Many readers will know that i enjoy geohashing (geohashing.org): locating a geographic point detemined daily by randomly generated coordinates. For a long time i've been wanting to try the sport that inspired geohashing, which is geocaching.

Geocaching (geocaching.com) is another GPS game where you have to find a 'cache' which has been hidden by someone else. The cache stays there indefinitely and over the course of time several people will follow clues to find it. The cache may be large or small, and may contain various items. People sometimes take an item out and replace it with another item for the next visitor to find.

Today i got my chance to go geocaching for the first time. All the geohash locations were uninteresting or hard to reach this weekend, so my geohashing friend Mike came to Winchester for the afternoon. We initially planned to spend an afternoon juggling, but it was a bit wet and the ground too dirty for that. We went for lunch in the Bridge Patisserie and then decided to look whether there were any geocaches nearby.

It turned out there was one just around the corner! GC1N2M9 – Winchester Chesil Station which is part of a series of geocaches along the route of the former Didcot, Newbury and Southampton Railway. I became interested in this railway line since my geohash in Bar End where i noticed the railway line going past St Catherine's Hill on a map from 50 years ago. So i was curious to go anyway, to see whether i could spot any clues of the former railway and the station.

The first clue made me laugh to myself that i'd never noticed it before!

Old Station Approach. The clue is in the name!

The second clue is even bigger! This is the entrance to the tunnel that went straight through St Giles' Hill and out the other side in Winnall before it carried on towards Kings Worthy. I wonder whether the tunnel is still intact?

This is a contribution to the Flickr group Guess Where Winchester? so [shhh] on the location! ;)

The footbridge near the multi-storey car park has a definite 'railway feel' about it, don't you think?

That car park is built exactly where the old station used to be. It was called Winchester Cheesehill, the old name for the area we now call Chesil.

The view from the bridge:

The silver car driving away is following the route of the old railway line. There is no sign of it now, but a photo on wikipedia proves the history. Winchester Chesil Station

We looked for a long time before we found the geocache. It was very small and very well hidden. I don't believe anyone would find it unless they were specifically looking for it. Eventually Mike pulled it up. It was really nicely labelled:

The barrel reads: GEOCACHE – CONTENTS SAFE – DO NOT MOVE – GEOCACHING.ORG

Look what was inside!

A list of people and dates when they have found the cache. The list was actually full: somebody needs to go back and put in a new sheet of paper.

I really enjoyed my first geocaching experience. There are loads of geocaches all over Winchester so i'll definitely be going to find more. There are another 4 in this series on the Didcot, Newbury and Southampton Railway which i am keen to find, whilst learning more about the old railway line.

I love optical illusions, particularly ones which make us see things that aren't there, miss things that are there, or misinterpret things. They show us that our brains do not faithfully relay everything in the outside world directly to our consciousness, but there is plenty of pre-processing, pattern matching and filtering that goes on in real time.

Today i discovered an amazing audio illusion that just blew my mind. Perhaps because i am quite used to optical illusions, they don't have the same powerful effect on me, but when you see this you'll realise that what you 'hear' and what you 'see' effect each other enormously.

Play it a few times, sometimes watching and listening, sometimes just listening (close your eyes). Isn't it incredible how you 'hear' something different depending on whether you are watching or not?! It's a very persistent effect too. Even though i know i should be able to hear 'ba ba' when i'm watching, i just can't. My brain takes the visual input and processes it with the audio to tell me what it thinks i have heard.

Here's another good audio illusion, though it may not work for everybody. Play this a couple of times. You might be surprised at what you hear on the second play!

I think it's all about the harmonics and balance, but i'm sure there is a fair amount of brain trickery involved with our tendency to match patterns wherever possible.

There is also an audio illusion which i can't try because it requires speakers placed some distance apart, but apparently it causes people to hear phantom words that aren't there at all. Different people hear different words. This to me is very interesting from the point of view of spiritual experiences. People say they hear angels, or the voice of God. I once had an experience where the volume of about 60 people singing suddenly sounded more like 200. Just because you hear something doesn't mean it is there.

I've also recently been interested in the spectrum of what people can hear. There is a 'mosquito' alarm outside a nearby shop that emits a squealing noise at a very high frequency. I had no idea it was there until somebody told me they could hear the noise. It's very unpleasant apparently, and its purpose is to stop kids from wanting to hang around outside the shop. The frequency is more likely to be heard by children than adults because their audible range is larger.

It's quite fascinating to be reminded that everything we think we see, hear, smell, taste and feel is really just the brain's filtered interpretation of the things around us.

Having just installed Rails on Ubuntu tonight, and reminded myself how utterly horrible the Rails scaffold looks (it's supposed to!) i thought i might have a look at Hobo.

Hobo builds upon Rails, brings in a few plugins, makes it even faster to do things, and looks pretty good right from the start.

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With all this talk of Google wanting to buy Twitter, it got me thinking about the exciting potential for real-time searching. I've seen some greasemonkey scripts for adding Twitter search results into Google, but i wanted something a little bit different. I wanted to search multiple places and bring them together in columns. Something a bit like this:

So i spent the whole afternoon figuring out how to do it (and in the process, learning how to do object-oriented PHP!) and you can try it out here: rightnow.aimee.mychores.co.uk

I need help on making it more interactive. It should be fairly easy to define new search locations like plugins. I want people to be able to choose which they wish to search on. I would like AJAX updating with auto refreshing. And of course i need a lot of help with the design!

If you fancy having a play, fork it on Github! github.com/sermoa/right_now_search :)

For once, a meme that's actually worth doing! My thanks go to Kapitano for this one. It takes a little while to do, but it's fun!

