked up geocaching as a hobby, and ever since then, I’ve been using my geocaching logs to get my writing fix. Still, it sometimes feels…
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Random Biking Notes
It’s been a while since I’ve been inspired to write anything here, but I wanted to sneak a post in for April 2013, preserve my streak of blogging at least once a month. Twitter is largely to blame for my lack of blogging, as with my current schedule, it’s much easier to fire off a…
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How to Save Money on Pool Chemicals
I’ve learned a few things about swimming pools after owning one for 12 years. #1, pools are a huge money pit. #2, pool chemicals, particularly when sold as such, are extremely expensive. And #3, for a lot of pool chemicals, you can save a significant amount of money by purchasing the equivalent product from an…
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Enumerating Contract Bridge Auctions with Lisp
I’ve been a fan of Contract Bridge for a long time. I’m really bad at it, but all the same, I find it fascinating and compelling. One of the interesting facts about Bridge is the astronomical number of possible auctions. For any given deal, there are over 128 × 1045 possible auctions. The exact number is:…