Surpassed the 300 geocache finds marked, and then some. Also nabbed three “earthcaches,” which have no container or log but instead are about discovering and learning about some unique geological feature. Highlight of day – doing the multi-cache at the summit. After I had done the math and got to the final location, took the cap off a fencepost and was greeted not by the cache but by a colony of swarming earwigs, right out of a horror movie. Awshum.

Some devilishly clever containers today – like the normal-looking pinecone shown, and the fake plumbing – you had to remove the pipe assembly, then turn the valve and a Bison tube tumbled out. Loved it.

Slideshow above does not include captions – view set at Flickr for those.

Day got off to a bad start with horrendous Bay Area July 4th exodus traffic, overcast skies, and a starter string of three DNFs (Did Not Finds). But things quickly turned around – everything turned gorgeous when the sun came out, the caches kept getting better, and the hikes got longer. Favorite cache of the day was Crivens! – on a peninsula half-mile off the road. Trekking through walls of blackberry taller than me, out toward a perfect blue bay, with amazing views. While most caches are filled with forgettable geo-crap, this one had an excellent Mullet-scented air freshener (yes, that kind of mullet) and a USB “humping dog.”

The west side of the bay was quite a bit trickier, since most of the rim is in State Park area. Access to caches much harder than it appeared on a map. Decided to hike to Johnstone rather than pay the $6 parking fee. So glad I did – descended through deep dark woods with bluebirds and chipmunks, got some major heart pumping action on the way back up. Dropped off some travel bugs I had carried home from Minnesota.

The scene changed completely for the last cache of the day as I headed toward the Pacific side for Kehoe Beach earthcache. Suddenly it was about salt mist and jellyfish, sand and dense fog. Reminded me of Morro Bay. This one was a major geology lesson – needed to photograph quartz veins running through granite cliffs and read about five pages of text on the local geological forces to answer the questions needed to log the find. If I nail it, will be my first verified earthcache find.

Getting very close to hitting the elusive 300-cache mark… but I’d much rather spend two hours on a great hike for a single well-placed cache than do 15 parking lot drive-bys in the same amount of time. The key is to remain process-oriented, rather than goal-oriented, and never let the drive for numbers outweigh the joy of the great outdoors and honest exercise.

Wrapped day with a well-earned dinner of Full Sail and raw / BBQ’d oysters at Tony’s. BBQ’d is nice, but IMO the only way to show an oyster your full respect and attention is to eat it raw. Heaven.

Completely fried by end of day. Showered, fell onto couch, and watched the fantastic but campy 1971 eco-disaster sci-fi flick Silent Running ’till I passed out.

Animated route from GPS (combined driving/hiking):

(click Replay to view)

Click Replay for hike animation

Wrapped up the visit with a lovely 3-mile walk through Carver Park Reserve with the family and kids through rolling hills. Returned with a few tics and lots of great memories.

Farewell Ben – we’ll always miss you.

Finally got around to figuring out how to edit GPS tracks with Garmin Bobcat (stupidly renamed Garmin RoadTrip), and upload to TrailGuru:

(press Replay for trail animation). Elevation map screenshot from RoadTrip:

Elevation plot:

A few months ago, all of that started to change. Somewhere along the way, he began to realize that every hour out hiking was an hour not building Legos or making stories at home. And while he was good for five-milers from a very early age, at some point he figured out he could claim to be “tired” after the first 200 yards, and even that passive resistance (laying down in the middle of the trail) was an effective way of brining an excellent afternoon outing to a grinding halt. I’m not positive, but think he learned this from watching other kids do it on group outings. Big ears, and alla that.

It’s a drag. What for the past couple of years had seemed like the perfect father-son bonding activity had often become a wrestling match when it came to getting out of the house. Of course, he usually had fun once he hit the trail, but his little power plays to resist the very idea of going out have become both more strident and more devious. Along the way we mutually recognized that a certain amount of negotiations would do the trick: “If I go geocaching with you today will you play Lego Star Wars with me tonight?” (an excellent deal for me, since I secretly love playing Lego Star Wars).

But even that tactic may be losing its effectiveness. After Amy informed him that we were going to do a big hike tomorrow, he apparently complained: “The last day of Thanksgiving vacation, ruined by a hike? Why do you guys even think I like it? I’m not even an outdoors kind of guy!”

