In the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams wrote about a device called an electronic thumb. Electronic thumbs were used by hitchhikers to flag down passing spaceships and help them get on board. Since not all spaceship captains were inclined to give hitchhikers lifts, some engineers spent all their time creating new devices to protected against electronic thumbs. This lead to the engineers creating electronic thumbs that could defeat these new devices, leading to even more anti-thumb devices, leading to better electronic thumbs, leadi…. you get the idea.

The people who create CAPTCHAs and the programmers who work for the spammers are locked in a similar epic battle.

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I’ve seen a couple of commercials for the Duracell MyGrid, a charging mat for cell phones and other gadgets. Every commercial ends with a URL (duracell.ca/mygrid) that will, presumably, take you to the product page on the Duracell Canada website. Faithfully typing the address into my browser, I was rewarded with a 404 error.
Hopefully Duracell will sort this out soon because I wanted to check it out and give a bit of a review of it. (Also, it really defeats the whole point of advertising a URL in an ad.)

Update: As commenter Ken pointed out, www.duracell.ca/mygrid does take you to the product page, but it still doesn’t change the fact that the advertised URL is broken.

Saturday was the 9th annual Fall 400 dragonboat races in Carleton Place. The weather was perfect for racing, with sunshine and almost no wind and the Algonquin College Singapore Slings were in fine form.

Altogether, we had three 400m races. Our first race of the day saw us set a new team best for 400m, 01:49.73. Our second race was 1:52.22 and our third race was 1:50.13. The combined times of our best two races was 3:39.92, which put us in 13th place out of 44 teams.

After the first race, my throat was quite sore from yelling the signals to our caller and calling the series and finish. Fortunately, a couple of other people on the team were heading out to do some shopping so I tagged along and picked up some industrial-strength lozenges (aka Cepacol), which helped immensely. I sucked up a far from recommended number of them before the end of the day, but my throat felt better for it.

So, that’s the end of dragonboat racing for this year. It was a great year overall and we improved immensely as a team. I’m looking forward to the 2011 season and just wish we could keep practicing every week.

I love camping, but except for my recent trip to the UK, I haven’t been camping in several years. Going camping in Scotland and near Haltwhistle reignited my interest.

I picked up a Vango Banshee 300 tent from a GOoutdoors store while on vacation. It’s a very nice three-man tent that consists of an outer fly with two aluminum poles that you pitch first, which will be great in the rain because you can keep the inner tent dry while setting it up. Once it’s set up you then attach the inner tent to the fly using a simple toggle and loop system and you’re done. There’s even a small vestibule to leave your boots in so that you don’t track mud into it.

Weighing in at just 2.5 kilograms, it can be packed into a 12L compression sack, making it ideal for backpacking. It took me about 20 minutes to set it up the first time, which is twice as long as the Vango website suggests – I wasn’t in a rush and I’m sure I’ll get faster!

The inner tent has a waterproof floor and is made of orange material. The outer fly is made of a heavier material that is dark green.

There are vents on each end of the fly the can be closed if you want. Inside, the “head” end of the tent has a large screen for lots of ventilation.

Overall, I’m glad I bought the Vango Banshee 300 for under £90 when I was in the UK because I think a comparable tent here would cost several hundred dollars.

I’m looking forward to my next camping trip! 🙂

I spent four days with Rob, Yuki, Lisa and Emma after Rob and I arrived back from Scotland and Hadrian’s Wall country. Rob had to work the first couple of days so I hung out with Yuki and the girls.

On the first day, we headed into Cambridge to take the girls to a fun fair that was in town. After the fun fair we wandered around Cambridge for a bit, including going to an old-fashioned candy store where the phrase “like a kid in a candy store” was demonstrated by more than one of us.

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Rob and I bid farewell to Scotland on the Tuesday after the Mega Scotland 2010 event and set out for Hexham in Northumberland. We followed the A68 most of the way. At one point, we headed off to try and find the Waterloo monument, which we saw from afar but never found the road to the parking lot for it. We did, however, see it in the distance from the end of a long farm road.

We paused at the Scotland-England border to take the obligatory border photos and find a geocache.

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After returning to the campground, we bumped into Fishteers, the geocacher that we had met at GC1WVG1 earlier in the afternoon. He asked us if we had tried to find The Good Green Doctor (GC1AX6W), which we hadn’t. He’d tried to find it earlier in the day, yet despite some fairly intensive searching, wasn’t able to find it, even though a number of other people had.

That sounded like a challenge to me, so I said “Well, let’s go find it now” and with that we hopped into Fishteer’s car and off we went.

The cache container was one of the tiny magnetic containers about the size of two or three hearing aid batteries and it was supposedly stuck to the metal fence behind a bust of a local doctor. As we were driving up, we watched as a couple of teenage girls adorned the bust with silly string.

Parking the car, we approached the cache’s supposed location and started a methodical search of the area. At one point a local dog walker asked us if we’d found it and said that most people seemed to be finding it to the left, where we had already looked. We thanked him and continued our search, spending extra time looking where he pointed.

After an hour’s searching, we admitted defeat and headed back to the camp.

Some other cachers who had found it said that the magnet wasn’t working, so they had tucked it into a crevice in the wall near the end of the fence. Even when Rob and I took a second stab at it the next day, we couldn’t find it.

I figure that it fell into the leaf litter behind the wall and being both black and the size of the eraser on the end of a pencil it’s gone for good.

There seem to be a number of these magnetic nanocaches in the UK. I’ve logged more of them than I have in the last couple of years of caching in Canada. The frustrating thing is that many of them could just as easily have been 35mm film canisters without causing any problems.