Dan Q
This checkin to GLB9T1P9 The ox-stream caching series - Castle Mill Stream reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
Found while on my lunch break. Took a bit of stealth to avoid all of the foot-traffic, and I spent some time looking in the wrong place entirely. TFTC!
This checkin to GLB9T1K4 The ox-stream caching series - Wareham Stream reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
Found without difficulty while on my lunch break. Great little container! TFTC!
This checkin to GCRQ9W Three Counties View reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
No luck. Had a great GPSr fix, and found two places that I thought would be perfect cache hiding places, but one was empty, and the other was full of the litter of some inconsiderate barbequers: I wonder if the latter used to be the location of this cache, and that it was destroyed by these litterbugs when they left their plastic cups, plates, and burnt-out disposable barbeque there?
I wasn’t carrying so much as a backpack, or I’d have done a litter-pick. Makes me sad to see such a beautiful landscape being destroyed by folks who won’t take their rubbish home with them.
This checkin to GLB902AN Sugarloaf reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
I don’t know what chrisabarker is talking about: it was a little blustery, but wonderful weather for a quick job up Sugar Loaf Hill! I went up on the morning, as I woke up earlier than the folks I was training during an away weekend for a voluntary organisation I’m part of, and loved finding this wonderful cache (and in such a beautiful area!). TFTC.
This checkin to GLB6RQ5F Dear Fred... reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
Is this really the most-famous visitor to Jersey? Didn’t Queen Victoria come here? Arguments about relative fame and influence aside, fleeblewidget and I were able to do most of our research on the Internet, and got her mother to find the stone and extract the numerals as we walked nearby. fleeblewidget‘s mother didn’t feel up to the trek up to the cache, so she stayed behind. Not having a map, fleeblewidget and I weren’t able to pinpoint the cache location by any more than its direction and distance, and we took a wrong turning and looped around about twice the distance we meant to before we found the path upon which the cache resides. Found it quite easily on the way back, despite distraction from a pretty noisesome thrush, singing his little heart out up the tree above. Lovely place for a cache. Thanks!
Log’s looking a little damp; I should’a brought some silica gel.
This checkin to GLB6RPJ9 View over St Aubins reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
Coming up having just found Not Much Room, we didn’t think to continue along the footpath and instead took the road, leading to a long double-back: whoops! Found the viewpoint easily (although recent tree growth has somewhat blocked the view), and – soon afterwards – the cache. Took a copy of the address of the Carstens in Nindorf to send them a postcard, and signed the log. TFTC.
This checkin to GLB6RP12 Not much room? reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
My 100th cache find turned out to be also my most-Southerly find so far, and also turned out to be a most-spectacular little hiding place. After walking up and down the path a bit with fleeblewidget and her mother, while our GPSrs got their bearings, we managed to pinpoint the location almost exactly, but we were still clueless. Eventually, it was fleeblewidget‘s mother – completely new to caching – who decided to investigate what turned out to be exactly what we were looking for! A most-wonderful cache; thanks!
Log full, unable to sign.
his is my video review of the first episode of Godzilla Huntley’s (Captain AvAngel) new blog series, Family Vlog. See the original.
This review originally appeared on Steam. See more reviews by Dan.
So much fun. A quick, silly, stealth-and-hacking romp through a ludicrous world of jumping, falling, leaping, climbing.
This link was originally posted to /r/outside. See more things from Dan's Reddit account.
The original link was: http://i.imgur.com/sYVlwjk.png
This blog post is the second in a series about buying our first house. If you haven’t already, you might like to read the first part.
When Ruth, JTA and I first set out to look at houses, we didn’t actually plan on buying one. We’d just gotten to the point where buying one felt like an imminent logical step, and so we decided to start looking around Oxford to see what kind of thing we might be able to get (and what it would cost us, if we did). Our thinking was that, by looking around a few places, we’d have some context from which to springboard our own discussions about what property we’d one day like to own.
There’s something about “window shopping” for houses that’s liberating and exciting. We don’t need a house – we’ve got somewhere to live – but we’re going to come and look around anyway. Once you’re on their lists, estate agents will bombard you with suggestions of places that you might like, and you feel a little like they’re your servants, running around trying to please you (in actual fact, almost the opposite is true: they’re working on behalf of the seller… although it’s certainly in their interest to get the property sold promptly so that they can take their cut!).
But as we got into the swing of things, we discovered that we were ready to buy already. Between our savings (and, in particular, boosted by the first parts of my inheritance following my dad’s death last year, as we’re finally getting his estate sorted out), we actually have an acceptable deposit for a mortgage, and our renewal on our current place was looming fast. None of us having bought a house before, we did a bit of reading and decided that our first step probably ought to be to work out how much can we borrow. You know, just to make our window-shopping a little more believable. Maybe.
One of the estate agents we dealt with introduced us to a chap called Stefan Cork, a mortgage broker working as part of the Mortgage Advice Bureau network. We were still only window-shopping at this point, but hey: if we were going to be allowed some free, no-commitment mortgage advice, then we might as well work out how much we could potentially borrow, right? After checking his credentials (the three questions you should ask every mortgage broker), I spoke to Stefan on the phone, and talked him through our situation. I described our unusual relationship structure (which he took in his stride) and the way that we means-assess our household contributions, alongside more mundane details like how much we earn and what kind of deposit we could rustle up. He talked us through our options and ballparked some of the kinds of numbers we’d be looking at, if we went ahead and got a mortgage.
