Friday, March 14, 2008

More about mobility


On a few occassions in the past I have blogged about reveiwing geocaches while "on the road" at exotic locations such as Cozumel, The Bahamas and Dyersville. I did the reviewing by packing along my notebook computer, a Dell Inspiron and finding a wifi hotspot. Sometimes I used my wife's notebook, because she has nationwide broadband coverage. While this has worked fine for the most part, my computer is not the most convenient thing to lug around. It has a large screen and, as notebooks go, is not the most trim PC you could own. Well today I tried something new. For the first time I reviewed (and approved) a geocache using a mobile phone. Recently my wife upgraded her cell phone to get one with more bells and whistles so her old phone -- a Cingular 8125 -- was going unused. Even though I don't use it for phone service, I decided to charge up her old phone to see if I could use it to access the Internet via our home wifi. I logged into geocaching.com and reviewed a new cache called Drake Bulldogs Madness (GC1A395). Now I have a pocket-sized way to access the Internet, provided I'm in a free wifi hotspot. I'm looking forward to trying this out "on the road" sometime because it means I may not be lugging around my computer or relying on borrowing time on my wife's computer. Besides, it's fun to be geeky with gadgets.

11 comments:

bumanfam said...

Yeah, that Dyersville is pretty exotic! Thanks for the chuckle!

Unknown said...

Dyersville rocks! Mobility is great. Right now I'm in San Francisco for a convention, but this afternoon some co-workers and I are getting a car and heading north to Wine Country. I've got the Inspiron 6000 with air card along, so we ought to get some caches in, but a little bulky. As an aside, there are quite a few virtuals out here, one yesterday in a free mechanical museum of old coin-operated games, some back to the late 1800s, and very strange games, too, a real journey back in time. The cache is Laughing Sal's (GCBD0A); it's down by Fisherman's Wharf. Did another cache in a beautiful garden park that was basically on top of a parking garage!(GC11WJK) The cacher is a graphic artist/web designer/technical writer and she paints watercolors of many of the buildings as hints for her caches, and they're in the description and are really good, especially when you get there! Time for breakfast - it's great to get up at 6am, which is 8am back home:)
BGT

IowaAdmin said...

Thanks for the tips about San Francisco area caches. I'll be out there in two weeks (visiting wine country, too) so I'll load those into my GPSR.

fishpounder said...

Loved the Dyersville comment!

Funny thing about that night in Dyersville..... I was "stranded" around 20 miles west of there. In Manchester, of all places.....

Actually, I had reserved a room there to get some caching done on my way up to spending Christmas with the family in a cabin at Backbone. I was just glad I was able to make it that far with how bad the roads got that afternoon! It was really tough caching will all the snow around....well, that is the excuse I am using for this episode of ISAC....

IowaAdmin said...

ISAC? I had to look that up and I came up with quite a few possibilities. Is it one of these?
Illinois Student Assistance Commission
Istituto di Scienze dell'Atmosfera e del Clima (Italy)
International Society for Analytical Cytology
Iowa State Association of Counties
Information Sharing Analysis Center
ISAC Industry Sector Advisory Committee
ISRO Satellite Center (Indian Space Research Organisation)
Information Society Activity Centre
International Standard Accuracy Contest (Atlatl competition)
Intelsat Solar Array Coupon (NASA)
Intelligent Secure Autonomic Controller (Symbium)
Illinois State Advisory Council on the Education of Children with Disabilities
Intermediate Systems Acquisition Course (DSMC)
Isotope Separator and Accelerator Facility (Triumf, University of British Columbia)
Information Sharing and Assessment Center (60 Private Companies)
Indian Satellite Applications Center
ISAC Internal Scientific Advisory Committee
ISAC ISDN Subscriber Access Circuit

fishpounder said...

Wow, Ken!

You have a lot of time on your hands! ;)

Well, lemme see if I can break this down a bit....

I = ummm......me!

S = see your blog from Feb 17...ya know... that word!

A = at

C= caching silly!

This is aa acronym that SSmini and I came up with due to our severe inability to find even the simplest cache...we started saying it so much we made it our team name! Caching ROCKS!

IowaAdmin said...

LOL!

Unknown said...

Fish,
I thought it was "Icthyologist Striker & Cacher!"
Ken,
I would load PQs in advance. The area in wine country is so cache dense, that we actually OUTdrove two PQs I had loaded, and they were only for Traditional and Letterboxes, no multis, etc. I had an aircard, so I dragged the gc.com map around on the screen, but my "driver" went a tad faster than I could enter numbers in the GPSr,,,"Uh, we just passed one by .46 miles." Lots of easy stuff along the road with beautiful views. The Marin #1 on the rest area north of the Golden Gate is neat, too! With the convention underway now, I still managed two on Friday, 4 on Saturday and 8 yesterday in wine country. I found that vino does enhance caching somewhat, but apparently you should train before doing all those tastings at the wineries,,,dang!:)

Weaky6 said...

The Drake Bulldog Madness lost all its hot air about 45 mins ago. Darn!

Ask GAMSCI what his name stands for. Team ISAC knows. ;-)
Weaky6

Gamsci said...

It is actually shortened and combined from Games and Science. It started to mean something else when another cacher (3AMT) noticed how I whiffed at a first to find along with another cacher (The NVG (The Not Very Good?)). Anyway, 3AMT surmised that Gamsci actually meant Good At Making Simple Caches Impossible.

Rob G. said...

I have the Mogul by Sprint, it is very nice and I have used it to find some caches! Stop by sometime www.robbgrant.com/blog.