Where, I wondered, could I find a cluster of mostly-land graticules (“square” degree of latitude and longitude) in which nobody had ever logged a successful expedition? I’ve been
geohashing for ten years now and I’ve never yet scored a “Graticule Unlocked” achievement for being the first to reach any hashpoint in a given graticule.
So this week, we’re holidaying on the West coast of Ireland, doing a variety of activities that take our fancy and, hopefully, finding a geohashpoint or two in previously-unexplored
graticules!
Looking at the nearby hashpoints, we decided that this was our best bet. An hour and a half’s drive from our accomodation to a village near the hashpoint and we might be able to make
the rest of the way on foot.
Expedition
Driving conditions were sometimes suboptimal, but okay.
My mother’s never been hashing before, but unlike most people I’ve told about the hobby she didn’t turn her nose up at the idea so she was happy to accompany me on this unusual
adventure.
We met a surprising number of dogs out, alone, “taking themselves for a walk’. Like this one.
Our rental car did a pretty good job.
We drove to Abbey, which turns out to be a delightful village, and parked outside the community centre (where my mother was able to use the bathroom).
Parking was plentiful in Abbey.
We still don’t know what makes this wall “lazy”.
Then we switched to foot, walking along the banks of the stream and following the road to the East, towards the field where we’d hoped to find the hashpoint.
We anticipated there being nowhere closer than Abbey to park and get to the hashpoint, so we spent most of our time on foot.
A quick survey around the outskirts of the area suggested that it was, indeed, in what had once been an active pasture but had been abandoned and disused for many years. The grass and
brambles grew high and were caked in snow, but we hopped the gate and pressed on for the final hundred metres.
Very close…!
We made the right choice: the hashpoint was just barely inside the disused old field, and we were able to get to it with only slightly wet feet and without disturbance (except for some
kind of nesting bird that was unhappy to see us, and some kind of medium-sized mammal – possibly a fox – that ran away as we approached).
View from the hashpoint.
We reached the hashpoint at 11:24.
Obligatory silly grins.
Flushed with success at this relatively easy victory, we continued our walk to a nearby dairy to see if they’d sell us some cheese (their farm shop was shut), and then crossed the river
and climbed the nearby hill to find the fantastic geocache at Pallas Castle.
The castle was a wonderful diversion on our way back.
Circling around from the hilltop to return to the car, we drove back home, completing our expedition (hashpoint, cache, and all) in a little under 7 hours.
The geokids and I are staying nearby and came out for a walk this morning to discover this under-appreciated cache. What an amazing location and such a great view! We searched many
“obvious” locations without luck, then translated some logs to get a clue. We should have checked the attributes! A little danger later and the cache was in hand. SL, TFTC/GPC! FP awarded – thanks so much for bringing us here. Greetings from
Oxfordshire, UK!
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.
I’ve spent the last week1 in Tulum, on Mexico’s beautiful Yucatan Peninsula, for an Automattic meetup.
And as usual for these kinds of work gatherings, it was magical (and, after many recent departures, a welcome opportunity to feel a closer
connection to those of us that remain).
Obviously, meeting in-person with my immediate team2 was a specific goal for the event.
Only after deciding the title of this blog post did I spot my own accidental wordplay. I mean that it was metaphorically magical, of course, but there also happened to
be more than a little magic performed there too, thanks to yours truly.
I made magic a theme of a “flash talk”. After that ~350 people was a suboptimal audience size for close-up magic and offering to later replicate
the trick I was describing in-person to anybody in the room… I ended up performing it many, many more times.
No, I mean that the whole thing felt magical. Like, I’ve discovered, every Automattic meetup I’ve been to has been. But this is perhaps especially true of the larger
ones like Vienna last year (where my “flash talk” topic was Finger for WordPress; turns out I love the excuse to listen to
other people’s nerdity and fly my own nerd flag a little).
There’s plenty of reasons it was a magical trip, as I’ll explain. But after arriving late and exhausted, this view from the doorstep of my bedroom the
following morning was a great start. I made a habit of a pre-breakfast swim each morning in the warm Caribbean waters.
