A friend hears about this, and I've heard about it for about a year in various articles. GeoCaching, a social activity of planting little treasure boxes, or in some cases virtual treasures, around the world and providing coordinates, clues and instructions on www.geocaching.com He picks out 5 likely candidates squirreled away in Toro County Park near Salinas, California, and we set out, a party of three (He, his ~12 year old son and I) take off in search of our first cache with compass, map, clues and my Garmin etrex GPS.

Getting the hang of finding a location in a park crossed by canyons and ridges can be trying. We first tried to get the north coordinate, which was easy enough. Homing in on the west coordinate, while maintaining the north one involved crossing a couple ridges and a ravine. Ulimately returning to the picnic area, accessible from the main entrance road, and a short hill climb yielded the cache.

Clearly establishing ahead of time the compass points and getting a feel for how rapidly N-S (latitude) degree changes versus E-W (longitude) can keep the activity from the realm of masochistic endeavor. Learning from our first mistakes, we located the next two with little difficulty and nice hikes, although some spilled rootbeer made the papers a tad messy.

Our second cache we pursued through a thicket and collected a number of ticks, which were quickly encouraged to rejoin their cousins in the grass. A different approach through a grassy field would have saved us the worry. The third was cache was offset slightly away from the central reading amid a thick clump of poison oak. We searched a while, with a few red herrings before locating it stashed neatly under a bush.

The fourth and our last was in high country and quite a hike to get to, hence we elected to leave the fifth for another day. Logs indicated it was located in a spot with a beautiful view, which was on the money and quite breathtaking. I held the etrex at arms length, as we zig-zagged though sparse, high brush along a fence-line and located within a small clearing nearly the exact coordinates. My friend's son scanned the undergrowth and exclaimed with excitement, it had been found. After a quick signing of the log and exchange of treasures we headed back out of the park considering our next opportunity to GeoCache and creating a few of our own for others to find.

LoTR:TTT and many days of vacation, so go and see it twice. Which I did and it was great the second time, and gave me a chance to pay less attention to the dialogue and more to other stuff. Only downside was Gollum/Smeagol's voice sounded too cartoony.

Found something very humorous, Saruman's Diary

Another year and then the Return of The King, I suppose.

ASUS A7V8X SATA/RAID/LAN/Sound/etc.

AMD 2600/333

GEIL 256MB CAS=2 3500 DDR

Seagate Barracuda 80GB and WD Caviar 80GB HDs

TEAC DV-516E

Samsung 172T LCD monitor

USRobotics 56K modem (no DSL or Cablemodem yet, for a few months anyway)

Wacom mouse/pen pad

Cheepie Nvidia graphics card, of some ilk, just enough to get up and going.

CA cheepie $19 set of speakers with a sub, from Circuit City, which work pretty good.

WinXP is installed, and yeah, it's a pain, but it's for work. During a few days off from work I'll get Mandrake 9.0 installed on the WD drive and figure out how to set up dual boot. I can hardly wait to get past this stage of installing drivers, downloading patches, installing software, copying stuff from my old laptop and get to working on some projects which have sat on the back burner so long the pot has all but rusted through. Now if the power just doesn't go out. Big storms passing are passing through and some people have spent 5 days without power.

With the flood of recent motherboards featuring Serial ATA, I've decided to give it a try, as the cabling should be simple. Drives targeted are Seagate's ST380023AS, but as I've noted on Pricewatch, a vendor listed then with Late Oct. shipping date. Now they're showing up as Late Nov.

There seems to be a rash of pushing things back, by various manufacturers, possibly attempting to squeeze the last few sales out of their existing line?

PC Power & Cooling Silencer powersupply on order. Check.

Plextor 48x24x48x CDRW on order. Check.

Teac 3.5" diskette drive on order. Check.

Keytronic keyboard on order. Check.

Monitor, HD drives, Mouse, MB, CPU and memory yet to go. :-)

Ants are now present in force. These are the south american kind which probably number in the tens of thousands per colony and they've found that we eat a lot of snacks at work, and often leave bodacious crumbs on the floor. Toxins have now been introduced.

