Geocaching adventure...

Yesterday, I did my first research session in 30C/86F conditions. The training sessions are four hours long and once outfitted you feel like a test pilot as you have a variety of sensors inside and outside your body, all measuring how you are reacting to the heat. In a future post, I will describe in detail what happened and will happen at my two sessions next week. The next sessions will be at 95F and 104F. It is fun training in the heat but the only bummer is that you don't get a tan.

While geocaching yesterday, I made a data entry error that put me on the wrong side of the Ottawa River, on the north, Quebec side. When I got to the apparent cache site all I could see is a large patch of poison ivy. Would a geocacher put a cache in the middle of a patch of poison ivy. I double checked my coordinates and had entered 24 rather than 23. The correct coordinates put me back on the south, Ontario, side of the Ottawa River. The cache was a little nasty as they had magnetically attached the first waypoint inside a metal culvert leading underneath a sidewalk. You had to reach elbow deep inside the pipe to fetch the metal canister to get the next set of coordinates. The final cache was hidden inside an old willow tree that was apparently surrounded by poison ivy but I think that the folks at the cache before me didn't know what PI looks like. While leaving the cache I spotted a red fox which was cool. It looked like a super sized cat and was on the prowl for dinner.

User experiences...

Today, I was at Mountain Equipment Co-op (mec.com) buying some last minute provisions for my hiking/camping/climbing trip (a summer sleeping bag and Clif bars). It was during lunch hour so the checkout line was long and slow moving. I let my eye wander over to a computer screen that you can use to search the online catalog and order stuff from the mail order department. The flat screen was embedded in a wood frame and part of a wall where you could post notices. From a distance it looked like a touch screen. A person walked up and started to touch the screen thinking that it was a touch screen. They would double-click on an icon and nothing would happen. The mouse point was visible on the screen and they tried to move the pointer by dragging their finger across the screen and nothing would happen. It was sort of fun to watch while killing time in the queue. The problem is it wasn’t a touch screen. There was mouse and keyboard on a shelf underneath the screen but it was so low that most folks didn’t see or ignored it. Just as they were ready to bolt, a stranger nearby pointed to the mouse and keyboard and suggested that perhaps these were would be useful. I was at the cash by this point so didn’t see what happened next.