Endless Recreation

Yesterday was a pretty fine day. I went out to Glen Ridge for the On The (Glen) Ridge geocache. The only real issue there was having to cross busy Bloomfield Avenue to get to that strip of greenery, but the traffic light and pedestrian crossing was a mere one block up from where I parked.

Then, I went to do Rule 528 at a recreation field in Nutley. The name of the cache refers to the geocaching.com rule that a new geocache must be at least 0.1 of a mile (or 528 feet) from any existing geocache. This cache is a puzzle cache, so in order to get the coordinates, I had to solve a grid-like puzzle. Naturally, I took the approach of writing a Perl script to do the job. The algorithm I used for this solver was similar to the one I used in the Sudoku solver (basically, it's a recursive generate and test), so I reused a lot of code from the latter and got the answer after about half an hour of work. (plus a split-second of script runtime)

This evening, it was threatening to rain, but I went for the Hudson's Edge geocache at Scenic Hudson Park in Irvington (Westchester County) anyway. Well, the rain worked in my favor. There were people hanging around at the cache site, but they left as soon as the raindrops hit. Then the cache was an easy pickup. After that, just to round out the evening, I visited the LX1355 benchmark at the Columbia University Press building also in the same town. One interesting item I noticed passing through that property was the Old Croton Aqueduct Trail. Couldn't stay long enough to check it out, however. Maybe another evening.

Then I went to Palisades Center. I took yet another look at the CompUSA clearance sale, where the discounts are now up to 60%. It ends next Monday. I noticed that the CompUSA staff had already gotten quite loopy and weird.