Our events team, who are already some of the most thoughtful and considerate planners you might ever meet, had gone above and beyond in their choice of location. The all-inclusive
resort they’d booked out for pretty-much our exclusive use was a little isolated and not the kind of place I’d have chosen for a personal holiday. But it provided all of the facilities
my team, sibling teams, and division could desire for work, rest and play.
One day, I returned to my room and discovered that in the course of their tidying, the hotel’s housekeeping team had been asked to tidy up any stray charging cables using
reusable Automattic-branded cable ties. These are the kinds of nice touches that show how hard our events coordinators think about their work3!
As usual, an Automattic meetup proved to be a series of long but energising days comprising a mixture of directly work-related events, social team-building and networking opportunities,
chances for personal growth and to learn or practice skills, and a sweet sprinkling of fun and memorable activities.
A particular treat as a trip to swim through a cenote – caverns formed by sinkhole erosion of the limestone sediment by
rainwater, often considered sacred to the Maya – complete with fish, bats, and the ugliest spiders you’ll ever
see.4Harvey Mackay said5 that if you choose a job you love, you’ll never work a day in your life. That might not ring
true for me every day of my working life, but it certainly feels significant when I’m at Automattic meetups.
Work that feels like fun, and fun that contributes to work? Is that the secret sauce? My colleague Boro and I certainly tried to bring that energy to our workshop on the philosophy of
code reviews, pictured.
Our meetups might not feel like “work” (even when they clearly are!), but rather like… I don’t know… a holiday with 400 of the coolest, friendliest, most-interesting people you could
ever meet6… which just happens to have
an overarching theme of something that you love.
Recently-developed changes to strategic priorities, and the departure of a few of our colleagues during the recent aforementioned “realignment”, meant that my “superteam” – my team and
its siblings – had a lot to talk about. How can we work better together? How can we best meet the needs of the company while also remaining true to its open-source ideology? What will
our relationships with one another and with other parts of the organisation look like in the year to come?
All the best meetings take place in bars, right?
Every morning for a week I’d wake early and walk the soft warm sands and swim in the sea, before meeting with colleagues for breakfast. Then a day of networking and workshops, team-time
activities, meetings, and personal development, which gave way to evenings with so much on offer that FOMO was inevitable7.
I continue to appreciate the ways that Automattic provides the time and space for me to expand my horizons. Whether that’s at one end of a spectrum learning a new technical skill. or
at the other sitting-in on a “sound bath”8.
Automattic remains… automaggical to me. As I rapidly approach five years since I started here (more on that later, I promise,
because, well: five years is a pretty special anniversary at Automattic…), it’s still the case that routinely I get to learn new
things and expand myself while contributing to important and influential pieces of open source software.
Our meetups are merely an intense distillation of what makes Automattic magical on a day-to-day basis.
At home, I usually start my day with a skim of my RSS reader from bed. But with the sea calling to me, first, each morning of the Tulum
meetup, I instead had to suffice with reading my feeds from the nearest available hammock to the beach on my doorstep.
4 The spiders, which weave long thin strand webs that hang like tinsel from the cave roof,
catch and eat mosquitoes, which I’m definitely in favour of.
6 Also, partially-tame trash pandas, which joined
iguanas, agouti, sand pipers, and other wildlife around (and sometimes in) our accommodation.
7 I slightly feel like I missed-out by skipping the board gaming, and it sounds like the
movie party and the karaoke events were a blast too, but I stand by my choices to drink and dance and perform magic and chat about technology and open source and Star Wars
and blogging and music and travel and everything else that I found even the slightest opportunity to connect on with any of the amazing diverse and smart folks with whom I’m fortunate
enough to work.
8 While I completely reject the magical thinking espoused by our “sound bath” facilitator,
it was still a surprisingly relaxing and meditative experience. It was also a nice chill-out before going off to the higher-energy environment that came next at the poolside bar:
drinking cocktails and dancing to the bangin’ tunes being played by our DJ, my colleague Rua.
From safely outside of its predicted path, just around the Yucatan coast, Hurricane Milton seems like a forboding and distant monster. A growing threat whose path will thankfully take
it away, not towards, me.
My heart goes out to the people on the other side of the Gulf of Mexico who find themselves along the route of this awakened beast.
It’s 05:30 local time on the third day of my work meetup in Tulum, on the Caribbean Coast of Mexico, and I was just woken by incredibly heavy rain. I got up and stepped out until it,
and was surprised to discover that it’s almost as warm as the shower in my bathroom. In the distance, beyond the palm trees and over the hill, the booms of thunder are getting closer.
