Wesley’s Personal Blog

This is part 3 in an 81 part series entitled “81.” In this series, I am detailing my finds of 81 unique Terrain/Difficulty combinations of Geocaches. For a better explanation of exactly what I’m doing (Or to start the journey at the beginning) check out The first post in the series.

GCRDG1 is among the easiest Geocaches out there: The ubiquitous 1/1. We hunted for - and found - this one right after the find I detailed last week (Part 2).

We parked the car in front of this little park that is scarcely more than a playground, and approached the large plastic playground equipment with confidence that this pesky little 1/1 would be an easy find. I mean, come on. Easiest terrain AND difficulty? No problem!

Lamenting momentarily the loss of the metal monstrosities we played on in our youths, we breezed past the plastic sectional play set and headed into the sparse wall of trees at the back of the park. These trees separated Sherwood Acres Park from a ball field. Perhaps in the summer they did their job fairly well; here in the deep midwinter they were more of a suggestion than an actual divider.

However, they posed a bit of a puzzle for our search. There were cracked trees. There were down trees. There were logs and rocks and all kinds of places a micro could be hidden. Yes, you heard me: I had learned from my prior experience and came to this cache knowing ahead of time that it was a micro.

We looked in the logs. We lifted the rocks. We checked around the roots of the larger trees and, as time went on, started to feel a sense of defeat. We considered our plight. It was a 1/1. It should be EASY. But this was not. We were still far too new at this game to say - with any authority - that we’d given it the effort due a 1/1 micro but… well… we felt that we had. By a factor of 5 or so.

There was a hint, though. Geocaching hints are simple ciphers of a type known as ROT13. To encode a ROT13 message, you ROTate the alphabet 13 letters. A’s become N’s. B’s become O’s. Etc. Because English has 26 letters, to decode the ROT13 message you simply ROTate it another 13 letters. Your N’s go back to being A’s, your O’s become B’s and everything falls into place.

I took the hint on the page and started decrypting. I felt like Ralphie with his Little Orphan Annie decoder as I frantically worked out each letter in turn.

I decoded the first three words: FIVE FEET UP.

I paused, looked up, and saw the cache hanging on a branch in front of me.

Next time, I’ll detail the third (and final) unique cache on this day - our first multi-cache!

Wesley 81, Games, Geocaching, Outdoors, Stuff

This is part 2 in an 81 part series entitled “81.” In this series, I am detailing my finds of 81 unique Terrain/Difficulty combinations of Geocaches. For a better explanation of exactly what I’m doing (Or to start the journey at the beginning) check out The first post in the series.

GCMC8B is another easy hide. It was my third find overall, but my second unique find. My second find just so happened to be a 2/1, just like the first. This one is a 2/2.

I was out in the Stow area showing some friends this new GPS I got, and introducing them to Geocaching. We parked near this bike trail and headed down the trail and - eventually - into the woods to find the cache.

We found the cache pretty quickly, and my friend expressed his concern that the many people wandering by on the bike trail would see us, wonder if we’re terrorists, call the police, or any of a number of other worries. I did not share his concern.

We replaced the cache after I dropped an oyster shell (From a beach in Washington State) into it, and we moved on to the next cache.

Maybe… just maybe… you’ll hear about that one next time.

Wesley 81, Games, Geocaching, Outdoors, Stuff

In my constantly frustrated effort to find something to blog about, I’ve come across an interesting (I hope) 81-part series that starts today, will sporadically jitter along for who-knows-how-long, and will eventually end at the 81st entry of the series. It takes some explaining to understand exactly what I’m talking about, so bear with me a bit as I go through this.

Geocaching is a fun outdoor activity that can be as easy or as hard as you want it to be. There are literally thousands upon thousands of geocaches in nearly every area of the US (There are 500 within about 10 miles from my apartment). If you like being outdoors AT ALL you should check the site out. All you need is a GPS (Check your cell phone. It may have the ability) and the desire to sometimes get muddy, wet, frozen, mosquito-bitten, and/or eyed suspiciously by “muggles” (the geocaching term for non-geocachers). The caches listed on the site are categorized with two main ratings: DIFFICULTY and TERRAIN. The first number gives you an idea of how hard the cache will be to find, while the second gives you an idea of how hard it is to reach. The numbers go from 1 to 5, in 0.5 increments. This means there are 9 values of each number.

