Using the google maps api I made a map of all geocaches that I’ve found, centered on my home town. I’m pretty pleased with it so far. It requires the gpx of my finds uploaded to my webspace, the html page and a google maps api key.
I now have this at the top of my geocaching blog and would have it in this post if I could work out how to get an iframe to be displayed inline on a blog entry.
Friday I took the day off for my birthday and we met up with Tash & Dave (non-bloggers) to go to Birmingham’s BullRing shopping centre and then to Outback for tea. The bullring was an interesting shopping centre – not the usual meadowhell/trafford centre type layout of shops and the outer design is definately funky in the extreme. I was not impressed at the parking fee’s though – it is VERY expensive to park in the middle of birmingham – we paid over £5 for 3 hours parking. I managed to get one geocache done, A bit of ….. which is a bit of a cheat really as it was a virtual and needed a photo taken of a bull statue. After lunch we went to see Hitch which was very good and funny (although the funniest bits were shown in the trailers for the film. We went to an AMC cinema and that was suprisingly cheap, £3 for the matinee performance and £5 for shows after 6pm. The local Vue cinema near us charges £6 and you have to pay about £3 for parking so a night out at the cinema works out pretty expensive (which is why we go on Orange Wednesday’s instead). Photo’s uploaded to my flickr page.
I found mt-rebuild which allows you to schedule a rebuild of an entry/page/index which is just what I needed to force a rebuild of my main index page on absocachinlutely to include my latest finds in the side bar of the page. I had to rename my Main Index to MainIndex and then include the blog id, set the mode to index and provide the template name in a cronjob as follows:-
/full-pathname-to/mt-rebuild.pl -blog_id=9 -template=MainIndex -mode=index
Looks like they’ve update the entire site with new colours and everything – my first thought was eek! My second thought was hmmm – wonder what is new.
So far there is a new feature called bookmarks to share a list of caches, and the cache page has the ability to bookmark or ignore listings.
I don’t like the way the pages change the background colour for each page that you visit but I might get used to it…..
Well after visiting Black Brook Black Hole, which was my nearest unfound cache at 7.3 miles away, I hit the one hundred mark. I had a great time although it was really really hot and I think I got sunburnt – even though I was wearing factor25 suncream and was out for a couple of hours. With Kristen coming home from a weekend away, what a fantastic way to finish a lazy weekend.
How annoying is that? 1 cache short of a hundred as I was unable to find the second cache this morning which meant that I was one short as I hadn’t made a backup plan of having an extra cache planned just in case.
Still 99 is a good number to rest on and shows that I am not addicted and can stop when I want to (for the day anyway!)
Had a fantastic day out visiting yet more places I’ve never heard of and seeing some great wildlife. There were loads of baby ducks at the first cache I went to and I saw several squirrels and a jay at the penultimate one. Now my feet ache so I’m going to have a bath.
As documented on my Caching blog I managed to do 9 caches over the weekend and collect 3 travel bugs and two trig points which is a pretty good tally. My knees are aching a bit though and I was very glad of my two walking poles when coming down the hill at Shutlingsloe. I was able to use them as crutches, put my weight on them and allow me to navigate down the hill without too much pain. Today, two days later, my knees were protesting a little bit when we doing the caches, even though I’d specifically chosed caches with terrain less than 2 (although that relies on you parking in the correct spot for the cache!) but I was able to walk without much assistance. So as the Doctor said a week or two ago – I just need to get used to it. As soon as they’ve recovered a bit more I need to get back on the eliptical cross trainer to build the strength in the knees.