Beautiful weather for a beautiful place.
Excellent cache, which I was pleased to observe has the largest conceivable container possible for its hiding place: nice one! I love a good treetop cache!
Once I’d free the right tree, getting up was relatively easy: the limb next over from the one mentioned in the hint provided a good launching-off point and a short scramble later I was
sat at height with the container in hand. Getting down, though, proved more challenging as I slipped on a low bough and plummeted to the ground!
Aside from my pride, the biggest injury was to my thumb, which nicked some kind of fierce plant on the way down and is bleeding as I type this. Still 100% a worthwhile effort to find a
great cache, so an FP awarded.
Now I’ve gotta start jogging again if I’m to have any chance of catching up to my partner Ruth, who I’ve joined in this leg of her effort to
walk the entire Thames Path (I swear I didn’t just agree to tag along for the caching opportunities!).
After a brief overshoot – too excited to finally be catching up to Ruth and the rest of my squad! – doubled back to find this easy location.
Cache was lying on the floor which I assume isn’t the right hiding place, so I returned it to the V. While running from the last cache I’ve dropped my writing implement somewhere, so
have photographed the (almost pristine!) logbook as proof that I actually found it. This has been my favourite of this mini-series so far; FP
awarded for the enjoyable container theming if nothing else!
Amazing geocache, FP awarded! I’ve been visiting Amsterdam for the last few days to meet up with work colleagues from around the world, but this
morning I’m having a bit of an explore/geocaching expedition before I catch a train back to the UK. TNLN, SL, TFTC!
Big thanks to the cache owner for their note, letting me know that the cache location is still accessible. Somehow I’d not
seen the obvious route. Followed a family of ducks and soon found the cache location. So excited I could jump for joy.
In fact, I did!
FP awarded in part for the lovely cache but mostly for the attentive CO who posted a note so promptly.
TFTC!
QEF while out hunting for some breakfast this morning between trains on my journey from Oxford to Amsterdam for a work meetup. Lovely thematic cache container in a great spot. FP awarded. TFTC.
1 This being my 100th post relies on you using non-pedant counting, that is: allowing
“checkins” like this to count as fully-fledged blog posts. There’s more thought given to
this question in my blog post about Kev Quirk’s #100DaysToOffload challenge, but the short answer seems to be that the challenge’s
creator would count this as my 100th post of the year, so perhaps you should too. If you don’t, though, then I’ve so-far published 74 posts this year and – thanks to Bloganuary and a general renewed focus on blogging I’m probably still on-track to make 100. And if I remember to
do so I’ll post a footnote for you pedants when I do.
The second of two caches found on a morning walk from the nearby Cambridge Belfry Hotel, where some fellow volunteers and I met yesterday for a meeting. This cache looked so close, but
being on the other side of the A428 meant that my route to get from one to the other side of the trunk road necessitated a long and circuitous route around half a dozen (ill-maintained)
pegasus crossings around the perimeter of two large roundabouts! Thankfully traffic was quiet at this point if a Saturday morning.
Cache itself was worth the effort though. Feels like it’s increasingly rare to find a large, appropriately-camouflaged, well looked-after cache in a nice location, so FP awarded. TFTC!
The elder child and I are staying nearby and couldn’t resist coming to a nearby cache with so many FPs. The name gave us a bit of a clue what we would be looking for but nothing could
have prepared us for for this imaginative and unusual container! FP awarded. Attached is very non-spoiler photo of us with our very own Incy
Wincies. Greetings from Oxfordshire!
This week, I received a ~240V AC electric shock. I can’t recommend it.
As you may have guessed based on photos in previous posts, our house is currently wrapped in a convenient climbing frame scaffolding.
We’re currently having our attic converted, so we’ve had some electricians in doing the necessary electrical wiring. Shortly after they first arrived they discovered that our existing electrics were pretty catastrophic, and needed to make a few changes including a new fusebox and disconnecting the
hilariously-unsafe distribution board in the garage.
The owner before last of our house worked for SSEN and did all of his own wiring, and left us a rats’ nest
of spaghetti wiring that our electricians described as being unlike anything they’d ever seen before. Also a literal rats’ nest under the decking, but we got rid of that already.
