GeoCaching

Great Hideouts

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In the short time since I started geocaching, I’ve already seen some awesome hiding places and ways of disguising cache containers. Unfortunately, I’ve rarely taken pictures, so you will have to to read my descriptions and try to picture the spots and camouflages yourself 😉

Category: “Why should I hide it?”
There are two geocaches of this category I especially like.
One is called “I love you”, and can be found at the Danube channel. There is no container, but a big graffiti of a
parchment scroll on one of the designated graffiti-walls. Your task: get your name and today’s date onto that scroll.

The other is a cache for premium members only, so no name and no place information … it’s in the Inner City at a bus stop, and also not hidden at all. There’s just this box that looks a bit like a control box, and the log book and trading items are in there. Have fun getting that box from it’s place, because every second about 20 muggels will see you.

Category: “Why should anybody find it without searching for an hour?”
This is great stuff. For example, go to some small street in the old parts of Stockholm, where GPS reception is basically zero, go to a certain house and look for a nano cache (about the size of your pinky’s nail). The hint is: “hinge”. Or, search for a cache of unknown size at dam. The hint: steel beam. There are 7 of them, each about 10 meters long, and reception is bad as hell. In the end, the container turns out to be the casing of a pen, hidden in a hose you had in your hands for 3 times at least.

I think will post some more of these … but at the moment I’m really busy with University. Sorry for that.

CouchSurfing

CS Walk & Talk meeting

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Inspired by another Couchsurfers’ Walk and Talk meetings, I’m about to start a weekly meet-up.
The meetings so far usually were easy hikes that nevertheless took about 4 hrs, but my edition will be for the busy, or lazy, or both, people.

As my University schedule leaves lot of time available on Wednesdays, and I would love to explore Vienna’s parcs, this is my idea:
Let’s meet up every Wednesday around noon for a walk of approximately 1,5 – 2 hours. The location will change every time so we can discover new places.

This week, I want to walk through Schönbrunn gardens.
Meeting point: the big gate in front of the palace.
Meeting time: Wednesday, Nov 16, 1 pm.

Hope to see you there 🙂

GeoCaching

The Confused Geocachers

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Again, a short story about the Cache at the “Industrial Area” where my mum and brother work. It’s not one single story, but something that happens time and time again and can also be seen in the cache logs on Geocaching.com.

The cache is hidden on the private property of the company my brother and mum are working at. Usually, caches are hidden in public locations, so no trespassing issues can occur. But as the best hiding place in my opinion was right where the cache is hidden, I had to hide it on the private property. And as requested in the rules for hiding geocaches, I do point out in the description that the property can and must be entered.

Still, my mum keeps telling me that people stop in front of the fence, look at their devices and then look up, startled and confused. They search the fence for some minutes, and then some give up, and some overcome their inhibitions and go to the other side of the fence. That’s the ones who will be successful, of course 😉

A recommendation for newbie-cachers: If you don’t bring the full description, you should at least print a list of the caches you want to do, including hints and parts of the description, like “private property can and must be entered”.

Other

Ikea

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Why do trips to Ikea always end with me asking why I always end up with more stuff than I intended to buy, but still not bringing all the stuff I intended to buy?

This time: We need some extra hanging baskets for the bathroom. We brought these, plus a new desk and chair for me, but we did not buy the laundry bag/basket for Georg.

Classic.

GeoCaching

The Berlin Craftsman

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The geocache owned by me (and my brother), situated at the “Industrial Area” of Pflach, is located right in front of the window to my mom’s office. My brother is working there, too, so I have people around to take care of this cache.

One day, the following log was posted to the cache:

First I did not really want to enter the private property, especially as there were two workers around. One of them, from Berlin judging by his accent, said “I won’t tell you where it’s hidden” – but I still found it. ‘Twas funny!

Logs like this are not rare for this cache, my mom seems to be have nice chats with cachers, too 🙂

CouchSurfing

A little CS break

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As always, after attending a CS invasion, I needed a break of Couchsurfing in the last weeks. Especially after the marathon we had completed during September and October, going to Salzburg, Augsburg and Graz, Georg and I were not at all motivated for hosting anybody for some weeks.