A7V8X? A7V333? KT3 Ultra? KT4? Decisions, decisions. My laptop is crawling and it's replacement is long overdue as the main PC in the house and main interface to the world. So many pieces to buy, too, as it's pretty much from the ground up. Pretty much nothing I already have will work with the PC to come. Everything else is Sun or Commodore.

Ants have invaded the office.

Up to last Friday there was a tiny spider lurking in my window, which I would occasionally feed fruitflies audacious enough to seek out the bananas I kept in my desk drawer. A mere speck of an arachnid, it could take on fruitflies twice it's size with speed and daring. Alas, ants first appeared a week ago, few in number, and their scouts fed the spider for the week. Today the spider is gone and the ants have been dismantling it's web and hauling away carcasses of its victims.

It is not unusual to see the ants in this area traveling over 200 feet to some food source. If they get into your house, they take some serious doing to get rid of, as colonies seem to number in the tens of thousands. Someone told me they're an invader species from South America, think 'marabunta' and you might get the picture. When I lived in Michigan ants lived in tiny hills, probably totally 100-200 ants per colony and could be found as close as a foot away from their neighbor. Scarcely did they invade houses, where were more the domain of black ants.

A slury of sugar and borax works well on black ants and Windex seems to put down a barrier, killing their scent trail.

Some tape now covers the hole the ants entered by. Hopefully they won't find another way in.

Just reading the news yesterday and saw the Vice President of The PRC visited Washington, Cheney, Bush, et al. Put me in mind of a famous routine by Bud Abbott and Lou Costello. My rendering follows.

Cheney: "Hu is here to see you, Mr. President."

Bush: "Who?"

Cheney: "Yes, Hu."

Bush: "What?"

Cheney: "No, sir, Hu."

Bush: "Who is here to see me?"

Cheney: "Exactly, sir."

Bush: "What is their name?"

Cheney: "Hu!"

Bush: "The person here to see me!"

Cheney: "Yes, Mr. President, that is Hu!"

Bush: "Who!?!?!?!"

Cheney: "Yes, I'll send him right in!"

Bush: "No! I'm supposed to meet with the Vice President of the Peoples Republic of China, right now!"

Cheney: "Yes, Hu is here to see you!"

Bush: "Why are you asking me?!?!"

Cheney: "I'm not asking you, sir, I'm telling you, it is Hu!"

Bush: "Who!?!?"

Cheney: "Yes, sir, Hu is the Vice President of the Peoples Republic of China."

Bush: "You're telling me?!?!"

Cheney: "Yes, sir."

Bush: "You are telling me who is here to see me."

Cheney: "Yes."

Bush: "And you are telling me who is the Vice President of the Peoples Republic of China."

Cheney: "Yes."

Bush: "Who?"

Cheney: "Exactly, sir."

Bush: "Ah! You to told me his name, please send him in."

Cheney: "Yessir!"

Hu: "President George W. Bush, I am pleased to meet you!"

Bush: "As I am pleased to meet you, Vice President Ex Act Lee!"

Item received in mail on Thursday. Not what I had originally bid on and paid for, but it's better than nothing. I can't help but think about how I'd still have nothing if the rascal hadn't returned to eBay and tried to sell the same exact item a year later, and few people in light of recent news on online scams and auctions gone bad as becoming a plague. Well, there's still been two other auctions over the past 3 years I got nothing for, fortunately they were cheap. Time to write a thank you note to Inspector Rick Chan of the Tseun Wan Police. They certainly showed more interest in pursuing this matter than the local police ever have for me, except when ticketing me.

It's been a quiet couple of weeks, and then two emails this morning. First from Mr. Yeung apologising for me not recieving the item and pretending he sent it and an offer to send a replacement.

The the bombshell, a letter from Tsuen Wan Police station that he had been iterviewed in the police station concerning the matter. Though not arrested, he was warned that all materials were now on file. I was also notified to expect Mr. Yeung to contact me.

I've requested it sent registered. It's been a long year, but I may yet get what I paid for.

