Morton Fox's journal

The weather wasn't bad this evening, so I went out a little further to bag cache find #9500. I went for Baby Bird NJ in Pompton Plains. It is in the garden of the Best Western Regency House hotel. The white gazebo looks like it might be used for wedding photography so access to the cache may be restricted at certain times, but tonight, there was no such problem. The cache description also mentions the smell of chicken cooking. That would be the nearby KFC, visible in this picture.

After that, I went to Willowbrook Mall to take a look around. I hadn't been there since last year but it really hasn't changed much. Still mostly uninteresting. Then came the real reason for this little trip: salad bar at Ruby Tuesday. To get the salad bar, I picked the quiche combo this time, keeping in mind that real programmers don't eat quiche. :) I should've gone to Ruby Tuesday at Garden State Plaza instead though. The one at Willowbrook Mall is slow to assign seating even when there are empty tables. I should've remembered what happened at last year's Crazy 8s geocaching event at this Ruby Tuesday. We had to wait far too long for service and some of us actually left the restaurant to eat at the food court.

There was heavy rain yesterday evening, but this evening, the weather was fine; not particularly hot or humid even. So I went out to Wayne for two geocaches. The first was parkview. It wasn't a hard one. Just a short dash into a slightly-muddy wooded area. I hadn't brought information for any other geocaches but I checked on the cell phone web browser and saw that Reading RR wasn't that far away. (or rather, it wouldn't be far if I'd gone the correct way instead of going out on I-80/US-46 and having to make a U-turn half a mile out of the way, but I digress) This cache site was a weed-filled nightmare. I was lucky to find this one because I didn't even think of checking that spot for the cache. I just happened to see it while crossing from one patch of weeds to another patch of weeds.

After that, I went to Willowbrook Mall for dinner. I hadn't been to that mall for years, so I was surprised to find an Arby's in the food court. Better yet, they still had the Pick 5 for $5.95 special, which is very filling if 3 of the 5 items are sandwiches. :)

identi.ca is an open source alternative to Twitter (the source code is Laconica), but like most Twitter alternatives, it seems to be more popular when Twitter is performing poorly. Commentary aside, I heard from more than a few people and blog posts that identi.ca has a Twitter-compatible API. Since it wasn't difficult to slip that into TwitVim, I did that in release 0.2.19. It's more of a hack than a proper feature implementation since all of TwitVim's messages still refer to Twitter instead of identi.ca, but it works pretty well and I can talk to either Twitter or identi.ca simply by changing a config variable. Of course, in my own installation, I wrote some additional commands to help me switch between the two services.

( Switching between Twitter and identi.ca... )

Mailed the Federal and State tax returns at the Park Ridge post office this afternoon. So, unless there are problems, I'm done with this tax season. I don't expect my 2008 taxes to be as high as 2007 but a lot can happen.

In the evening, I went to Wayne for the FREEDOM BEGAN HERE geocache. It's at Gregg Froehner Park off a residential road. Actually, I'm not sure that's part of the park. The cache was actually at the edge of a fenced-in Revolutionary War burial ground. I didn't see much in the fenced-in area though. The place is overgrown. There were only a few headstones that I could see.

After that, since the route I used to avoid the Garden State Parkway went right by the mall, I stopped at Garden State Plaza for dinner. I didn't know the food court had Thai food. However, as is usually the case at a mall food court, it isn't very authentic. (It's more Chinese than Thai.) I had mango chicken, tofu vegetables, and pad thai.