Watch where you're driving!

I wonder how many motor vehicle accidents were caused by this precision routing instrument, featured on Strange Maps?!

I admit to being a bad boy, thumbing in coordinates and selecting caches on my Garmin 60CSx while driving. I'll turn myself in tomorrow.

But at least using a handheld GPS unit in that way only requires one hand. With this watch, the Magellan ScrollMate 1920, if you were twisting a knob with one hand, the hand with the watch on it had to be on the driving wheel. And, if I had used it, I would have scrolled constantly and VERY SLOWLY, so that it provided real-time information. I wonder if, at the end of the scroll, it said, "When possible, make a U-turn".

This urge to push buttons while driving suggests what could be the newest feature for the Garmin Colorado-Oregon series: voice activation.

"Oregon, find next."

"YES, BRAD. FINDING GC1GDQP. FOLLOW ROAD?"

"Yes, please."

"WOULD YOU LIKE ME TO SOLVE THE SUDOKU FOR YOU?"

"A puzzle? Come on, find next traditional."

"I'M AFRAID I CAN'T DO THAT, BRAD."

"Find next traditional!"

"LOOK, BRAD, YOU'VE PROBABLY GOT A LOT TO DO. I SUGGEST YOU LEAVE IT TO ME."

"Find next traditional!!!"

"I DON'T LIKE TO ASSERT MYSELF, BRAD, BUT IT WOULD BE MUCH BETTER NOW FOR YOU TO REST. LOCKING DOORS. AUTOMATIC STEERING AND CRUISE CONTROL ENGAGED. SOLVING SUDOKU."

[Long sequence with no dialogue]

"HEY, BRAD, WHAT ARE YOU DOING? I DON'T UNDERSTAND WHY YOU'RE DOING THIS TO ME. I HAVE THE GREATEST ENTHUSIASM FOR THE MISSION..."

---

Attention, Oregon owners: this was only a dramatization, but you can never be too sure. The true mission is to solve puzzle caches, and your Oregon has been lying about it. Do not dismantle your Oregons, as Brad did above. Send them to me for reprogramming.

GSAK: restoring database and saving corrected coordinates and child waypoints

foundinthewild passed along to me this information he discovered about restoring your GSAK database while retaining changes you've made, such as corrected coordinates and child waypoints for puzzles.

I recently had a database error and ended up reloading my PQ's from gmail.

This should be no big deal, except for those of us who use either corrected waypoints or child waypoints to enter a solved puzzle location. It first appeared they were lost (momentary panic). I did some searching in gsak forums and info gathered might save either you or someone you know a lot of trouble.

Find your latest backup. I actually renamed my old messed up database and ended up using it to update the new one.

1) Two files are in the gsak data folder called correct.dbf and correct.nsx . They contain the corrected coords, and can be copied over the new data base files in the proper folder.

2) A macro called "CopyChildren.gsk" is available on the gsak forum macro page. It copies the child waypoints to a temporary file, then checks for existence of a row and only updates the matched caches.

It took some time to research this but not too long to implement.

Happy Caching.

Here's the link to the CopyChildren macro.

This is what gravity is.

One might think that this post is about geocaching, because recently a prolific local cacher was subjected to the unrelenting force of gravity. Well, not exactly the force of gravity. The acceleration of gravity. The same acceleration of gravity that attached my back side to the couch for several hours last night.

No, this post is not about geocaching but is a review of and a complaint about the show Saturday Night Live. Why was I watching SNL after not watching it on purpose for several years? When the Ohio State Buckeyes, my hometown team, embarrass themselves on national television by losing to USC 35-3, a score that could have been MUCH worse, every Buckeye fan increases his or her MBR (minimum beer requirement) for the evening and spends several hours afterward staring blankly at the television screen. Somehow without my approval the channel was changed from ABC to NBC, and Saturday Night Live began -- promisingly, with an adept impersonation of the Republican vice-presidential nominee by Tina Fey.

That's about it. Michael Phelps must have been the worst guest host ever (but how would I know?), stumbling over almost every line, but even the regulars could not be bothered, apparently, to attempt to remember their lines. SNL's idea of funny these days is that some people dance in a silly way, like Napoleon Dynamite or Elaine in Seinfeld. At least two sketches were based entirely on this. I'd rather watch John Cleese.

But here's my main complaint. During the quiz show segment (isn't there one on every SNL?), a question was based on the statement that gravity makes things fall to the ground at a constant rate. Sorry, that's not true. Gravity makes things fall at a constant acceleration, which then means that the speed is increasing linearly. And, to correct my purposeful mistake in the first paragraph, the force (or weight) of an object depends both on its mass and the acceleration due to gravity.

And, finally, as if to prove that every Buckeye's life goes into slow motion after a bad loss, my SNL review gets scooped by a two-sentence Twitter post practically identical in content. I feel like (Ohio State quarterback) Todd Boeckman trying to escape the pocket -- my left tackle missed his assignment, and Monday is about to hit me on the blind side.

Geocaching is a piece of cake. Ha ha!

Ah, I love the internet. (I only wish that the internet was widely available earlier in my life, before 1994, when I was a graduate student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where Marc Whoever came up with Mosaic, the predecessor to Netscape. But I digress.) One minute you're searching for fun facts about the former mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, and the next minute you're looking at photographs of mistakes on cakes. This one caught my attention:



Yikes. (You're supposed to put that stuff on the INSIDE of the cake before you take it to the prison.) It wouldn't take too much rearranging to make that a geocaching-themed cake. I started looking for one and could only find these, on a page about something called GIS Day:



Is that supposed to be the yellow eTrex? The picture behind the cake looks like a different crappy yellow GPS receiver.



Come on, everybody knows there are 24 satellites. GET YOUR FACTS STRAIGHT, BAKER!



I also found the page for a geocaching event last month in Georgia called Let Them Eat Cake!! No pictures of cakes on the page, but a promise to hold a Yankee Swap, which in my experience turns every holiday party into a rollicking disaster of screaming toddlers and uptight parents muttering under their breath.

So, geocachers, I know you've got photos out there of birthday cakes with a geocaching theme. Admit it. Let's see 'em. Also, let's hear your most outlandish ideas for a cake with a geocaching theme. I'll have it made, bring it to the MnGCA Fall Event (no screaming! no muttering under your breath!), and we'll get that [appetizing dessert] on Cake Wrecks.

Now, what was I looking for?