After a couple quiet weeks I just received an email from a detective inspector of Tsuen Wan Police Station assigned to my case. I'll have to fire up my email client when I get home and forward all sorts of technical bits, like IP addresses from email headers and such. My guess is Mr. Yeung Yuk-tin is claiming his ID was stolen or such and I have to help the police build the case. Well, no worries there, I have lots of nice evidence in my 3,700+ message mailbox, not including all 600+ messages I've sent to people over the last 2 years. I must say, I'm immediately impressed with the alertness of the Tsuen Wan Police, that they request email header information. Very cool. Stay tuned.

Saturday morning I finally made the first move in building a home desktop system. A cleared out a bunch of stuff and sold it on eBay to raise a few bucks and the sale went pretty well, so I have a little extra scratch to start getting components. The laptop has been pretty good, though always having to work on a Chicklet keyboard breeds a certain amount of aggrevation, which puts me off the big projects I want to get into.

The case is a Lian Li PC 65 USB, black aluminun with a window. Looks sharp and gets good reviews. I'll probably be getting fullsize keyboard, mouse and maybe the harddrive this month, since I can test all those on existing equipment. Down the shopping list are the mobo (MPX are just coming out so I'll wait for a few reviews and follow usenet discussions before jumping in), powersupply, CD, basic graphics card and monitor. That should get me up and going and then I'll figure out what else I need from there as money comes available. It'll be nice to finally build the system I've always wanted and to get away from using a laptop all the time.

Email this morning from Hong Kong Police, transfering materials to Tsuen Wan Police District (New Territories), things progress, hopefully more then this, it's been a few days. Still no word from PayPal, probably have to call them on the phone. They're probably busy defending themselves against inattentiveness in San Jose and don't have time for important matters such as customer alerts of fraud.

Only a couple days before, an article about an eBay scam appears on Slashdot and I relate my tale of woe, being taken by one Yeung Yuk Tin of Hong Kong, back in March, 2001. Lo and behold, on Sunday, Feb 24, 2002 I see something on eBay I'd bid on, paid for and never received, from one and the same Yeung Yuk Tin, listed under a seller hkcollectibles of Hong Kong, registered on the 21st of the month. I fire off an email, after gathering all relevant address and auction information I still have in my email address. Today eBay has NARU'd hkcollectibles and all of his auctions are gone from the db. Cool, I was right. I fired off an email to PayPal, too on the odd chance they'll do something. And this evening I fired off an email to the Hong Kong police department with all details and offer to supply further information. The game is afoot! I may get nothing more out of this than the satisfaction of momentarily hounding a thief, but it's better than nothing. Steal from me and find what a sore loser with a long memory I can be.

Trolling for laughs? I dunno, it seemed a funny idea at the time and I punched it in and left it to the moderators. No disrespect to the article intended, but the idea of New Chemistry got the set the imagination in motion. I liked the idea so here it is, again with minor changes and further thoughts on the matter:

Firstpostium: Always attempts to appear at the top of the Periodic Chart, usually for no fathomable reason, frequently target of moderatium reactions.

Taconium: Bonds readily with Kathleenium.

Kathleenium: Bonds approx. 15 minutes later with Taconium.

Athlonium and Pentium: Elements which increase energy levels frequently, highly exothermic, although less so as they are refined, in constant competition for best quantum numbers.

Trollium: Densest element known to man, will react even with itself but prefers to bond to any other element.

Moderatium: Appears in cyberspace, sometimes where least needed or bonds inappropraitely, sometimes replaced by Metamoderatium.

Katzium: Occasionally emits photons of insight in cyberspace, frequent target of Trollium and Moderatium compounds to form.

Slashdottium: Highly radioactive, half-life ~20 minutes, when bonded to a link often replaces it with blackhole.

Redmondium: Pervasive, claims to be more stable than linuxium, but is frequently reduced by hax0rium, replaces atomic structure every ~2 years, but still looks almost exactly the same.

Hax0rium: Great affinity for almost any of the Techthanide or Codeinide series of elements, will often reduce or produce warzeides.

CowboyNealium: Only exists in the margins of cyberspace, always appears last in Periodic Chart, regardless of the number of elements represented.

Common Ions:

Trollmoderite (TrMd)

Trollmoderate (TrMd2)

Katztrollmoderite (KzTrMd)

Katztrollmoderate (KzTrMd2)

Others?