After connecting everything new up they began switching everything back on and testing the circuits… and we were surprised to hear arcing sounds and see all the lights flickering.
The electricians switched everything off and started switching breakers back on one at a time to try to identify the source of the fault, reasonably assuming that something was shorting
somewhere, but no matter what combination of switches were enabled there always seemed to be some kind of problem.
You know those escape room puzzles where you have to get the right permutation of switch combinations? This was a lot less fun than that.
Noticing that the oven’s clock wasn’t just blinking 00:00 (as it would after a power cut) but repeatedly resetting itself to 00:00, I pointed this out to the electricians as an
indicator that the problem was occurring on their current permutation of switches, which was strange because it was completely different to the permutation that had originally exhibited
flickering lights.
I reached over to point at the oven, and the tip of my finger touched the metal of its case…
Blam! I felt a jolt through my hand and up my arm and uncontrollably leapt backwards across the room, convulsing as I fell to the floor. I gestured to the cooker and
shouted something about it being live, and the electricians switched off its circuit and came running with those clever EM-field sensor
pens they use.
Somehow the case of the cooker was energised despite being isolated at the fusebox? How could that be?
Buy one ECG appointment. Get a free partial chest-shaving free!
I missed the next bits of the diagnosis of our electrical system because I was busy getting my own diagnosis: it turns out that if you get a mains electric shock – even if you’re
conscious and mobile – the NHS really want you to go to A&E.
At my suggestion, Ruth delivered me to the Minor Injuries unit at our nearest hospital (I figured that what I had wasn’t that
serious, and the local hospital generally has shorter wait times!)… who took one look at me and told me that I ought to be at the emergency department of the bigger hospital over the
way.
The first hospital were kind enough to hook me up to an ECG before sending me on to the A&E department. It indicated possible cardiac arrhythmia in the sinus node – basically: my heart’s natural pacemaker was firing somewhat
irregularly – which is kinda what you’d expect from an AC zap.
Off at the “right” hospital I got another round of ECG tests, some blood tests (which can apparently be used to diagnose muscular
damage: who knew?), and all the regular observations of pulse and blood pressure and whatnot that you might expect.
And then, because let’s face it I was probably in better condition than most folks being dropped off at A&E, I was left to
chill in a short stay ward while the doctors waited for test results to come through.
Apparently our electricity meter blew itself up somewhere along the way, leaving us with even less of a chance to turn the power back on again.
Meanwhile, back at home our electricians had called-in SSEN, who look after the grid in our area. It turns
out that the problem wasn’t directly related to our electrical work at all but had occurred one or two pylons “upstream” from our house. A fault on the network had, from the sounds of
things, resulted in “live” being sent down not only the live wire but up the earth wire too.
That’s why appliances in the house were energised even with their circuit breakers switched-off: they were connected to an earth that was doing pretty-much the opposite of what an earth
should: discharging into the house!
For the next day or so, a parade of linesmen climbed up and down all the pylons in the field behind our house, hunting for the source of the problem.
It seems an inconceivable coincidence to me that a network fault might happen to occur during the downtime during which we happened to have electricians working, so I find myself
wondering if perhaps the network fault had occurred some time ago but only become apparent/dangerous as a result of changes to our household configuration.
I’m no expert, but I sketched a diagram showing how such a thing might happen (click to embiggen). I’ll stress that
I don’t know for certain what went wrong: I’m just basing this on what I’ve been told my SSEN plus a little
speculation:
By the time I was home from the hospital the following day, our driveway was overflowing with the vehicles of grid engineers to the point of partially blocking the main street outside
(which at least helped ensure that people obeyed our new 20mph limit for a change).
We weren’t even able to get our own car onto our driveway when we got back from the hospital.
Two and a half days later, I’m back at work and mostly recovered. I’ve still got some discomfort in my left hand, especially if I try to grip anything tightly, but I’m definitely moving
in the right direction.
It’s actually more-annoying how much my chest itches from having various patches of hair shaved-off to make it possible to hook up ECG electrodes!
The actual conversation at this point seemed to consist of the guy at the top of the pole confirming that yes, he really had disconnected the live wire from our house, and
one at the bottom saying he can’t have because he’s still seeing electricity flowing. Makes sense now, doesn’t it?