Ouch. Why don’t you just put me in a resting home right now, little squirt? Our Ultimate Bonding Activity, totally up-ended. OK, so you’re not into geocaching anymore. I can live with that. But “Not an outdoors kind of guy?” Where did you even learn an expression like that? And is that an example of genuine self-knowledge, or just an extension of increasingly sophisticated rhetorical ploys to let you stay home and play? And how can I make hiking feel more like play to you?

Well, Sid the Science Kid recently told you all about the importance of getting a good dose of cardio daily, and you seemed to buy that. But Sid or no Sid, just don’t wound your dear old dad like that, eh? Ouch.

One of the many unusual aspects of geocaching is the fact that it relies completely on the existence of a single web-based database, represented by the site geocaching.com. As web-based database applications go, the site is a modern marvel. The database represents hides, finds, people and their discovery logs, travel bugs (ID’d items that travel the world, hopping from container to container), and more, all sliced and diced a million ways to Sunday. The site is deeply geo-enabled, letting users hone in on hides near them, along a route, or near arbitrary destination locations. It’s also one of the best examples I’ve seen of useful Google Maps mashups, relying heavily on the open APIs provided by Google to integrate its cache database with Google’s map database. This is what map mashups are all about, and geocaching.com has done an amazing job with them.

As the popularity of personal GPSs rises, so does the game’s popularity. But when geocaching.com goes down (or slows down), so does the game, which involves more than half a million hides world-wide, and many millions of players. The site, which is, sadly, based on Microsoft database technology and ASP, does go down from time to time (big surprise); it’s a “single point of failure” in bit-space for the entire meat-space game – a precarious position.

We could – and probably should – have a separate discussion about ways to distribute the load and eliminate that single point of failure, either by replicating / load-balancing to other servers elsewhere in the world, or by coming up with a protocol and distributed architecture so the game isn’t in the hands of a single group to begin with. Discard the dependency on a single organization and open source the whole concept.

Lots of difficult problems to solve there, but save that thought for another day. These notes are about Web 1.0 vs. Web 2.0 cultures. Yes, I know those terms are vague and scattered, but for these purposes I’m thinking about one key ingredient of Web 2.0: Open-ness, manifested in technology as interoperability between servers and clients via published APIs.

The ability for people to do cool things with data living on someone else’s server is what has enabled the rapid growth of cottage industries surrounding the most popular web 2.0 sites. There are dozens of external web sites and desktop/phone clients doing amazing stuff with the data living on Twitter. Facebook’s API is credited with the huge ramp-up in that site’s popularity over the past couple of years, as thousands of developers wrote applications to interoperate with the site. RSS/Atom have enabled countless opportunities for interoperability between sites. XML-RPC lets us create excellent desktop publishing tools for posting to blogs of all kinds, and to get our data into and out of web 2.0 sites. Google’s maps API has opened up a universe of possibilities for creative developers working on other sites. Flickr’s open API has created a vast cottage industry of external sites grabbing, slicing, and dicing data on Flickr in creative ways. When a site is built on top of structured data, that data should be available in programmatic ways. Open that gate and let the building begin. It’s not just about technology – it’s a mindset that opens doors.

Compare: In 2008, I can’t even get an RSS feed of my recent finds from geocaching.com. In fact, even though I can see my recent finds through the site, I can’t even create a distinct URL for that view of their data to give you here. Nor can I get an RSS feed of caches recently published in my area. In fact, geocaching.com doesn’t even seem to know that RSS exists – one of the most fundamental technologies on the web in the past eight years, completely missing.

Similarly, there is apparently no way for external sites or clients to programmatically retrieve data from the site. Since the day we first heard that 2nd-generation iPhones would come with a built-in GPS, many of us thought the iPhone would become the ultimate geocaching device, allowing us to go “paperless” from anywhere in the world, without loading up our GPSs with waypoint data before leaving the house. Instead, what we ended up with was a well-intentioned but anemic client called Geopher Lite – a noble attempt to create a geocaching application for the iPhone, but which fails spectacularly for one simple reason: While Geopher can easily determine your current location, it can’t pass that information to geocaching.com and get back a list of nearby caches. And if you select a cache with its built-in browser, it can’t get that cache’s coordinates into its own dataset. Geocaching.com is so closed down that even the most basic level of interoperability is impossible. It’s just sad.

