Those with GPS receivers know the problems of their devices all too well.

It’s frustrating when your unit claims that you’re just a few feet from ground zero just to have the GPS suddenly jump and say you’re 20 feet away in the opposite direction… then you walk to the new coordinates to have it jump again saying your now 50 feet away in a different direction altogether.

This dance involves staring down at the GPS while blindly walking in circles that could include stepping into piles of excrement or into oncoming traffic. The problem could be blamed on signal echos or signal obstruction, both which make sense in areas with dense trees or tall buildings, but the root of the issue is too much dependence on the electronic device.

Such was my fate last weekend. It’s okay now … the gummy fecal canine deposits have been kicked, scraped and walked off … but as a result I’ve decided to review the rudimentary way I work the caches.

I know a couple of geocachers who worked almost solely off of printed maps. The maps had handwritten scribbles and notes to suppliment the printed Geocache codes and pins. We drove or walked about locating the next item on the list, but navigated solely off printed maps. This has me thinking about the printed map advantages:

1. Better planning
   By planning what you plan to do, you’ll be better prepared. Are there caches in the woods? Bring hiking gear. Are they in the city? Wear walking shoes.
2. Less chance of overzealous hunting
   Knowing that there are ten other caches on the map, hunters are less likely to spend an hour on one difficult to find cache.
3. More attention to the environment and surroundings
   Instead of going strictly off of coordinates, there was more observation work going on.
4. No accidental puzzle caches
   Some cache owners accidentally put the wrong category icon for the cache. Going off of the iPhone app, the result is spending time to get to a location then, after ten minutes of searching around, reading the details to find out it’s a puzzle cache. However, if you prepared the trip through a printed map, you don’t depend on instant information so you have to print all that information out at the time, meaning you likely noticed this snafu beforehand and either solve the puzzle before heading out, or don’t waste your time going to the original coordinates… either way makes a happier outing.

On our next outing we’ll try the other extreme and put away our GPS receivers, using a purely printed approach and report what happens. Stay tuned.

I’ve been looking for an app that allows me to capture the essence of wines that I’ve tasted, display the results of others for wines I haven’t tasted, view the label, the price and the wine maker’s description in a clean interface. Data input must be easy and, because of the nature of wine, must have access to an extensive database. I would also insist on the ability to back up the data.

In the journey to find such an application, I’ve come across a good number of wine apps. Indeed, there are over 100 free wine apps in the app store, though I haven’t tested nearly half of them. I thought it might be of interest to others, as well as a brief documentation for myself, to post the brief findings of wine apps that I’ve toyed with. This post is a work in progress and has incomplete data. It will be updated as time allows. One of the most disturbing lack of features is the ability to back up your database. Without that ability it’s impossible to reach a 5 star rating. Nobody wants to spend hours scanning labels, entering their taste experiences and typing in their inventory to get it erased.

Today Japan made history for having the fifth largest earthquake known since we’ve started recording the event scientifically. Some people are blaming global warming (you have to question their reasoning). Another concern is that Japan houses several nuclear power plants and aftershocks can cause some difficulty. Greenpeace tree-hugging tie-die aficionados are saying “we told you so”, but the reality is that nuclear energy itself is still safe and the concern raised was just to alert of the possibility and how Japan is forthcoming with its precautions. I applaud that responsible measure rather than angrily shoot the messenger.

With all that said, It’s worthwhile to notice that something is going on with our planet over the past couple of decades.

Most of the larger earthquakes as well as some interesting volcanic activity over the past few months have been occurring over an area of plate tectonic activity called the “Ring of Fire”.

Here’s a short list of some notable earthquakes so far this year.

2011-01-02 Chile Earthquake 7.1
2011-01-18 Pakistan Earthquake 7.2
2011-01-19 New Zealand 7.4
2011-02-04 Myanmar India 6.4
2011-02-21 Suez Canal 5.9
2011-02-22 Christchurch New Zealand 6.3
2011-02-25 Gulf Coast 5.7
2011-03-06 Volcano in Kilauea Hawaii erupts and creates a fissure in the crust
2011-03-06 Chile Earthquake 6.2
2011-03-06 South Sandwich Islands (Africa) 6.5
2011-03-10 Yunan China 5.4
2011-03-10 Volcano in Kilauea stops and drains, collapsing
2011-03-11 Japan 8.9

This has nothing to do with global warming or radio waves or martians. It’s interesting to note, however, that the number of earthquake occurrences and the number of large earthquake occurrences are increasing over these past 20 years compared with the twenty years before it. I don’t know if that means earthquakes have a snowball effect (implying they’ll only get worse without receding) or a cycle (implying the time frame of this cycle is beyond when we started recording earthquakes with precision equipment), but it looks that either way it’s going to get worse before it gets better.

It’s just a hunch, but looking at the record of recent earthquakes and magnitudes, I’d say either Saudi/Iraq or California are in for a hit in a couple of weeks.

As to the idea that our records of seismic activity has increased solely on the advancements of technology and science, these two following sites make a compelling argument that this idea needs to be scrutinized. The first one points out that records for major ‘quakes were fairly good from the 1880s onwards so anything in the 6.5~7.0 range and above would be detected and recordable. The second one makes a scientific case based on the data centered around 5.x magnitude earthquakes.

A couple of interesting sources on the matter:
Earthquake Frequency Trends
International Earthquake Frequency