Dan Q

Dan Q found GC1788D Torre Agbar

This checkin to GC1788D Torre Agbar reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

My 7-year-old, who’s really interested in skyscrapers, was excited to point this one out to me upon our arrival in Barcelona on Saturday, observing that it looks very similar to “The Gherkin”/30 St Mary Axe, a highly-recognisable London landmark. He’s right, it does, and it’s a shame he couldn’t join me on this geocaching expedition but he was still around asleep when I set off.

I stood pretending to wait for a bus for a little while, then quickly found, signed, and replaced the cache. TFTC/GPC!

Dan Q found GC6TKBN MALIP – Monument a les il·lusions perdudes

This checkin to GC6TKBN MALIP - Monument a les il·lusions perdudes reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

After failing to find this yesterday, I came back earlier this morning for another go. Thanks to the hint, I was pretty confident I’d been looking in the right place, and a message from the CO helped confirm this (gracias!).

There are, in my mind, two significant challenges to this cache:

1. It’s a challenging and unusual hiding place and you will need to use the hint. I see from previous logs that some people used the hint… and still got stuck! Got to look around and see what it could mean. This bit… I got right. In fact, I touched the cache yesterday but just didn’t know it for sure!

2. It’s a busy area in which searching for a geocache… looks a bit suspicious! I came at almost 08:00 yesterday and, probably because it was a weekday, the area had lots of muggles. I felt self-conscious hunting for the cache and that made it harder. Coming back today an hour earlier made all the difference.

A really sneaky cache good enough to hunt for twice. TFTC/GPC. FP awarded. Greetings from Oxfordshire, UK.

Dan Q found GC1BA7C Parc central del Poblenou

This checkin to GC1BA7C Parc central del Poblenou reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

QEF while on my way back to my hotel after a morning of exploring the area. GPC.

Dan Q did not find GC6TKBN MALIP – Monument a les il·lusions perdudes

This checkin to GC6TKBN MALIP - Monument a les il·lusions perdudes reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

An extended search bore no fruit this morning. Worth help of the hint and an initial survey I was pretty confident in what kind of thing I was looking for, but though i inspected many candidate hiding places I couldn’t quite find it. Perhaps I’d do better at a less-busy time.

Dan Q found GCARWF7 Antigua Fábrica de Tallada i Lora

This checkin to GCARWF7 Antigua Fábrica de Tallada i Lora reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

Visiting from Oxford, UK, I woke up early this morning and decided to come out for an explore before my partner and the children got up. A walk through the park brought me to this delightful piece of industrial history! With the hint, the cache was soon in hand and the log signed. GPC!

Note #24831

Parenting is about sacrifices.

Here, I’m making the noble sacrifice of forcing myself to drink a delicious beer so my 10-year-old can use the customer-only bathroom at a beachside amateur football club. Such a sacrifice.

Hackaday

Me, hacking challenging Javascript at work: “Damn, I need a holiday.”

Me, hacking challenging Javascript on sabbatical: “Ah, so relaxing.”

Dan Q found GCAG598 Mimetic – Passeig de Gràcia

This checkin to GCAG598 Mimetic - Passeig de Gràcia reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

QEF for the geokid and I while exploring beautiful Barcelona this wet weekend. Greetings from Oxford, UK. TFTC!

Hour of Ambiguity

Here in my hotel room, high above Barcelona, I woke up. It was still dark outside, so I looked to my phone – sitting in its charging cradle – as a bedside clock. It told me that the time was 02:30 (01:30 back home), and that the sun would rise at 07:17.

But how long would it be, until then?

Daylight savings time is harmonised across Europe by EU Directive 2000/84/EC¹, but for all the good this harmonisation achieves it does not perfectly remove every ambiguity from questions like this. That it’s 02:30 doesn’t by itself tell me whether or not tonight’s daylight savings change has been applied!

It could be 00:30 UTC, and still half an hour until the clocks go back, or it could be 01:30 UTC, and the clocks went back half an hour ago. I exist in the “hour of uncertainty”, a brief period that happens once every year². Right now, I don’t know what time it is.

I remember when it first started to become commonplace to expect digital devices to change their clocks twice a year on your behalf. You’d boot your PC on a morning and it’d pop up a dialog box to let you know what it had done: a helpful affordance that existed primarily, I assume, to discourage you from making the exact same change yourself, duplicating the effort and multiplying the problem. Once, I stayed up late on last Saturday in March to see what happened if the computer was running at the time, and sure enough, the helpful popup appeared as the clocks leapt forward, skipping over sixty minutes in an instant, keeping them like leftovers to be gorged upon later.

Computers don’t do that for us anymore. They still change their clocks, but they do it silently, thanklessly, while we sleep, and we generally don’t give it a second thought.

That helpful dialog that computers used to have had a secondary purpose. Maybe we should bring it back. Not as a popup – heaven knows we’ve got enough of those – but just a subtle subtext at the bottom of the clock screens on our phones. “Daylight savings: clock will change in 30 minutes” or “Daylight savings: clock changed 30 minutes ago”. Such a message could appear for, say, six hours or so before and after our strange biannual ritual, and we might find ourselves more-aware as a result.