After geocaching for a while, I stumbled upon a site named It’s Not About The Numbers that - despite its name - gives you a whole bunch of statistical information about the caches you have found. Included in that information is a nice little 9×9 grid that shows you which of the 81 combinations of difficulty/terrain you have found, and those that you have not.

So I got an idea: Why not find at least one of every combination? I’m in the 20’s right now (I found the 27th unique one - making my journey 1/3 of the way done - in February of 2010) so I’ve got a good way to go. Maybe, I thought, if I blogged about them I’d have a reason to go for the more rare (and/or the more difficult) combinations.

Sometimes these posts will be long (Like this one) and sometimes they’ll be short. Sometimes the hunt will be difficult, and sometimes easy. But all in all I hope it’ll be an interesting journey.

So let’s get started.

(Oh, I should say: These posts are essentially spoilers for the caches. So unless you don’t think you’ll ever look for them, you may not want to actually read these)

GCQ0F3 is an easy (Difficulty 2, Terrain 1) hide in the Solon Industrial area. It was not just my first find in the 81 list, it was my first find ever. It happened to be near the building I worked in, back when I found it in 2005. I had just gotten my GPS that day, and had brought it with me to work. I checked out geocaching.com and was excited to find that there was a cache JUST DOWN THE ROAD. Within walking distance, even. I work nights, so I threw on a coat and headed out into the cold late-November-evening air to nab my first find. It was, according to my GPS, in a little grove of 3 trees in the center of a roundabout at the end of the road. Not exactly well-hidden, it would have been impossible to search stealthily during the day. I looked on the ground. I looked at the bases of the trees. I looked in the branches. I realized how much a flashlight would help.

After 20 minutes, I returned to work angry and frustrated. There was NOTHING there. I decided to cheat a little, and read other logs. “Great hide!” I read, and snorted. “Quick Cache,” another member mockingly tittered. “WAY COOL MICRO!!!” another shouted. Micro? What’s a micro?

It turns out that a Micro is the smallest type of cache. The biggest micros are those little plastic containers that hold film (You remember film, right?) and the smallest ones are smaller than thimbles.

Armed with this knowledge, plus the knowledge that someone found it *three* days ago so it was likely still there, I went back out on my next break with newfound determination. I expanded my search to a nearby plaque, the curb around the roundabout, and even considered the trees outside the roundabout. However, my GPS told me that its accuracy was under 30 feet. 30 feet meant within the roundabout.

I again returned to work cacheless. This sport, I thought, appears to be a bit more difficult than I expected it to be. Was my $120 purchase actually worth it after all?

Eventually my work shift ended. I was getting in my car, preparing to take the long (okay, short. But drives of shame have to be long) drive home, and suddenly I realized that if I did not find this cache I would have FAILED. 100% of my searches so far would have been FAILURES. This was unacceptable. I drove down the street to the little grove of trees and defiantly stormed into them, ready to spend all night there if need-be.

And suddenly I found it. With a branch poking me in the face, and another scraping my ungloved and frozen hand, I wormed my way deep into the trees to what I had thought was a bird’s nest. But this was no bird’s nest; It was a WICKER BASKET. A tiny, bowl-shaped wicker basket with a Carmex lip-balm container in it.

Like Gollum with his precious, I scurried to my car with the container and unscrewed it with frozen fingers. Within, I found a tiny rolled up piece of paper with scribbled names and dates. I fished a pen from my glove box (Incidentally, always bring a pen when you go geocaching. I ALWAYS forget to do this), happily scribbled my name and the date on the paper, and returned the container to its original location.

I had succeeded, and was done with my first step on my as-yet-undiscovered journey through 81 caches.

Wesley 81, Games, Geocaching, Outdoors, Stuff

(This whole thing is as spoiler-free as I can make it)

So I got Fallout 3. I liked Oblivion (From the same studio, Bethesda) but didn’t love it. I quickly got bogged down by the sheer size of the world, and never liked any of the weapons. Ranged weapons were a pain and melee weapons were worse. And you simply could not get through the game without fighting durn near everything.

