Tuesday, November 8, 2011 Lethbridge
5:00 am
The temperature is +1 C, with a high predicted of +5 C. From the Environment Canada website: Today Clearing. Wind west 40 km/h gusting to 60. High plus 5. Tonight Clear. Wind west 30 km/h gusting to 50 becoming light this evening. Low minus 12. Normals Max: 5°C Min: -6°C.
5:15 am Morning Musings
I have a cup of freshly brewed Van Houtes "House Blend" in front of me. A good beginning.
I also have 2 cups of a 9-bean mixture that have been soaking overnight. A steaming pot of tomato bean soup is on the menu for lunch.
Geocaching is on my agenda as well. I have never found a cache on November 8. Today I will search for one just north of the city. Late morning will be a good time to try this.
Then return home for a coulee walk.
I have a coffee meet scheduled for 3 PM.
Model trains - setting up detailed notes for the engineers for the various train schedules is my current priority. The key idea for this is ensuring that after each train completes a set of moves that it stops on a siding so as not to interfere with any possible mainline activity by other trains.
Reading: perhaps some molecular biology, perhaps some Infinite Jest.
10:00 am Geocaching
My goal for today was to find one geocache. That would fill in the square for November 8. I put the coordinates for 4 nearby caches into my Montana 600 so if I failed to find one on my first, or second, or third try I would still have a 4th option before returning home. It was fortunate that I had more than one cache loaded as my first try, which was also an attempt at being a FTF (First To Find), resulted in a DNF (Did Not Find). I guess I could call that a FDNF.
My second effort turned out to be a quick find.
I also used the EveryTrail app on my iPhone to show the route that I took this morning. Here is the URL:
10:30 am Photography
Here are three photos that I took while geocaching. The first is near the Dancing With the Sun cache that I failed to find. The lake is frozen over (note the rocks on the surface). The last two are near the Concrete Canal.
12:00 PM Cooking
The 9-bean soup is delicious. In addition to the chopped onions, diced tomatoes, and a special mix of spices (all of which are in the recipe) I added some diced ham. A great hot meal during the winter months.
2:00 PM Technology
I have updated my nuvi North America Map for my Montana 600 GPS unit. This took about 4 hours to download from the Internet. My current version 2012.20.
Here is another EveryTrail map that I created while walking to Tim Hortons for a cup of coffee.
But we are not there yet. The iPhone does a fine job of tracking a route and transferring it to the web. Turn the device on when you leave home and tap a couple of icons to upload the track to a web site. Very cool. But the camera is far from good.
Meanwhile I have a good camera but it does not provide a method for geotagging the photos.
It is possible to combine photos with a track using another device but the overall process to integrate photos and track and get it uploaded to the web is not worth the effort.
If the iPhone is capable of tracking and transfering the data to the web, surely the same type of chip could be put in a camera. We are close, but the two industries don't appear to be talking to one another.