Dan Q

Tag: travel

Dan Q found GCAD0V7 HJKM Gifts and TB Hotel

This checkin to GCAD0V7 HJKM Gifts and TB Hotel reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

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!

Dan Q found GC9MY4J IJtunnel

This checkin to GC9MY4J IJtunnel reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

My work team and I have been meeting in Amsterdam, but this is our “afternoon off” so we’re going to the maritime museum. I’m not convinced that the person I found was particularly beautiful, but I appreciated the hint anyway! Dragged one of my teammates along. Greetings from Oxfordshire, UK (and around the world!).

Five men in thick coats stand at the entrance to a museum.

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Dan Q found GCA7Q4A Elephant Parade

This checkin to GCA7Q4A Elephant Parade reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

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.

On a tree-lined canalside footpath, Dan leaps theatrically into the air as if in incredible excitement.
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!

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Dan Q found GCA1JJ5 Gemaal Mercatorstraat

This checkin to GCA1JJ5 Gemaal Mercatorstraat reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

My work colleagues from around the world have gathered for a meeting at a hotel near here. I woke a little early this morning and so I decided to come out and try to find a couple of geocaches before our team meeting starts.

After failing to find nearby GCA7Q4A “Elephant Parade” owing to construction work, I was hopeful of a find here. The coordinates put me exactly on top of a likely hiding place, and with a little exploration (and some pretending to tie my shoes!) I had the cache in my hand. SL, TFTC.

Dan, his hand cupped to his ear, listens closely at the green-painted door of a water pumping station.

Listened for water pumping but couldn’t hear any over the traffic noise, I’m afraid! Greetings from Oxfordshire, UK.

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Icebreakers – Heraldry and Compairs

I’m in Amsterdam for a meetup for my new team at Automattic.

A group of people dressed as robbers (with masks covering their faces and automatic weapons in their hands) pose menacingly in the lobby of a vault.
As you can see, a lot of serious work has been taking place.

When we’ve not been out tackling escape rooms, finding geocaches, and eating curry, we’ve been doing a variety of activities to help solidify our new team’s goals, priorities, and expertise: y’know, the normal things you might expect on a company away week.

I volunteered to lead the initial session on our first day with a couple of icebreaker games, which went well enough that I’m inclined to share them here in case they’re of any use to you. The games we played are called Heraldry and Compairs. Let’s take a look:

Dan stands with four other men in front of a projector screen with a fifth man on it.
One of my teammates was unable to get his visa cleared and had to attend remotely1, which resulted in me making a late change to my planned icebreaker activities to ensure they were presence-agnostic.

Heraldry

I was looking at the coat of arms of Noord Holland, the province in which Amsterdam lies, and thinking about all the symbolism and propaganda that’s encoded into traditional heraldry, and how much effort it takes to decode it… unless you just, y’know, guess!

Coat of Arms of North Holland.
Per pale or and azure; I a lion rampant gules, armed and langued azure, II seme of horizontally placed billets or, two lions passant guardant in pale of the same. The shield is crested by a coronet of five leaves or. 2

I asked each participant to divide a shield into five quadrants and draw their own coats of arms, featuring aspects of (a) their work life, (b) their personal life, (c) something they value, (d) something they’re good at, and (e) something surprising or unusual. I really wanted to keep the time pressure on and not allow anybody to overthink things, so I set a 5-minute timer from the moment everybody had finished drawing their shield outline.

Then, everybody passed their drawing to the right, and each person in turn tried, as best they could, to introduce the person to their left by attempting to interpret their neighbour’s drawing. The known categories helped to make it easier by helping people latch onto something to start talking about, but also more-challenging as people second-guessed themselves (“no, wait, maybe it’s sailing you’re good at and guitar you play in your personal life?”).

Six hand-drawn sketches of heraldic coats of arms by six different Automatticians. Ballpoint pen on paper.
This wasn’t about artistic skills; it was about getting people to talk to one another. Which is for the best, given my (lack of) artistic skills.

After each introduction is made, the person being introduced gets to explain their heraldry for themselves, congratulating their introducer on the things they got right and their close-guesses along the way.

It’s sort-of halfway between “introduce your neighbour” and “pictionary”. And it worked well to get us warmed-up, feeling a little silly, knowing one another slightly better, and in a space in which everybody had been expected to have spoken and to have made a harmless mistake (everybody managed to partially-interpret a shield correctly). A useful place to be at the end of an icebreaker exercise is left with the reminder that we are, after all, only human.

Compairs

Next up, we played a game only slightly inspired by witnessing a game of Mr and Mrs the other week3. I threw together a Perchance (which, in the nature of such things, is entirely open-source and you’re welcome to adapt it for your own use) that generated a series of randomly-selected pairs of teammates and asked a question to differentiate the two of them.

Screenshot of the game asking: "Gareth vs Dan (Travel category): Who's taken the longest boat ride?"
Some of the questions were gentle, but solicited a reasonable amount of guesswork alongside a modest amount of deduction.

Participants other than the two shown on the screen were challenged to guess the answer to the question. Sometimes the questions would have a definitive answer, and sometimes not: the joy was in the speculation! “Hmm, I know that Dan’s done quite a bit of globetrotting… but could he actually have travelled further East than a colleague who lives much further East than him?”