I’m currently in the process of building a geocaching satellite site in Django (more details on that in the future). Not having an open API at geocaching.com is a major pain in the butt, and has put the kibosh on many of my plans. Shortly after getting started, I realized that if I had something as simple as a cache ID, such as GCK6F2, there was no way for me to construct an automated link to that cache’s page at geocaching.com — the cache ID isn’t even present in the unreadable hairball URL (geocaching.com apparently never got the memo that “URLs are architecture, and should be readable / elegant / meaningful). So I asked in the forums whether there was some kind of shortcut URL I could use to redirect from a known cache ID to a cache’s page. I did get a useful answer, but I also had not one, but two very experienced community members insinuate that I was a bad guy, probably intending on scraping the entire database for my nefarious purposes.

This blew my mind. The culture of the site is so web 1.0 that a basic question about interoperability was met with distrust. Not only is geocaching.com lacking the technology it needs to enter the web 2.0 world, it’s lacking the culture needed to support it. In 2008, interoperability between sites needs to be encouraged, not discouraged. Sad that geocaching.com’s traditional closed-ness has created this kind of culture.

There are many things I’d like to do with my project that I won’t be able to do as a result. But I do plan to respect the geocaching.com terms of service, even if I don’t agree with all of them.

The irony is that geocaching.com relies so heavily on the open APIs provided by Google and other mapping services, but provides no open-ness back to the web in return. Imagine using geocaching.com without the map mashups integration – it would be nearly impossible. One would think that the folks at geocaching.com would see their own mashups as an example of the great ideas that bloom when datasets and APIs are open and shared.

I don’t want to give the wrong impression – again, geocaching.com is an absolute marvel, and one of my favorite web database applications in the world. Hats off to everyone who’s labored on the site over the years; you’ve built something really incredible. I really do appreciate your work. But it’s time for change.

In a perfect world, geocaching.com would ditch the Microsoft technologies it’s sitting on and re-write the entire system in Django, being sure to build open, published APIs into every imaginable corner of the system. Then, to solve the reliability problems of the site, move it all into Google App Engine, solving the scaling problems for good (App Engine happens to love Django, but that’s coincidental). Finally, sit down with all of the geocaching.com employees and explain to them that it’s time for a culture shift — that it’s time to enter the world of open-ness and interoperability that transforms sites from walled gardens to thriving platforms. Then just sit back and watch as hundreds or thousands of add-on sites and services bloom, possibly leading to entirely new modes of geocaching.

I know, pie-in-the-sky stuff, not likely to happen. And I don’t like to come off as an armchair analyst, pretending to know what’s best for a site I don’t own or control. Re-building / rethinking geocaching.com would be a massive undertaking. I don’t want people telling me how I should throw away my labors of love and start over, so I’m loathe to suggest same for someone else’s project. On the other hand, geocaching.com is a resource for the web community, and it’s not keeping up with the technologies that drive modern web communities forward. I’m just dreaming aloud here – take it as such.

After a waffle breakfast with friends, spent Father’s Day with Miles and Amy at Redwood Regional Park, hiking down to the valley floor to get up close and personal with giant old growth redwoods. Not quite Muir Woods scale, but utterly spectacular. Found a small handful of geocaches along the way, including one locked deep inside a cow femur, which just added to the “dinosaurs have walked this path” atmosphere of the day. At one point near the valley floor, just a few dreamy rays of light were left penetrating to the forest floor. Miles started to get scared, convinced there were ghosts in the trees. Ascending 1,000 feet or so out of there was a much-needed workout, rewarded with eventually walking up and out of the canopy into broad daylight.

Later quenched our appetites at a local sushi bar — a landmark moment for us to be able to go to a restaurant without a kids menu. Stuffed myself on crab and avocado, then chili-infused dark chocolate (didn’t get the chocolate-covered ants I had wanted, but lightly salted Aztec Chili chocolate tiles are complex and dreamy). A glorious day. I love my family.

“If you ever want to find the longitude and latitude of a location on Google Maps, simply center the map to the location you want to find. You can even search an address and this will work. Then paste in this code into the URL field:

javascript:alert(window.gApplication.getMap().getCenter());

A pop-up box will appear with the longitude and latitude.”