The end to that break came with Armi and Andre, who sent Georg a really nice request (also including my name, and some of our hobbies). The last years, they lived in Christchurch, New Zealand – does the name ring a bell? Christchurch has seen about a dozen earth quakes since February, at least one per month. I don’t know if that was the only reason for them, but in the end, Armi and Andre decided to leave New Zealand for good and try their luck in Europe. They will be looking for jobs and a place to stay in Berlin pretty soon, so if anybody of you knows something, let me know 🙂

Other

My new toy

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The kindle arrived 2 days after I ordered it. And I’m so happy with it, it’s unbelieveable 🙂

I can put the task description for the weekly exercises on it, all the slides from our lectures and even the script they gave us for Technical Basics for IT. The only thing with Text-PDFs is that the zoom is not designed for such. It’s very good with the slides, as they usually cover one whole page, and are well readable, but the longer texts (as scripts) I have to convert to a kindle-able format, which destroys all the previous formatting. It looks a bit better when the screen is turned by 90°, though.

And of course, I can download books just like that from the kindle store, because I did not care about 50 Euros more and bought the kindle 3G. So when I finally remembered that I wanted to read “A Dance with Dragons”, I just opened the kindle store, looked it up (keyboard FTW!) and bought it. One minute later, I could start reading.

That was last Wednesday evening. I finished yesterday.

This might be one of the reasons I’ve been so lazy during the last weeks 😉

Work / University

Programming basics

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I did not do much programming before I decided to study IT. Still, I understand the basic rules of it, e.g. that in Java you always have to conclude a line with a ” ; “, or that you should make sure that there is some case that ends your loop before you test it. Anyways, I am one of the bloody newbies considering programming in the mass that is my fellow students (we’re about 690 – only counting those who START studying IT this autumn). So I decided to take part in an optional tutorial group for programming. First meeting was yesterday.

After 30 minutes, I was close to leaving, as I was not sure at all how I should solve the task. Today there will be a tutorial on Java basics, so I thought it might be better if I did that tutorial before cracking my head by trying to solve this exercise. But in the end, I got a working program. Not on my own, but that’s okay. I cooperated with another student who was struggling hard, too. And the tutor was ok with it, he only pointed out that the University would use a plagiarism-scanner on our submissions, so in any case we would have to re-write the code and make some changes.

This was the exercise:
Write a program that can scan a textfile containing an ASCII-picture. The program should finish after the last line and then state the lenght and broadth of the picture, length being the number of lines, broadth the number of symbols per line. If one line was too short, the program should stop and state “INPUT MISMATCH”.

Stating length and number of signs of something you put into the prompt was by far the easiest part. Boy, it took us some time to get the program to read the file.

But, step by step, we worked our way through the problems we encountered, and finally, after about 1.5 hrs, the program was finished 🙂

So the only thing I now have to do is get moving and make some changes to the code.

Yay!

Other

Whew!

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In between lectures at University, doing homework (!) and finally reading the book I’ve been waiting for for 3 4 weeks, I just did not manage to write as much as I did before I started studying. The whole picture of students in Austria is wrong, I knew that before. If you really want to get something done during your time at University, if you really want to be done with your Bachelor’s degree within 3 years and a bit, there’s not much time for doing nothing or going somewhere, for spending a weekend off or something like that. Lectures alone are 25 hours per week, plus 6 hours of tutorial groups plus some more hours of learning and preparing exercises for the tutorial groups.

The time left by this schedule, I spend (I guess, for the next 3 days) by reading “A Dance with Dragons”. I only bought it last Thursday, but I already got to 80 % (kindle doesn’t show the amount of pages). The book is great, as I expected, and the stories go on – some as thought, some changing to a totally different direction.

Just wanted to let you know that everything’s okay – there is just not enough time to write 😉

CouchSurfing

Sturm Graz

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Sturm Graz is a CS meeting to find new friends; to get to know the city of Graz; to find out about culinary specials in the surroundings; and of course to have a great time!

Well, okay, it sounds like your typical CS meeting. But CS is all about cultural exchange and making friendships all over the world, so why not in Graz?

Sturm Graz, as Sounds of Salzburg, was inspired by Vienna Calling. In October 2010, Kersy, Thomas and Tom and some 100 couchsurfers met up to have pub crawls, pick nicks, city tours and a great night out at a Buschenschank in the outskirts of the city.

The program for Sturm Graz 2011 has been announced only in early September, and it looks great. Unfortunately, I will have to make some decisions, like: do I prefer chocolate over a guided tour through Graz’s underground? Will I do a City Rallye, or a City Walk? And – most of all – what the hell should be my late-birthday-and-thanks-for-hosting-us-present for Kerstin?

I am dearly looking forward to this 🙂