After a few seconds to a minute, once their colleagues had settled on an answer, the people listed on the question were encouraged to make their own guesses. Usually they’ll have a better idea as they are one of the data points, but that’s not always true!

Screenshot of the game asking: "Michal vs Raja (Code category): I can't remember whether I need aria-label or aria-labelledby. Who can tell me?"
A handful of questions were even tangentially work-related. Who is the accessibility Web expert in our team, anyway?

There’s no points, and you can play for as long as you like so long as it’s long enough that everybody gets at least one turn, so it’s a good “fill the rest of the time slot” game. It follows Heraldry moderately well as an icebreaker double-feature because the former is firstly about learning things about one another (and to a lesser extent guessing), and the latter is about the opposite.

I came out of both games knowing more about the humans behind the screens in my new team, and it seemed to open up the room for some good discussions afterwards, so the social lubricant effect was clearly effective too. If you give them a go or adapt them into anything else, let me know!

Footnotes

1 Our absent colleague instead had to tower over us on an enormous projector screen.

2 The red (“gules”) upright (“rampant”) lion in the coat of arms possibly comes from the heraldry of the city of Gelderen in Germany, but once part of the Dutch Republic. The lions striding (“passant”) to the left (“to dexter”) but turning to face you (“guardant”) come from the arms of Fryslân (Friesland), and its rectangles represent the districts of Fryslân. Aren’t you glad you asked.

3 Also known as The Newlyweds Game after the US game show of that name and basically the same format, Mr and Mrs is a game in which a (typically newly) married couple are asked questions about one another and their lives together which they answer separately and then those answers are compared. This induces a reaction of compersion when they’re “right” and in-sync and when the couple disagree it results in amusement. Or possibly divorce.

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Dan Q found GCADMXH Rembrandt park #3

This checkin to GCADMXH Rembrandt park #3 reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

I’ve recently changed team at work, so my new team and I have gotten together – from the UK, France, Poland, India and South Africa – here in Amsterdam to meet up in person and do some work “together” for a change: normally we work entirely distributed. After our day of work we did an escape room together, then on our way to dinner I dragged them out of their way a bit to find this geocache.

Quick easy find, TFTC! Greetings from Oxfordshire, UK (and from many other corners of the world, courtesy of Team Desire from Automattic!).

Dan waves to the camera; several other geeky folks walk along behind him in a leafy green city space.

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Dan Q found GC7B9CP Platform 9 3/4

This checkin to GC7B9CP Platform 9 3/4 reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

Even on a Monday morning the muggles are lining up to hold the trolley. Not me. As an actual magician, I’ve no need for such frivolities. Instead, as I’m passing anyway on my way to a train to an entirely different magical land (The Netherlands), I just snapped a selfie with the sign visible in the background. Easy peasy. TFTC.

Dan, a queue of tourists behind him, points over his shoulder beyond them to a sign on a brick wall, "Platform 9¾".

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Dan Q found GC1TK6P Narrow Minded

This checkin to GC1TK6P Narrow Minded reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

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.

Early morning sun reflects in the water of a peaceful wide canal in central London.

Hey, this is my 100th post of 2024!1

Footnotes

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.

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Freedom of the Mountain

During a family holiday last week to the Three Valleys region of the French Alps for some skiing1, I came to see that I enjoy a privilege I call the freedom of the mountain.

In black skiwear, Dan looks into the camera from a bench in the snow, his skis upright behind him.
“Mornin’. Let’s go skiing.”

The Freedom

The freedom of the mountain is a privilege that comes from having the level of experience necessary to take on virtually any run a resort has to offer. It provides a handful of benefits denied to less-confident skiers:

  • I usually don’t feed to look at a map to plan my next route; whichever way I go will be fine!
  • When I reach one or more lifts, I can choose which to take based on the length of their queue, rather than considering their destinations.
  • When faced with a choice of pistes (or an off-piste route), my choice can be based on my mood, how crowded they are, etc., rather than their rated difficulty.
A snow-covered Alpine glacier sandwiched into a gully of exposed rocks.
Let’s tear this up, yo.

The downside is that I’m less well-equipped to consider the needs of others! Out skiing with Ruth one morning I suggested a route back into town that “felt easy” based on my previous runs, only to have her tell me that – according to the map – it probably wasn’t!

Approaching the Peak

The kids spent the week in lessons. It’s paying off: they’re both improving fast, and the eldest has got all the essentials down and it’s working on improving her parallel turns and on “reading the mountain”. It’s absolutely possible that the eldest, and perhaps both of them, will be a better skier than me someday2.

I’m not perfect, mind. While skiing backwards and filming, I misjudged the height of an arch and hit the back of the head with it… despite the child shouting to warn me! 😅

Maybe, as part of my effort to do what I’m bad at, I should have another go at learning to snowboard. I always found snowboarding frustrating because everything I needed to re-learn was something that I could already do much better and easier on skis. But perhaps if I can reframe that frustration through the lens of learning itself as the destination, I might be in a better place. One to consider for next time I hit the piste.

Footnotes

1 Also a little geocaching and some mountainside Where’s Wally?

2 Assuming snow is still a thing in ten years time.

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