Miles was on a mission to photograph his Bionicles in natural settings, so spent half the day shooting macros of various Phantoka (and their off-spring) hanging from trees. If that sentence means anything to you, you have a 5-10 year-old-boy.

Also encountered a 4′ bull snake in the middle of the path, soaking up the sun, completely content to be petted and photographed. After a minute, it slid calmly off into the weeds.

On the return trip, Miles and I ventured into deeper woodlands to find our 200th geocache (hard to believe we started just under a year ago; we’ve found all but ~30 of these together). It’s become a centerpiece of our bond, and he’s still surprised when he realizes that most kids have never been. Phoned our milestone into the Podcacher podcast, and Miles did the talking; hopefully we’ll get to hear his proud little voice on next week’s show.

Black Chasm was an amazing experience; years since I’ve been in a real cave, being stunned by mineral drapery, 200,000-year-old crystal extrusion, a pool of earth’s purest water 200 feet below glowing blue and green, inhabited only by sea monkeys. Got to Daffodil hill just as it entered it was entering waning stage, flowers just starting to think about drooping, but still beautiful. And catching a large male peacock in full strut, on a corrugated tin roof no less, was just stunning.

Flickr set

Great to see Jeremy Irish on the panel – Jeremy is the mastermind behind geocaching.com – the most sophisticated and original database-backed web site I know of – despite it being built in ASP (forgive us, Lord). Jeremy opened the session by showing the placard for the original geocache, and the OCB (Original Can of Beans) (food is no longer allowed in geocaches; ammunition and drugs are also barred).

Ryan Sarver – Skyhook Wireless. Conqwest game – similar to geocaching but more interactive with the real world, and with a big budget (clues on billboard, media buys, etc.)

Dennis – Created Vindigo (old Palm app for finding nearest restaurants – I remember using this). Pacmanhattan – grown men in Pacman suits. Plundr – search for wifi hotspots in your area and create an island. If you connect to the island wifi network you can buy and sell resources, goods (bananas, etc.). When you go and join another network, you can trade items between islands.

Location aware games are difficult to build. Require special software for phones and devices, sometimes cooperation of phone vendor, cities.

Nike+ – a GPS in your shoe. You can graph your run on a public map, share routes.

Can we make public art / graffitti into game pieces? Extending the idea to ski resorts – show ski map with gamepiece icons.

Some resorts now lend out GPSs with built in trail maps, that will tell you what lifts to take to get back to the lodge or to get to a certain lift.

Believability – running away from an invisible thing.

All real-world geo games have social implicatons — littering, or caches looking like pipe bombs.

During Q&A, I asked the panel about geo possibilities for journalists (beyond the obvious answer – geotagging photos). Responses:

Check out georss.org – protocol for adding lat/long to each RSS item in a feed.

Also Check out Steven Johnson’s outside.in: “So what is outside.in? In a phrase, it’s an attempt to collectively build the geographic Web, neighborhood by neighborhood.”

More:
whereigo.com – New geo game designed for modern GPSrs like the Colorado. Reference to Zork I didn’t get…

loki.com – “Free location-based search and navigation toolbar.”

where camp – at google plex – for the “geo curious.”

The Colorado addresses all of that and more… at a price. Excellent review at GPS Magazine (6-page review, check the photos on inner pages). “Indiana Jones Meets MacGyver.” Not sure I want to be either of those guys, but dang, I’m drooling. Went to look for a demo unit at REI yesterday, but it’s not in stores yet. Ended up walking out with new mud boots instead. Saving pennies.

The GPSr pointed to a spot somewhere just beyond the plane’s cockpit, which explained why the cache was rated a 4.5 on the terrain scale – one of the more difficult ones I’ve attempted (yay adrenaline!).

Absolutely gorgeous caching day, and booty everywhere. At the end of the day, sun going down and the sky turned absolutely electric. One of the most gorgeous sunsets of my life, and the vista was 180 degrees of perfect.

Me: Miles, this is one of the most incredible things I’ve ever seen. No, wait, *you’re* one of the most incredible things I’ve ever seen.

Miles: Yeah, but I’m not a sword swallower. [Then, looking at the sky:] Hey, this must be where God lives!