The SAS Global Forum 2008 that is.

I spent much of this morning in the Coders’ Corner sessions, which were short sessions with tips for programmers and users alike.  Ten minutes in length, I found these sessions quite useful.

I also attended another session on OLAP data cubes and one that discussed a factor analysis of a health care provider survey.  The latter was of interest to me because it used a technique that I’d like to use at work.

Papers from each of the streams were judged and the best were recognized during the closing ceremony.  I was unexpectedly asked to grade one of the sessions I was in this morning, which was kind of neat.

The closing ceremonies also had some pretty cool door prizes ranging from clothing donated by the various sponsors to a pair of airline travel vouchers to a pre-paid registration to SAS Global Forum 2009.  A ripple of "oohs" washed through the audience when they announced that prize.  Unfortunately, my name wasn’t drawn for that one or any of the other prizes.

After things wrapped up, I walked back to the hotel with a colleague who was staying here.  Along the way, we stopped to do a couple of geocaches before heading off to do our own things this afternoon.  I continued geocaching and ended up logging 5 caches in total today: 3 traditional caches, a virtual cache and a webcam cache.  My friend Rob helped out with the webcam cache by making a screen capture of me standing in front of a webcam that’s pointed at the Alamo.

I hopped in the pool for a few minutes upon my return to the hotel before I headed out to find somewhere to eat.  I ended up having dinner at Boudro’s on the Riverwalk where I was lucky and only had to wait about 5 minutes for a table.  Other people were being given wait times of an hour or more.  (It would have been worth waiting that long.)

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I headed over to the convention centre to pick up my registration package for the SAS Global Forum.  On the way, I walked through La Villita Historic Arts Village, which was in full St. Patrick’s Day mode, and encountered a St. Patrick’s Day parade just starting to pass by.  I stopped to watch for a couple of minutes before continuing on my way.

The Convention Center is on the edge of HemisFair, which was built for the 1968 World’s Fair.  The park has a number of buildings, sculptures and other things, including the Tower of the Americas.

It also is home to a couple of geocaches.

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I got up at the extremely uncivilized hour of 4am this morning so that I could catch a 6am flight to San Antonio, Texas via Newark, New Jersey.  (Those of you who know me know that I am not a morning person so this was a major accomplishment in and of itself.)

We boarded the plane on-schedule and then spent about half an hour driving around the airport visiting the de-icing pad and then holding before taking position for take off in order to allow the engines to warm up since this was the first flight of the day.

Although we arrived about 20 minutes behind schedule, the flight to Newark was uneventful and I got a nice picture of sunrise above the clouds.  This made the connection to the flight to San Antonio was one of the tightest I’ve ever had in all the flights I’ve taken over the years.

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I must not have visited the BOFH pages at The Register in over a week because I found two new stories today.  One of them is about the Boss taking up geocaching.

I headed out Sunday afternoon with some teacher friends to introduce a couple of them to geocaching (one had gone caching with me before).  We met up at P23 on Dolman Ridge Road in Mer Bleue and donned our snowshoes.

The first cache we tried was A poplar rest spot (GCKGHY), a traditional cache hid in some trees a few metres off the road.  We followed a suspiciously convenient set of foot prints and spent a few minutes checking out the various possible locations before spotting the cache.  I left my traditional mini-Sharpie marker and picked out a small rubber duck that is the trademark signature item for some other friends who geocache.  We signed the log and headed back to the road.

The next closest cache was the first waypoint for Horsing Around! (GC11M7B), a multi-cache.  For those who don’t know, multi-caches are geocaches where you go to the first waypoint and find a tag (usually) with the next set of coordinates you have to visit.  Sometimes, there’s only one redirect, like my GAG6 – Take The High Road (GCNBXX).  In this case, however, there were six or seven tags that we hunted down over the next hour.

Finally, we came across a toy horse in the middle of a field and figured we were at the cache rather than yet another redirect.  A little searching revealed the cache container near by.  We excavated it from the snow, traded some swag, signed the log and took some pictures with the horse.

Looking at the GPS, we decided to head off through the woods to a traditional cache a few hundred metres away in a clearing in the forest called GAG10 – Gnomes Catapult (GC12F4G), which was placed for the Go And Get ‘Em 10 event held last spring.

Trooping through the brush, we came across a single set of cross-country ski tracks in the middle of nowhere that passed right by the geocache.  It appeared that the skier stopped at the cache, but it doesn’t appear they logged it.

So, we opened up the container and made some swaps, took the obligatory pictures and headed back to our cars.   On the way out, we came across tracks in the snow made by a field mouse or a vole that ended in what can best be described as a "splat".  Surrounding the splat were feather prints, so I assume that the little creature was snatched up by an owl or hawk that was looking forward to a fresh dinner.

The area seemed to be a popular hunting ground because a little bit farther along we came across a similar crime scene, except that here two tracks went into the splat, but only one came out.

Mother Nature can be a harsh mistress, can’t she?

More pictures from this outing can be found here.

While out with an impromptu geomob this evening, we came across a big porcupine minding its own business munching on a small tree.  Naturally, we pretty much surrounded the tree and took pictures of it.  I had someone with a huge flashlight standing on the other side of the backlight the poor creature.  The result is to the right.

I wrote an entry at the end of December talking about the problems with lamp post caches (LPCs). Barely three days later there was an bomb-scare incident in Plano, Texas involving a lamp post cache in a parking lot. I contacted the Plano Police Department to learn more about the incident.

Around 1pm on January 4th, the police department in Plano received a call from security officers at a local Wal-Mart store reporting suspicious activity around the base of a light pole in their parking lot. One or more persons were observed placing something under the cover at the base of the light pole.

The object in question, of course, was the container for a lamp post cache (LPC) that had been placed in the Wal-Mart parking lot without the knowledge of Wal-Mart.

According to one of the Public Information Officers at the Plano Police Department, had the geocacher who hid the cache contacted Wal-Mart for permission before placing the cache the 14 officers, two bomb trucks, a bomb trailer, a fire truck and a medical unit would not have been dispatched. Instead, they had to be dispatched to respond to an unknown device, a situation that may cause concerns for responding officers. And they were there about 3 hours before the incident ended at 4:21pm.

“If the individuals hiding the item would of contacted Wal Mart this would not of happened” [sic] said Officer Rick McDonald of the Plano Police Department in an email to me earlier yesterday (Tuesday). He also noted that “with the times of today Homeland Security issues are very high and suspicious activity around populated stores draws a lot of curious calls.” Police encourage the reporting of suspicious activities like those the security officers observed.

In this case a non-trivial amount of manpower was expended because someone didn’t follow the rules, specifically the one that says “you assure us that you have adequate permission to hide your cache in the selected location.” Because the investigation was on-going, Officer McDonald could not comment as to whether the owner of the cache in question has been contacted by the police. He was able to confirm that the cache container was not destroyed by the bomb squad.

If the geocaching community as a whole doesn’t exercise better judgement and respect the fairly simple self-imposed rules in place with respect to placing geocaches, we will increasingly find ourselves unwelcome where we previously were.