Yesterday at 23:00 I discovered that the cache “The middle of somewhere” was published at 16:16, and that noone had found it, or at least had not posted any FTF (First To Find) logs on geocaching.com. This is a mystery cache, and I had to recall my old geometry skillz from school to be able to calculate the coordinates. Then I downloaded a free GPS waypoint finder program for my iPhone, plotted the coordinates in and went to bed.
This morning the first thing I did was check my mail to see if there had been any finders of this cache. It was nothing there, but I was a bit worried that one of the other regular FTF hunters I know had found it but not logged it on the website so that other FTF hunters would come rushing to the scene just to be disappointed by finding a not-so-much pristine log sheet in the container. A despicable practice, that.
However, after dropping the kid off to kindergarten and the wife off to work I went down to see if I got my calculations right. And after some detours – the iPhone GPS isn’t all that.. – I had to use the hint to start bruteforcing possible cache locations. And I found it! And it was an FTF! There was much rejoicing, and then I went to work 
Wondering about the picture? Well, little Halden seems to be a dangerous town, that’s a bullet hole in a sign near the cache!
After doing geocaching for a little over a year, I still love it. But geocaching has some features that makes the activity pattern change a bit over time. In the beginning there’s a lot of caches not very far away, and you can go grab caches in between other things that you need to do, like shopping and dropping the kid off in kindergarten. However, after some time you need to drive for quite some time or do time consuming walks in the woods just to get to the cache site – as there is a proximity limit of 161 metres between caches and the bureaucracy of placing geocaches is quite overwhelming for the less eager among cachers . This makes having time for geocaching more difficult since you have to dedicate whole days to geocaching since the distance to the nearest cache is steadily growing – and not everyone has full days to spend on something that does not help in building the house or fixing the garden… Of course, those rare business trips to other cities are treasured as that often gives one the possibility of finding a cache or two.
Enter: Gowalla. This is more of a social networking thing compared to geocaching, it helps you see where your friends are, and their status updates. Gowalla is actually quite similar to geocaching, in that it has geographical spots that you can find, and you can log that you have found them on the system’s website or on a mobile client. However, there’s a lot of small differences. While Geocaching uses various physcal containers that you actually have to get a hold of in order to write something in the enclosed log book, Gowalla only reqires you to be in the proximity of a spot in order to log – or Check In to – the spot. This means you can find and log the spots without even getting out of your car, and you don’t need to worry about getting a cache muggled which may result in unwanted attention from law enforcement and so on – a great advantage in urban areas. Also placing spots is a lot less hazzle with Gowalla – there’s no formal requirements for placing a spot and no approval process. So anyone can play Gowalla very easily. Geocaching also has this more or less unwritten rule that one should only find a cache once, while Gowalla encourage you to find the same spot multiple times by introducing a leaderboard for each spot. Gowalla even has virtual “cache content” (swag) that’s trackable like Geocaching’s travel bugs. But I can’t say I’m really into that part of Gowalla -yet.
Of course, Gowalla is a more virtual game, and is as such not really much suited for the family sunday trip with kids – the instant reward of having your toddler/child finding tupperware treasure chests in the woods is something Gowalla just can’t provide
For the Norwegian readers out there this piece on NRKBeta has more about Gowalla. Translated version here.
Endeleg er domene-piraten Karl-Oskar Fosshaug ute av business. Norid har sperra domena hans og kasta han ut som registrar. Ein siger for alle oss som har prøvd å registrere eit domenenamn berre for å oppdage at Central Equities allereie har snike seg til det heilt urettmessig.
Fosshaug burde blitt bura inne i tillegg, men ein kan ikkje få alt ein ønsker seg her i verda.
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Eniro, selskapet bak telefonkatalogen.no/gulesider.no har nettopp vore så greie å berre publisere fødselsdatoen min på nett utan mitt samtykke. Så dersom du har lyst til å stjele identiteten min er dette no så lett som å gå til telefonkatalogen.no og finne adresse og fødselsdato, og så finner ein årstalet i skattelistene. Deretter kan ein bruke ein personnummer-generator for å finne det faktiske personnummeret. Eller sjekke mot websider som validerer identiteten din basert på personnummer.
Tidlegare har eg i alle fall prøvd å vere påpasseleg med å ikkje legge ut fødselsdatoen min på heimesida mi, Facebook, MSN og liknande. Då eg no vurderte å registrere meg som brukar hjå Eniro for å få skrudd av fødselsdatoen min blir eg møtt med dette bruksvilkåret:
Ja, jeg samtykker til at de personopplysninger jeg har lagt inn kan gjøres tilgjengelige i denne og andre søketjenester fra Eniro Norge AS.
Trur ikkje det, nei.
Denne saka har fått stor merksemd på Twitter under taggana #eniro og #enirofail, i tillegg til at nettavisene no ser ut til å hive seg på.
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Da er vi i gang!