Recycled Electrons - Blog of Keith Horowitz

I ran my second geocaching event yesterday. The last one was just a general get-together. This one was a special clean-up event. The main geocache site, geocaching.com, promotes both regular clean-up whenever caching and a special day once a year for a major international clean-up on Earth day. They call the clean-up a CITO, for Cache-In, Trash-Out. During my first event, a number of people in the area indicated they would prefer a clean-up event that did not occur on the Earth-day on Saturday. Many people can't make Saturday events. Also by having it on a different day, it would allow Geocachers to do the Earth-day/Saturday event up in Denver on Saturday and then do another one on Sunday. It took me a few tries - but I got in touch with the parks department. They asked where I would like to clean up. I figured with all the different places that I knew people would be coming from, that somewhere around downtown Colorado Springs heading West towards Manatou Springs would be p...

I've been living without sound on my Toshiba laptop since last summer. When I opened it up, I found the sound card was this tiny board, maybe 2 inches by a half inch. And it has this plug-in to the motherboard. The connector on the motherboard had come loose. Considering that plugging in earphones would cause mechanical stress on this top board, it almost seems inevitable that this connector would break on the motherboard or sound card. This should have been right on the motherboard or connected with a ribbon connector. There are a number of other ribbon connectors in the laptop, so it is already a workable solution. At first it just worked oddly - sometimes the sound would work, sometimes it would make odd noises - sometimes it didn't work. And of course this happened after the unit was out of warranty. I can only imagine that if I took it in to be fixed, the answer would be to replace the motherboard. A motherboard and labor - I can only imagine this would cost nearly...

For a change we got our taxes done early. Early being 2 weeks before the deadline. The last 2 years, things were crazy enough that we wound up filing extensions. But this year we did our taxes on the most appropriate day of the year: April Fools Day - April 1st. Somehow it seems appropriate to me. I'm just not sure who is being made a bigger fool. Trying to read tax code, I think it is me! I'm not big on April Fools. It seems way too easy for people to be unnecessarily mean - and it seems like meanness can only escalate until someone gets upset. The one little joke I played was I told my son he didn't have to clear the table. When he asked 'really', I replied 'April Fools'. That is about as far as I like to go. No long suspense. No elaborate lies. No major emotional plays. Just a tiny bit of quick teasing once.

I was musing about 'The Who' Music used on CSI and on the reference to the guy on the show who was collection famous dead people's picture, saying that he was going to put it next to his Entwistle. I laughed at the connection between the musician from the group that does their theme music. And it reminded me of the morbid joke about getting the Beatles back together, when there were still 3 of them. The joke went it would take 3 more bullets. Ouch :) Then I realize both The Beatles and The Who are down 2 members. So between the 2 groups they have just the right number to make a new fab-four group. :) Then the topic became what would the new group be called? I think the best that came up was The Weavels. A little hard - a little soft - introducing those new old guys from the UK: The Weavels! :)

I started a new blog for my geocaching adventures. My first real entry on this blog was describing geocacing in some detail for those who want to understand it a bit better. Today I wrote up about a geocaching adventure that started with trying to figure out a puzzle a few weeks ago - comparing notes with other geocachers last week - then trying to find it Sunday - and going back again Thursday afternoon to try again: GCC276 Away Team Mission

Had to take my big guy to a Jewish-youth group activity this afternoon. Went down to the skating place. They said - we don't know about that activity. Could it be at our other location [5 minutes back they way we came]? They called - it was. I didn't even know they had a second location. It is laid out almost identically. They play the music very loud at both places. Too loud for my little guys. My big guy asked what they called it - I said slow-ear-drum-damaging level. I took the little guys out for some geocaching. I didn't have all my notes with me - but I did have a lot loaded into my GPS. The first one I couldn't find - but as it was just a fake coordinate for a puzzle cache, it is not suprising we couldn't find it. I had my laptop along with a number of the geocache sites pre-loaded on my drive. So I was able to find another couple to try right nearby. We parked near a dog-run, and headed for a micro first. I don't like this smallest size geo...

So this past week's episode of Numb3rs seemed to be designed specifically to refute my previous log entry where I said GPS is not part of cell phones. It seems I was wrong. I am sorry Numb3rs for my misunderstanding. According to the show, it seems that when the decided that for emergency purposes, that cell phones should be trackable, the didn't use triangulation from cell towers. The actually put a tiny GPS chip inside all modern cell phones. Wow. So I guess they were right when they said they used GPS with the phone. Of course, in the episode, the person was in a library. Inside buildings is a very poor place for GPS reception, so I still have some doubts. Then a very short while later it hit me. There is a GPS inside most everyone cell phone. And they don't let you use it! It would be so simple to show locations and do some simple coordinates on a cell phone. The data is already there. It would only take a simple program! Man - think of all the people who coul...