Anyway, the short of it is that I recommend against getting zapped by the grid. If it had given me superpowers it might have been a different story, but I guess it just gave me
sore muscles and a house with a dozen non-working sockets.
A childhood move
Shortly after starting primary school my family and I moved from Aberdeen, Scotland to the North-West of England. At my young age, long car journeys – such as those we’d had to make
to view prospective new houses – always seemed interminably boring, but this one was unusually full of excitement and anticipation. The car was filled to the brim with everything we
needed most-imminently to start our new lives5, while the removals lorry followed a
full day behind us with everything less-essential6.
I’m sure that to my parents it was incredibly stressful, but for me it was the beginning of an amazing voyage into the unknown.
To this house. In this car.
Live on Earth
Back in 1999 I bought tickets for myself and two friends for Craig Charles’ appearance in Aberystwyth as part of his Live on
Earth tour. My two friends shared a birthday at around the date of the show and had expressed an interest in visiting me, so this seemed like a perfect opportunity. Unfortunately
I hadn’t realised that at that very moment one of them was preparing to have their birthday party… 240 miles away in London. In the end all three of us (plus a fourth friend who
volunteered to be and overnight/early morning post-nightclub driver) attended both events back to back! A particular highlight came
at around 4am we returned from a London nightclub to the suburb where we’d left the car to discover it was boxed in by some inconsiderate parking: we were stuck! So we gathered some
strong-looking fellow partygoers… and carried the culprit’s car out of the way7. By
that point we decided to go one step further and get back at its owner by moving their car around the corner from where they’d parked it. I reflected on parts of this anecdote back in 2010.
The winner
At somewhere between 500 and 600 road miles each way, perhaps the single longest road journey I’ve ever made without an overnight break was to attend a
wedding.
The wedding was of my friends Kit and Fi, and took place a long, long way up into Scotland.
At the time I (and a few other wedding guests) lived on the West coast of Wales. The journey options between the two might be characterised as follows:
the fastest option: a train, followed by a ludicrously expensive plane, followed by a taxi
the public transport option: about 16 hours of travel via a variety of circuitous train routes, but at least you get to sleep some of the way
drive along a hundred miles of picturesque narrow roads, then three hundred of boring motorways, then another hundred and fifty of picturesque narrow roads
Guess which approach this idiot went for?
Despite having just graduated, I was still living very-much on a student-grade budget. I wasn’t confident that we could afford both the travel
to and from the wedding and more than a single night’s accommodation at the other end.
But there were four of us who wanted to attend: me, my partner Claire, and our friends Bryn and Paul. Two of the four were qualified to drive and could be insured on Claire’s
car8. This provided an opportunity:
we’d make the entire 11-or-so-hour journey by car, with a pair of people sleeping in the back while the other pair drove or navigated!
It was long, and it was arduous, but we chatted and we sang and we saw a frankly ludicrous amount of the A9 trunk road and we made it to and from what was a wonderful wedding on our
shoestring budget. It’s almost a shame that the party was so good that the memories of the road trip itself pale, or else this might be a better anecdote! But altogether, entirely a
worthwhile, if crazy, exercise.
2 Also, wow: thanks to staying up late with my friend John drinking and mucking about with the baby grand piano in the lobby of the hotel we’re staying at, I might be first to publish a post for today’s Bloganuary!
3 Strangely, all three of the four journeys I’ve considered seem to involve Scotland.
Which I suppose shouldn’t be too much of a surprise, given its distance from many of the other places I’ve lived and of course its size (and sometimes-sparse road network).
4 Okay, probably not for the entire journey, but I’m certain it must’ve felt like it.
5 Our cargo included several cats who almost-immediately escaped from their cardboard
enclosures and vomited throughout the vehicle.
6 This included, for example, our beds: we spent our first night in our new house
camped together in sleeping bags on the floor of what would later become my bedroom, which only added to the sense of adventure in the whole enterprise.
7 It was, fortunately, only a light vehicle, plus our designated driver was at this point
so pumped-up on energy drinks he might have been able to lift it by himself!
8 It wasn’t a big car, and in hindsight cramming four people into it for such a
long journey might not have been the most-comfortable choice!