And somehow, somewhere along the line, our perspective switched. Instead of looking at houses just to give us a feel for what we might buy, “maybe next year”, we were genuinely looking to buy a house now. We re-visited some of the places we’d seen already, and increased our search of places we hadn’t yet seen. Over time, and by a process of elimination (slow Internet area; too many hills; too narrow staircases; too expensive; too wonky), we cut down our options to just three potential properties. And then just two. And then we came to an impasse.
So… we put offers on both. Under the law of England and Wales, a property purchase isn’t binding until the contracts have exchanged hands. Sellers benefit (and buyers suffer) from this all of the time, because it permits gazumping: even after the buyers have spent money on lawyers, mortgage applications, surveys and searches, the seller can change their mind and accept a higher offer from a different prospective buyer! But this legal quirk can work for buyers, too: in our case, we were able to put offers in of what we were willing to pay for each of two properties (different values, at that), and let them know that the first one of the two to agree to our price would be the one to get the sale!
Haggling for a house in this way felt incredibly ballsy (I’d been nominated as the negotiator on behalf of the other Earthlings), but it played against the psychology of our sellers. Suddenly, instead of being in a position of power (“no, we won’t accept that offer… go a little higher”), the sellers were made to feel that if they didn’t accept our offers (which were doubtless lower than they had hoped), they’d have a 50% chance of losing the sale entirely. When there are hundreds of thousands of pounds on the line, being able to keep your cool and show that you’re willing to go elsewhere is an incredibly powerful negotiating tactic.
True to our word: when one of them came back and accepted our offer, we withdrew the offer on the other house and began the (lengthy) paperwork to start getting the purchase underway. But that can wait for another blog post.
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The original link was: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hellburners
Hellburners (Dutch: hellebranders) were specialised fireships used in the Siege of Antwerp (1584-1585) during the Eighty Years’ War between the Dutch rebels and the Habsburgs. They were floating bombs, also called “Antwerp Fire”, and did immense damage to the Spanish besiegers. Hellburners have been described as an early form of weapons of mass destruction.
Wikipedia
Which came first, orange or orange?
Let me try that again: which came first, the colour or the fruit?
Still not quite right – one more try: which came first, orange, the English name of the colour, or orange, the English name of the fruit? What I really want to know is: is the fruit named after the colour or the colour after the fruit? (I find it hard to believe that the two share a name and colour simply by coincidence)
It turns out that the fruit came first. Prior to the introduction of oranges to Western Europe in around the 16th or 17th century by Portugese merchants, English-speaking countries referred to the colour by the name ġeolurēad. Say that Old English word out loud and you’ll hear its roots: it’s a combination of the historical versions of the words “yellow” and “red”. Alternatively, people substituted words like “gold” or “amber”: also both words for naturally-occurring substances whose identity is confirmed by their colouration.
There wasn’t much need for a dedicated word in English to describe the colour, before the introduction of the fruit, because there wasn’t much around of that colour. The colour orange isn’t common in nature: a few fruits, copper-rich soils and rocks, a small number of tropical fish, a handful of flowers… and of course autumn leaves during that brief period before they go brown and are washed away by Britain’s encroaching winter weather.
Brent Berlin and Paul Kay theorise that the evolution of a language tends towards the introduction of words for particular colours in a strict order: so words to distinguish between green and blue (famously absent in Japanese, Vietnamese, and Thai) are introduced before brown is added, which in term appears before the distinction of pink, orange, and grey. At a basic level, this seems to fit: looking at a variety of languages and their words for different colours, you’ll note that the ‘orange’ column is filled far less-often than the ‘brown’ column, which in turn is filled less-often than the ‘green’ column.
This is a rather crude analogy, of course, because some languages go further than others in their refinement of a particular area of the spectrum. Greek, for example, breaks down what we would call “blue” into τυρκουάζ (turquoise) and κυανό (azure), and arguably βιολέ (violet), although a Greek-speaker would probably put the latter down as a shade of purple, rather than of blue. It makes sense, I suppose, that languages are expected to develop a name for the colour “red” no later than they do for other colours (other than to differentiate between darkness and lightness) – a lot of important distinctions in biology, food, and safety depend on our ability to communicate about red things! But it seems to me that we’ve still got a way to go, working on our linguistic models of colour.
If we’d evolved on Mars (and were still a sighted, communicative, pack creature, but – for some reason – still had a comparable range and resolution of colour vision), our languages would probably contain an enormous variety of words for colours in the 650-750 nanometre wavelengths (the colours that English speakers universally call “red”). Being able to navigate the red planet based on the different ratios of hematites in the rocks, plains, soils and dusts would doubtless mean that the ability to linguistically distinguish between a dark-red feature and a medium-red feature could be of great value!
The names we have for colours represent a part of our history, and our environment. From an anthropological and linguistic perspective, that’s incredibly interesting.
If it weren’t for the ubiquity of, say, violets and lavender in the Northern hemisphere, perhaps the English language wouldn’t have been for a word for that particular colour, and the rainbow would have six colours instead of seven. And if I’d say, “Richard Of York Gave Battle In…”, nobody would know how to finish the sentence.
In other news, I recently switched phone network, and I’m now on Orange (after many years on Vodafone). There is no connection between this fact and this blog post; I just thought I’d share.
This review originally appeared on Steam. See more reviews by Dan.
Fun, beautiful first-person-shooter. I disliked Bioshock and I hated Bioshock 2, so I was glad to discover that Bioshock Infinite is not terribly like either of them, but is something else – something more fun – entirely. Playtime was a little shorter than I’d have expected for a game of its price, but it was still worth having.
If you haven’t played it, you should. Or failing that; wait for it to be on sale.
This link was originally posted to /r/firstworldanarchists.
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