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A New Home

Yep, Brat&Testy have a new home here on blogger.com. We’ve changed ISPs and that means that we’re los­ing the abil­ity to host our own blogs on our own serv­ers — hence we’re using blogger/blogspot.

What this means — I’ll be slowly port­ing over the old blog con­tent, but the com­ments will be lost.
We’re not sure exactly when the cut-over will occur, so you can view the ori­gin­al blog at http://bratandtesty.homeip.net for a short time longer.

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First 2nd-to-find :-)

Yep, anoth­er trek up Knox Moun­tain in Kelowna found us find­ing a NEW cache, The Christ­mas Knox Moun­tain Cache.

Check the log for more details but this was a first for us too — our first Travel Bug, now to get the little bug­ger on his way¦

Yes­ter­day we bagged to oth­ers, the ever elu­sive Mom’s East­er Cache — we tried this one in the sum­mer but the lush foliage thwarted us. This time there appears to have been extens­ive log­ging, much saw­dust, many stumps and logs, that made it easi­er. I hope the loc­a­tion survives¦this is a fun one.

The second we found (actu­ally the first of the day) was anoth­er in the same park — Kelowna. a good find in a neat area.

Out for more tomor­row.

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Another cool concept in caching…moving caches! What a feast!

You nev­er know what you’ll find while surf­ing cach­ing sites. Here’s a great concept I can’t wait to see developed in the Edmon­ton area; Mov­ing Caches!

Are you nev­er first to find at a cache? Well that all ends now! If you?re fast enough you will be FTF on our caches! Yes it?s true that you may not be quite as fast as you thought, and find only some flag­ging tape where a cache should be, but sure enough, a day or two later it will show up some­where again ready for you to dis­cov­er its secret loc­a­tion.

Game, Set, Cache! is a mov­ing cache for the East­ern Fraser Val­ley area. It is a 350ml Lock’n’Lock con­tain­er with a roll of flag­ging tape, log book, sharpen­er, and pen­cil (and per­haps some­thing spe­cial for the FTF!). There are no trad­ing items in this cache. When you find it, tear off a piece of flag­ging tape from the roll and fix it to some­thing where the cache was loc­ated. Remove the cache, post the find here, rehide it else­where, and then update the new loc­a­tion. The rules for the cache can be found by click­ing on the link below and under the Gen­er­al Rules for the Mov­ing Cache Game.

[source: MovingCache.com]
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Local Edmonton Caches — sample export from GeoToad

Bril­liant Brat has devised anoth­er cool scheme to dis­play all the Caches with­in 50 miles of home base:

  1. set up GeoToad to build both, .html and .gpx files at a par­tic­u­lar fre­quency. This is accom­plished by call­ing GeoToad from a batch file with the nat­ive ms sched­uler in Win2k.
  2. I’ve actu­ally got two batch files, one for grabbing HTML, the oth­er for GPX. I just add anoth­er line for each region (based on postal codes — also very cool) I want to update.
  3. also have the batch file copy the res­ult­ing files to my shared web­serv­er space — enabling me to grab these files while away from the home com­puter.
  4. Load the res­ult­ing GPX file into GSAK. Then use GSAK to cre­ate a file for Map­source. GSAK is great at man­aging all those way­po­ints you col­lect over time.

This is almost like magic 🙂 Gotta love tech­no­logy.

[UPDATE] I just found this AWESOME over­view of GeoToad.

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Do Bloggers deserve the rights of Journalists?

There’s an inter­est­ing piece in today’s New York Times — an opin­ion
piece — that dis­cusses the Blogger’s right/privilege to main­tain the
pri­vacy of their sources. In the US it’s called the First Amend­ment
right. In Canada:

Free­dom of the Press is enshrined in Sec­tion 2 of the
Cana­dian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (1982), part of the Cana­dian
Con­sti­tu­tion, which states that every­one has the right to free­dom of
thought, belief, opin­ion and expres­sion, includ­ing free­dom of the press
and oth­er media of com­mu­nic­a­tion
http://laws.justice.gc.ca/en/charter/index.html.

But, since Blog­ging has such a low Ëœbar­ri­er to entry’ — Blog­gers
don’t have to attend Journ­al­ism school, cut their teeth in the boon­ies
work­ing on weekly papers, work week­ends and grave­yards cov­er­ing the
news­room, learn­ing the craft, under­stand­ing why a story leads (or
doesn’t) — a blog­ger may have little exper­i­ence with (or care about)
the oth­er side of the coin, the Journalist’s respons­ib­il­ity to
objectiv­ity and truth.

Journ­al­ists know that there are many sides to a story, and object­ive
journ­al­ists attempt to present all sides fairly, without col­our or
pre­ju­dice. Journ­al­ists report on the facts. Can we say the same about
blog­gers? What about Blogs hos­ted by a biased PR or Mar­ket­ing com­pany -
do they get the Journalist’s Priv­ilege the same as a News Blog­ger?
Inter­est­ing ques­tions that time will answer.

[Sources: Micro Per­sua­sion Blog | Cana­dian Con­nec­tions: Canada and Press Free­dom | New York Times (sub­scrip­tion required) ]

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Many 30 second moments…

Halo: Com­bat Evolved (Halo 1) released on Novem­ber 14, 2001. Three
years have passed (minus a day or two) and Halo2 has been the game de
jour for many Xbox own­ers. Heck, First Per­son Shoot­er (FPS) fans have
even bought Xboxes just to play Halo — the ori­gin­al was that good. But
does Halo 2 live up to the very high expect­a­tions placed on it by fans,
fuelled by the Microsoft mar­ket­ing machine?

For me, right now, the short answer is no. Here’s why¦ Con­tin­ue read­ing “Many 30 second moments…”