Geocaching me.
My boss is a geocacher... it's a sort of GPS-driven treasure hunt. People hide stuff and invite others to find it by providing coordinates. It's very organized... the website linked above provides a database of caches and lets you log your finds.
Often, the cache is a weather-proof box full of trinkets... take a trinket, leave a trinket. Some of the trinkets include "Travel Bugs" or other items with unique tracking numbers. Find a trackable trinket and you can claim it on the website and then log when you leave it in another cache. Many of them are trying to get somewhere, which is kind of cool.
Anyway, I've never tried it because I wasn't going to spring for a GPS receiver. And it hadn't occurred to me that with the accuracy of aerial photography maps, I didn't need one... there are geocachers who have found thousands of caches without the use of GPS. So I decided it sounded kind of neat and put it out of my mind.
Until this week, when I was given an Nokia N810 internet tablet as part of a pilot program at work. We're deploying these to our salesmen, and the more the IS department knows about them, the better we can support them... and I got one. And it has a built-in GPS receiver.
Now this is the interesting thing... GPS receivers with color screens and downloadable maps are fairly expensive. You can spend more on one of those than you can the N810, which is barely over $400. So this is really different from the entry-level, $100 experience... for $100, you get a B&W screen that shows street maps without much detail, which you might be able to upgrade/keep-up-to-date for a price. With the N810, I can get Google street maps and aerial photography for free. (It runs Maemo Linux, which has a free, open-source mapping application.)
So my seven-year-old son and I went out this afternoon to see what we could find. And it was a lot of fun... he really got into it, especially when the third cache we found was an Army surplus ammo box full of all kinds of goodies. (The first two were good training, but a little boring... both magnetic key boxes with nothing but a strip of paper to log your visit.)
The GPS is mediocre... first, it takes forever to get a 3d position fix. It looks like this may be a software bug and fixable with a simple upgrade, but for now, it takes as long as fifteen minutes to start working (though I hear that's not terribly uncommon in lower-priced GPS receivers). Once it gets a fix, it's pretty reliable about keeping it (some report that it's more reliable than a lot of dedicated GPS receivers). But it's accuracy is... weird. It seems to be most accurate when it's moving, but stop moving and the position indicator starts wandering around. One time that I stopped walking and held it still, and the position indicator make a full circle around the waypoint (destination) I had programmed in... about a 12-foot circle with me on one edge of it. Now, they say you can only trust a GPS to within about 20 feet, but I really didn't expect it to think I was moving when I was standing still. But all in all, I did find it pretty helpful in finding the exact location of all three caches... it got me to within a five feet every time.
Those were pretty simple ones down by the river-walk and in a park... I never got more than a couple miles from my house! Turns out there are quite a few along the river and around town, but I'm going to look for some more remote ones as well. I did a fair amount of walking, so it's good exercise and a fun way to spend time with my son. Can't beat that.
Eco-friendly in a mail-order world…
Do I see the irony in mail-ordering bio-friendly products? Of course I do.
This is something else I've struggled with... the lack of selection or price locally compared to mail order. And I've got an Amazon Prime account, which means I get free, two-day shipping. ("Free" as in, I paid $80 a year to not have to pay shipping on individual orders.) Since I then don't have to wait until I've got a $25 order to get free (and slow) shipping, I can order a $5 item all by itself without the "shipping cost" tax.
And if I really want to get into the mind-set... the more small orders I make, the more I get my money's worth. But I fortunately don't have a tendency to think that way. I just think, "I want this memory card right now, it's $11, and I can get it in a day or two." (I live close enough to one warehouse that "2-day" shipping is often next-day.) And if I happen to want something else the next day? Two boxes, two deliveries, where there could have been one.
So I've got this never-ending stream of Amazon boxes. Okay, it's not horrible... it turns out I only place an average of less than two orders a month, and I'm probably paying about the same as standard shipping (but getting two-day shipping). But still... I find myself wondering at the ecological cost. We re-use the boxes... my mom has an eBay business that sucks most of them up. But there's all that fuel.
Buying mass-produced goods (books and electronics mostly, with the occasional cast-iron cookware) really doesn't fit into a buying-local mindset. Even if I buy that book or memory card locally, it still got shipped here from China. And I'd have to spend gas driving to at least one store. Is the eco-cost of delivering that good directly to my home from a warehouse really significantly more than delivering it to a retail store where I go pick it up? Is it enough to influence my choice?
And all this from the guy who works 38 miles from home. I got approval to work from home two days a week (up one), but I'm still driving 228 miles a week just to get to work.
Biodegradable, renewable plastic forks
Now this is just cool...
http://www.worldcentric.org/store/bioplastics.htm
Maybe I'm a bit out of the loop... I've known about corn-starch based plastic wrappers and packing peanuts. But I had no idea that there were companies making plastic cutlery and drinking cups out of the stuff. They're not making plates out of it, because those are being made out of bagasse, the stuff left over after pressing sugar cane. All this stuff's not just biodegradable, but it's compostable, which means it will degrade quickly under composting conditions.
Now I've been bothered for some time about our obsessive "convenience packaging" culture, but I really wasn't sure what to do about it. I try not to use disposable stuff when I can use reusable (a steel fork instead of plastic), and we use canvas shopping bags instead of plastic (or the wife does, and I do when I remember to grab one), but I'm a dyed-in-the-wool consumer... I buy stuff, and that includes eating at fast-food places that give no choice but paper and plastic.
My work place doesn't have a kitchen, and I've found that trying to use metal cutlery and reusable plates results in dirty dishes in my desk drawer. I feel guilty about the box of plastic knives and forks... filling the landfill with non-renewable petroleum products, but giving them up degrades my quality of life. (I've got enough stress that I don't need to worry about doing the dishes at work!)
So I can really get behind this. I still want to minimize my use of disposable products, but at least I can choose disposable products that are biodegradable and made from an easily renewable resource. (As opposed to paper, which is technically renewable, but it's not a good renewable source for creating disposables.) So I'm going to buy some of these and give them a try.
I'm going to have to look more closely at those Seventh Generation paper goods, too... 100% recycled napkins and TP, with 80% post-consumer content.
Now, if all those restaurants and packagers of goods will get on the bandwagon and start choosing renewable, biodegradable packaging materials, I'll be a happy camper.