Made it through a day and a half of theme park fun with the kids. Time for a much-needed beer, then as long a sleep as circumstance will allow.
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Sex With Monsters
This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.
Just in time for Halloween, this comic (published via the ever-excellent Oh Joy Sex Toy) is fundamentally pretty silly… and yet still manages to touch upon important concepts of safer sex, consent, aftercare etc. And apparently, based on Simon’s portfolio, his “thing” might well be that niche but now fun-sounding genre of “queer/monster horror”.
Dos Huevos
Dan Q found GCA8R9X Xemeneies a Barcelona #2 Foneria Giralt
This checkin to GCA8R9X Xemeneies a Barcelona #2 Foneria Giralt reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
An early morning walk from my hotel while I waited for the rest of my family to wake up brought me to this, another old chimney. I’ve really been enjoying discovering these relics of the industrial history of this part of the city.
Unusual and well-disguised cache container! 😁 First name in a clean new log sheet too; thanks to the CO for maintaining their caches! ❤️ SL, TFTC/GPC. Greetings from Oxfordshire, UK!
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
Hackaday
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.