Last July, I bought a GPS receiver so that I could make Amy “hunt” for a present that I bought her and so we could try out geocaching on our anniversary trip to St. Augustine. We haven’t been out much looking for cache’s, but the time we have spent has been a lot of fun. About 6 months ago, I decided to hide my first (and only) geocache in the courtyard outside the office where I work. The cache is called Runningman’s Jungle and is a slightly tricky cache to find because of the amount of traffic during the day, and the open cement roof tends to obstruct the GPS signal.
Since then, my coworkers and I have had quite a bit of fun watching people wandering stealthfully around the complex, trying to find the cache. To add to the fun, I setup a webcam that points to the area where the cache is hidden. Using a program called Active Webcam, I was able to have the cam take snapshots on motion detection rather than just sending them to the website. The problem with the motion detection system is that it tends to either be too sensitive and save an unmanageable amount of snapshots, or too oblivious to movement that it misses when people are near the cache. For that reason, I have long since turned off the motion detection system. While I had it on though, I caught some of Gainesville’s most prolific cachers, and thought I’d finally post them up.
Suemac was the first to find the cache. She was here during the day with her daughter, so I actually got to meet her in person. I’ve since learned that she’s not very nice when it comes to hiding micro caches.
They’re always so hard to find!
Esco, getting closer…
SwampKing, just about to jump the wall to get to the cache.
According to the logs, he was here with SwampQueen.
Wow! This is all news to me, I had no idea that such a group existed, yet alone a group so large that you get a regular flux (every day!) of geocachers looking for your stash. Time to go get a GPS.
Hey, now I don’t need a gps to find your cache 🙂
Yea, the geocaching community is pretty hardcore. I’ve only found about 20 or so caches, but some of these people have found thousands. On average, a new cacher finds Runningman’s Jungle about every other week (usually on the weekends). There are a ton here to find in Gainesville, but there are geocaches in most major cities and parks all over the world (including Sacramento).
…and Brian, you didn’t need a gps to find it anyway, you’ve been to the office before! 🙂
Sometimes when I click “Post” the page appears to not do anything, but upon opening the page up in a new window I see my comment has been submitted. You using AJAX and not telling anyone about it?
Hmm, interesting. Sorta reminds me of the ham radio guys, all the little encrypted messages and weird alphanumeric upper case characters.
AJAX is quite the buzzword at the moment. I came across the page that you linked on del.icio.us this morning but didn’t read the article. Then I saw one of the programmers here actually reading the article this afternoon. And about 5 minutes ago I get an IM from my wife asking, “What’s AJAX?”.
Without thinking about the article I replied, “an abrasive powdered cleaning product”. She pointed out that she was talking about your comment. So I clicked the link and saw the same page that I’d seen twice previously today. When the programmers saw the page open yet again on my monitor, it started an argument among them as to whether or not AJAX is language or a construct. Due to the argument, I decided to close the window and give up on having anything intelligent to reply to your comment with.
Does that answer your question, Justin? 🙂
I guess you’re not using it then 🙂
It happened to me again this morning on your post about SXSW. Click submit, page just sits there as if I didn’t do anything. Open a new window and check the post and sure enough it’s there.
I don’t know what I would describe AJAX as being, I *do* know it’s a lot easier to say. Since AJAX only refers to using the XMLHTTPRequest object and there is other forms of “Javascript to Server and back” communication, AJAX is really a subset of a bigger movement of what I would clasify as Remote Scripting. This is something I use on one of my sites to generate the “comment preview”.
You could use any “Javascript to Server and back” methodology, I still think it would fall under the “Remote Scripting” label. And that’s really what AJAX is, a methodology. You could do it with hidden IFRAMEs or you could do it with XMLHTTPRequest objects.
AJAX seems to be an assimilation of technologies used to make the browsing experience better. I’m not sure if or how I would use it at work to make our web projects better, that requires further investigation. I do know that if I started to use tons of JavaScript and XML some of my co-workers would get lost in the code but that’s b/c we do a lot of stuff in VB and don’t have any compelling reason to change.