1. Go to a random page on Wikipedia. The heading is your band name.
2. Select the last in a list of random quotations, or the last few words of it. That's your album title.
3. Take the third of a random selection of Flickr images. That's your album art.
4. Now get creative.

My random Wikipedia page is Trip distribution, part of a mathematical transportation forecasting model.

My random quote:

The deepest definition of youth is life as yet untouched by tragedy.

- Alfred North Whitehead
English mathematician & philosopher (1861 – 1947)

For my Flickr image i couldn't take the third one because it was 'All rights reserved' so i kept going until i found one with a Creative Commons share and derive image. Which turned out to be this lovely picture: Hello flickr, (explored) by OUCHcharley.

Some days Twitter can be such a buzz! What you get out of it is closely correlated to what you put into it, in my experience.

• You're @replying to multiple people having multiple conversations simultaneously.
• You're sending direct message to someone to arrange a meetup.
• You're following a trending topic on twitterfall.com and participating using the hashtag.
• You look at pictures related to the trending topic and make comments on TwitPic.
• You make a blog post, add a link on Delicious, make a comment on 43Things, tick off a task on MyChores, it all gets updated on Twitter.
• You catch onto a meme and help spread it and promote the mashup.

All these things and more have happened to me today! My tweeting activity has earned me 6 new followers, and i started following 2 new people.

In this case the trending topic is #uksnow, and the mashup is benmarsh.co.uk/snow. Make a tweet like this to register your postcode and marks out of ten for snow fall. The map will update automatically!

#uksnow SO23 2/10

The only thing i didn't do today is re-tweet anybody. I still haven't got the hang of re-tweeting. I briefly used Twitterfox which made it easy, but i still prefer to go directly to twitter.com for instant results!

Whoops, it's another late night, but … i just wrote a WordPress plugin!

Every time i change my theme i hardcode in the meta tags for GeoURL to detect my location. GeoURL is then able to find other sites that are geographically nearby. It gives me a little button link to use, like this:

The way this works is very simple: just poking these meta tags into the header of my blog page:

<meta name="ICBM" content="51.0622, -1.3205" />
<meta name="DC.title" content="A little place of calm" />

Note, that is not *exactly* where i live – it is just somewhere random near the centre of Winchester!

I thought there must be an easier way than hardcoding the meta tags into the theme. I had a look but didn't find a plugin for it, so i made one myself! :) It allows you to easily add your location coordinates and ping the GeoURL server. Pretty simple, but i'll find it useful. It's already working on my own blog and once i get a subversion repository from WordPress, i'll upload it for sharing! :)

Who knew that coding could be such a social activity! I really like GitHub, with its ability to fork people's code base, apply your own changes, offer it up to be merged back in, see the difference logs, comment on the difference logs … ah, now that last one's genius!

Somebody happened upon this quiet little commit from DHH … yes, the DHH, creator of Ruby on Rails. The bright spark goes and posts it to Reddit, prompting the world and its duck to chime in with an opinion! It's quite funny reading through the comments, both on Reddit and on GitHub.

What does the commit do? Not a lot. It's what we call syntactic sugar: aliasing something in code as something else. It means we'll be able to do this:

['a', 'b', 'c', 'd'].third
=> 'c'

Of course, i have an opinion too. I can see why it could be useful, but i don't really think it is worthy of being in the Rails core code. I doubt i will ever use it. I also agree with the person who says it widens the gap between Ruby and Rails. When Array#first is available in Ruby, people will wonder why Array#second is not.

I do wonder, if anyone other than DHH had submitted this 'patch', whether it would have been accepted into core Rails.

After laughing at this thread over lunch today, one of my colleagues sent me an instant message:

Coffee.third?

I replied:

return true

I think it's good that people are looking at the commits, seeing what's going into Rails, and having their say about it. This is community-driven development at its best! Cheers, GitHub! :)

Update: DHH has responded! It now only goes up to fifth … but Array#forty_two has been added in as compensation! DHH calls it accessing "the reddit".

Alright, can anyone explain this to me …

I've seen these for sale at the Hawkins Bazaar in Winchester. They refuse to open the box, and the staff all claim they don't know how it works. In any case, i found out that even if you do open the box there are no instructions; just a password that you can enter on a site to get the information. There must be something they are hiding.

There was a Yahoo! Answers question asked: "How does My Mystery Ufo toy work?" … it has been deleted.

My curiosity wants to know what this is all about, but i'm almost certain i'll be disappointed.

Update: Oh wait, i think i've got it. They wave their hands around it, but they don't wave a hand straight over the top. I think i have an idea what's going on. Yup, glad i didn't buy one!

The White Poppy symbolises the belief that there are better ways to resolve conflicts than killing strangers.

From www.ppu.org.uk/poppy

This morning, whilst discussing with my partner my reasons for wearing a poppy, i discovered that my opinions are better represented by the white poppy than the red poppy. I was, and still am, strongly against the war in Iraq, and in wearing a poppy i remember not just the British soldiers who have died but also all the innocent victims in Iraq whose lives have been torn apart by warfare.

The red poppy is associated with the British Legion, and is particularly for commemorating soldiers who have died. I believe that is important, and i recognise that war is sometimes necessary. But i believe the impact of war goes so much further than that.

The white poppy is for peaceful resolution of conflict, and is to remember the victims of warfare. I did not know about the white poppy before today, and it's too late to get one for this year, but in the future i will wear both a red poppy and a white one. This week i'll be wearing my white scarf to symbolise my desire for peace.

P.S. Here is a lovely picture of a Sea of White Poppies taken near Basingstoke a couple of years ago.