Morton Fox's journal

There was another new geocache not too far away. So this afternoon, I went to Ramapo College in Mahwah for Happy Hour. This cache is on the junk tree, a tree at one corner of the campus on which students have been hanging all kinds of odd junk. I visited the junk tree (This is just what I'm calling it. I don't know what name the locals have for this spot.) two years ago for another cache and since then, there has been new junk added. Since it's been going on for years, I guess the college tolerates this bit of tomfoolery.

After that, I went to KFC in Ramsey for another mashed potato bowl. Thank goodness for the coupons they keep mailing to me.

Speaking of KFC, I got a reply to my question for KFC corporate on the operating hours of the KFC/LJS in New Windsor. I didn't write about this earlier because I got that email during Anthrocon and there was more than enough going on at the time. The restaurant owner thought it was unacceptable for them to close the dining area before the actual closing time and sent me a $10 gift certificate. It is redeemable only at that particular restaurant so it will have to wait until the next time I go to Orange County, which may be in a month or two. (That area doesn't get loads of new geocaches every week like some places.) I'm surprised at their response though because I wasn't actually complaining. When I wrote to them, I merely explained the situation and asked about restaurant policy concerning the closing time. It's good to know they're paying attention anyway.

Cloudy. 35-39°F. I didn't want to go too far out today because I needed to take some time in the evening to prepare for upcoming events/trips. So I picked two nearby geocaches and did those. Both were more work than the average cache but they were very much worth the effort.

The first geocache was Sloat's Dam in Sloatsburg. This 4-stage geocache is a tour of an old dam system. It's hidden away from the main road so I had no idea it was there before going for this geocache. I could still see part of an old road and stone wall and a stone gate. I also saw the backdoor entrance to the Ramapo Service Area on the NYS Thruway.

The second geocache was The Hawk Temple at Ramapo Reservation in Mahwah. It is near Hawk Rock, which is a 3/4-mile hike up a mountain. The hike started off level but became quite steep when the Halifax Trail split off from the lake trail. The view from Hawk Rock is great.

After that, I had lunch at Subway in Ramsey and returned home.

Monday evening, I got home, did the laundry and fell asleep from exhaustion. Remember that one Dr. Dolittle story where he had to treat an island full of sick animals and after that, he was so run down that he slept for 3 days? Well, after talking to the animals for 3 days, I was tired like that. :) Woke up early Tuesday morning. Here's where people get the impression that I don't go to work. There were 4 new geocaches near home -- 2 of those weren't listed until that night -- and I visited them all that day.

In the morning, I went to Johnny 99 near the Sharp corporate building in Mahwah. It was simple because I knew the access road, having seen it many times on my way up Route 17. Then at lunchtime, I went for A Whole Lot of Tandem at a truck parking lot in Spring Valley. I knew about this tandem lot because I'd been there previously to look for a USGS benchmark. Never found that benchmark for reasons unknown but fortunately, the cache was easier.

That night, I was catching up with the latest cache listings when I saw two new geocaches in West Nyack. So I went for Park & Grab #1 and Park & Grab #2. The two geocaches were both in park and ride lots but on opposite sides of the Route 59 and Route 303 interchange. Both geocaches were easy to find in the dark. Only the second one took a little while because I started looking at the wrong spot and didn't see it until I went back to the car to get the bigger flashlight.

After that, I was a bit peckish so I went to Palisades Center nearby to see what, if anything, was still open that hour of night. Well, surprise. Buffalo Wild Wings was still open (BWW and TGI Friday were the only two businesses open late there. Even the theater was closed by that time.) and they still had 40-cent Wings Tuesday. So I got a dozen wings in Southwest Chipotle sauce. Because my sleep schedule was out of whack, it was actually my fifth meal of the day. From morning to night, I had: breakfast, 2nd breakfast, lunch, pie, and wings. I got six free wings for filling out the world's shortest online customer survey, so I'll be back for more late night wings soon.

It was a rainy day yesterday but the weather was fine today, so it's funny that I went to Rainy Day Women this evening. This geocache is in Ramapo County Reservation in Mahwah. Like the geocache I did last week in the same park, this too is up the mountain. This one is a little further up the mountain though. Whereas last week's geocache was at the reservoir level, this one is near the first lookout point on the blue trail. Although steeper, this evening's walk was shorter and I was there and back to the parking area in well under an hour. After that, I had a meatball marinara footlong at Subway in Ramsey.

TwitVim development continues. Summize Twitter search provides an API so I used it and made it so that TwitVim displays search results in a Vim window. I also added mappings and extended some existing commands to jump to timelines of other users. A TwitVim user actually suggested this feature and generously provided code for it, but I already had a different implementation in mind so I went with the latter.

I've been geotagging my photos, at least those photos that were taken near cache sites. My camera doesn't have GPS and thus doesn't embed GPS metadata into the JPEG files. So, up until yesterday, I'd been uploading photos to Flickr, Geosnapper, Panoramio, etc, and then adding the location data using the interfaces of those websites. (with the help of some AutoHotkey macros) However, because these photo websites recognize GPS tags in EXIF headers of uploaded images, it is less work to add the information to the image file before uploading. This way, I need only add the information to one place: the image file itself. Wish I'd thought of that earlier! So I started using ExifTool this evening to do that. Flickr and Panoramio accept location data just fine this way. Unfortunately, Geosnapper, for reasons unknown, fails to interpret the GPS tags correctly and comes up with locations that are as much as 10 miles off. I'll have to ask them about this problem some time.

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This afternoon, to seek a geocache in Mahwah, and to do some banking and get a Subway footlong in Ramsey. Then I went back to work, on a route that passed through town again. (well, it clipped one corner of town anyway) Montvale is only 4 square miles so I drive out of town to do practically everything! Maybe I misunderstood the question.

It rained lightly today, but there were new geocaches, so in the afternoon, I went out to Mahwah to do Stonehedge. I knew the location because it was in the same strip mall as Moe's, a restaurant to which I no longer go because the cashier slipped up and then had an argument with me. Anyway, I was off my game today. It should've been simple but I started looking in the wrong place and took longer than expected to find the cache. I met TwistedT while I was there.

On the way out of the strip mall, I nearly had a collision with a UPS truck that was going around a corner a bit too fast on a rainy day. I think it's supposed to be "What can Brown do for you?" not "What can Brown do to you?" :)

A news reporter from Herald News was at the Sopranos/Hitman geocaching event and pre-event hike on Saturday and here's the news article. I thought that was a fair portrayal of the activity. Of course, wooded areas account for only a portion of all geocaching locations because there are also urban cache hides, some of which I go for after dark to kill time before dinner, but we don't have to tell the press everything. :)

On a slightly different note, I'm sending the GPS receiver back to Garmin for warranty repair. It freezes up now and then, requiring removal of the batteries to reset it. I made the arrangements with Product Support using their web contact form and I'll mail it to them tomorrow. For the next few weeks, I'll use the spare GPS, which is the exact same eTrex Legend HCx model because I'd planned ahead and ordered another one from Amazon a while back.