Of course, I suppose I could have added UTC to my world clock. Collapsed the waveform. Dispelled the ambiguity. Or just allowed myself to doze off and let the unsleeping computers do their thing while I rested. But instead I typed this, watching as the clock reached 02:59 and then to 02:00. I’d started writing during summertime; I’d finished after it ended, a few minutes… earlier?

Daylight savings time remains a crazy concept.

Footnotes

¹ Why yes, I am the kind of nerd who didn’t have to look that up. Why do you ask?

² In places that observe a one-hour shift for summertime.

Melià Barcelona Sky

Enjoying a glass of cava while the kids peer down out of the window of a Barcelona skyscraper.

Day 8 of my sabbatical. Think I’m doing this right?

Note #24818

This boy is excited and ready for Spain!

Double Sausages

This child is eating sausages with one hand while playing a video game about eating sausages with the other.

Is this life-imitating-art or the other way around? Who can possibly say?

Note #24813

Off to Spain! BRB.

My Oldest Article of Clothing

There’s a pretty, lightweight, short-sleeved shirt that I own. If you know me personally, it’s reasonably likely you’ll have seen me wearing it at some point.

And I’m confident that it’s the oldest piece of clothing I own. I first got it in the winter of 2001/2002, which makes it a massive 23 years old!

Given that I seem to be incapable of owning clothing without holing it in short order¹, why has this shirt lasted so long? Is it imbued with some form of mystical draconic longevity?²

A 23-year-old shirt that’s been worn most months would most-likely already represent good value, but I bought this particular garment second-hand, from a stall in Preston’s Covered Market. For 50 pence! That’s cheap enough that it would have been the best-value shirt I’d ever owned even if it had fallen apart as quickly as my clothes do typically.

That it’s instead lasted over two decades is just… mind-boggling.

Footnotes

¹ My socks wear holes within a year or two; my trousers gain crotch tears, possibly as a result of over-aggressive cycling, within a similar timespan; my t-shirts for some reason reliably get holes under the left armpit usually within four years, and so on.

² With thanks to the Wayback Machine, I found an original web page about my shirt on the designer’s website (in an example of full “early 2000s” web design – look at those image navigation buttons with no alt-text! – as well as other retro touches like being able to order by fax before paying in deutschemarks). They’re still making shirts, I see, although no longer in this design.

How I Learned to Enjoy Pickled Onion Monster Munch

Duration 4:55

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Right in time for International Crisp Sandwich Day (St. Crispin’s Day) tomorrow, I’ve taught myself to enjoy Pickled Onion Monster Munch.

Three jars of homemade pickled eggs; one in each of a chilli-spiced vinegar, balsamic vinegar, and white vinegar. — You might reasonably have assumed I’d have already enjoyed pickled onion crisps. After all, I not only enjoy *actual* pickled onions but also the far more “acquired taste” of pickled *eggs*, shown.

There’s a need for somebody… anybody… to eat Pickled Onion Monster Munch in our household, because we have a bit of an oversupply. In order to reliably get both of the other flavours that people like (Roast Beef and Flamin’ Hot, respectively), we end up buying multipacks that also contain Pickled Onion flavour, and these unwanted extras pile up in the snack cupboard until we happen to have a houseguest that we can palm them off onto.

My entire life, I’ve claimed not to like pickled onion flavour crisps. As a kid, I would only eat salt & vinegar and ready salted flavours, eventually expanding my palate into “meaty” flavours like chicken and roast beef (although never, absolutely never, prawn cocktail). Later, I’d come to also enjoy cheese & onion and variants thereof, and it’s from this that I realise that I’m probably being somewhat irrational.

Because if you think about it: if you want to make a “pickled onion” flavour crisp, what flavouring ingredients would you use? It turns out that most crisp manufacturers use a particular mixture of (a) the ingredient that makes salt & vinegar crisps taste “vinegary” and (b) the ingredient that makes cheese & onion crisps taste “onioney”. So in summary:

I like pickled onions.
I like salt & vinegar crisps, which include an ingredient to make them taste vinegary.
I like cheese & onion crisps, which include an ingredient to make them taste onioney.
Therefore, I ought to like pickled onion crisps, which use two ingredients I like to try to emulate a food I like.

A packet of Pickled Onion Monster Munch, held in a hand. — I should like this. Right?

Maybe that deliberate and conscious thought process is all I need? Maybe that’s it, and just having gone through the reasoning, I will now like pickled onion crisps!

Conveniently, I have a cupboard in my kitchen containing approximately one billion packets of Pickled Onion Monster Munch. So let’s try it out.

The first time I’ve tried a pickled onion flavour crisp in almost 30 years, captured on camera for your amusement.

It turns out they’re okay!

They’re not going to dethrone either of the other two flavours of Monster Munch that we routinely restock on, but at least now I’m in a position where I can do something about our oversupply.

And all it took was stopping to think rationally about it. If only everything were so simple.