yotogi.net

so i started getting a bit anxious to get back into the swing of things at work. i have another week off, however. not that i am complaning a bit. i need the break, and when i get back i know that i will be very, VERY ready to start up again.

in my free time around the house, i have been playing a couple of games that i got for christmas. final fantasy tactics advance is wonderful on my new gba sp. and uru has made me fall in love with the myst universe all over again. while surfing around the uru website forums, i can across a reference to something that i had not heard of before, geocaching.

back in 2000 when clinton made GPS technology available to the public, people started using it for backpacking and general land navigation. in celebration, the first cache was placed, and within 3 days visited by 2 different people. the sport of geocaching has its roots in an activity called letterboxing. letterboxing worked by placing stamps in special boxes. people sought out the boxes and placed the stamp on their own logbook, and in the logbook in the box indicating that they had been there.

geocaching works very much the same except the contents of the cache are not limited to stamps. in addition the the fun of finding hidden boxes based solely on GPS coordinates, some caches contain items for the finder to take. the only provision for taking an item is leaving an item. sometimes these items are not trinkets, but special travel bugs with identification information that allows them to be tracked as they travel from cache to cache.

so melissa and i are going to go out tomorrow and try to find a cache or two. i went out today to get the hang of using the GPS itself and found it really a pleasure to use. so much in fact that i spent a little over an hour walking around playing with it. i covered a little over 2 miles and had a wonderful time. my legs hurt a little bit, need to remember to stretch. if you are at all interested in geocaching, check out the geocaching web site. very cool stuff IMO.

i intened to get some sleep early today, and figured that i would considering how much exercise i got today, but alas it is now past 3:00 and i am just about to crash. i need to get my sleep cycle moved back around before i start back at work in a week. alas, my silly body.

then i went on a ramage hitting up friend's sites and "catching up". crosslinked to another old friend's site who i don't keep up with. read a couple of his posts and thought about what my website used to be like. somewhere with the work and the house and the day-to-day i stopped posting what i would consider intersting things. when i go back and take a bite out of the archives, i don't enjoy the "i did this" variety of posts. instead, i like the interesting things, the real observations. somewhere along the last couple of years i stopped doing that. people still seem to visit the site, but i am not happy with the content that i am delivering them, i also don't find it theraputic like i once did.

time to start this over again.

i just completed a puzzle game that encourages you to make sense of hints and tips and requires a good deal of lateral thinking. most of the time you are forced to make observations of things that are well placed in the environment. you spend time thinking about how things work and how to make them do things that you need them to.

while out doing daily stuff today, i realized that this activity of figuring things out is something that i do more often than i realize, but something that i do not do as much as i used to. at some point over the last couple of years, i stopped pushing my brain like i did when i was in school. this bothers me to no end.

some people make new years resolutions to loose weight, some to spend more time with the people that they love. i resolve to pay more attention to my mind, and find new ways to encourage people to do the same.

what is currently floating around in my brain will require me to spend a lot of time in the downtown orlando area and do a whole lot more research into the history and geography of the area. geocaching has provided me a bit of a framework for placing something of an urban puzzle, one that will require more than just following your gps to a place and finding a box, one that will make you contemplate the world and how things work.

all that, and i want to learn how to build furniture.

today was the first day in 5 weeks that i was back at work. it felt really good to be back. so much of myself is fulfilled by what i do for a living that not being there so long left me feeling quite a bit out of sorts by the end of it all. in addition, i realized that most of my friend-type contact happens at the office, and not being there so long is kind of like not seeing your friends for that time.

but it is not work that found me saying things that hurt feelings. it is funny how connected you can be with someone such that when they are upset, there is nothing on your mind but why they feel that way and if there is anything you can do to help. sometimes what you say can start out as a joke, and end up being something that you wish you had never started to say in the first place. i do believe that honesty and open communication is the key to understanding the people that you care about and in keeping the relationship you share healthy. sometimes though, i wish that i was a bit better about tempering my words and not necessarily speaking my mind.

horay for run-ons.

i find it interesting that the class that i took was able to get me into AI at all. much of AI breaks down into three classes of problems: searching, sorting and knowledge representation. the treatment of these topics given in my class led much to be desired. they certainly didn't spark any interest in truly understanding the subtleties of A* algorithms, nor did they really pique much interest or desire into continuing the study of the topics presented.

but perhaps it was the knowledge representation that struck me most. i was interested in how to represent the world in a binary format. i was interested in finding ways to emulate that which our brains do so well in computing. we store and process an incredible quantity of information every moment, to be able to do a fraction of that on a machine level has always interested me.

so back in colege i took an interest in a game called mancala. very simple and quite enjoyable and quite an area of study for game theorists. the development of quickly evaluating heuristics is rolling around in my head once again. of course, before i can implement anything to investigate the rules one might employ to be very good at the game, i need to write a framework for playing the game.

so much code, so little time.