Regardless, I wanted to try Fallout 3 because I love the theme. I tend to prefer SciFi to Fantasy so I was hoping that, at least, would get me through the game. Did it? Read on…
Read more…

Wesley Games

I make no excuses for being an Xbox Live Achievement whore. I can’t get enough Achievement points and will go to fairly great lengths to secure a couple lousy 5-pointers in a game. Generally, if the game is fun at all I’ll stick to it until I’ve gotten all of the achievements that are even remotely worth it.

Recently, I completed Tiger Woods 2009 completely, including every single Achievement. They weren’t that bad except one that required me to play the bulk of the game over in its entirety in order to unlock a particular clothing item that you MUST be a male golfer to get¹. It added probably 2 months to my playing of the game, and I really didn’t mind because the game is quite fun and mindless.

Before that, I got all the single-player achievements for Grand Theft Auto 4².

Before that, I played some Lara Croft game³ twice so I could pick up the easier achievements that I missed the first time through. That game wasn’t fun enough to play the levels over and over for the timed achievements, but I was happy to go silver and gold hunting for a couple hours.

Enter Mass Effect.

Mass Effect is a HUGE game. And it’s a FUN game. I really don’t mind playing it for what is now my third time. It’s like watching a movie⁴ over and over: If you love the movie⁵, you WANT to see it multiple times. If you love the game, you want to PLAY it multiple times.

But there’s one facet of Mass Effect that I’m not all that hot on: The utter repetitiousness of the non-story quests. The story is awesome, challenges your morals and forces you to seriously consider your actions both on and off the battlefield. The non-story quests - in short - do not.

• Go to a planet. Invade a base. Kill all the minions. Kill a boss.
• Go to another planet. Invade a base that looks disturbingly⁶ like the last base. Kill all the minions. Collect something.
• Go to a third planet. Invade a base⁷. Kill all the minions. Blow up an installation.
• Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

But the worst part of the repetitiveness is one singular phrase. One thing you hear over and over. Over and over and over⁸. Every base, every warlord, and every pirate outpost has a guy who - as you’re slaughtering his friends and comrades - repeatedly screams “Enemy is everywhere!”

And it drives me freaking NUTS.

1. In any game that you can see your character, I tend to play as a female. If I’m going to stare at a digitized butt for 20+ hours, you better believe it’s going to be a female digitized butt [↩]
2. The multiplayer part of the game was very not fun. All through GTA3 I wanted multiplayer. In GTA4 I was sad to see all that I thought would be great turn out to be garbage [↩]
3. See above about digitized butts [↩]
4. Or, with the investment of time, more like TV series [↩]
5. TV show [↩]
6. And by “Disturbingly” I mean “Exactly” [↩]
7. Seriously, is there some equivalent of an Ikea catalog for space merchants, warlords, and pirates? [↩]
8. And over [↩]

Wesley Games

After a full day’s drinking yesterday¹ I woke up this morning² chipper and vibrant³, and was ready to take advantage of falling on the sunny side of today’s 50% chance of rain⁴.

That’s right. I went disc golfing.

I didn’t keep score because not only was it mostly a warm-up round, but the wind was blowing quite fiercely and the thought of recording successive double-bogeys just didn’t sound all that fun to me. However, I didn’t do all that bad and got par on most holes, with a few bogeys and only one double-bogey that I can remember. I also got one wonderful birdie: A 10-foot putt for my second shot when my first shot rolled perfectly up to the hole after the wind knocked it down sideways.

Not every shot that landed on its side rolled, however, as the picture here shows. This drive off of the long par-4 fourth hole, where you have to drive high to clear the trees, landed with quite a bit of force and had to be extracted - and cleaned - before moving on.

All in all, I’d call today a win.

1. Saint Patrick’s Day’s festivities, which I hope to get to in another post but probably won’t, were good. [↩]
2. By morning I of course mean afternoon [↩]
3. I actually was. Jenny, who didn’t drink so much as a sip of alcohol all day, was more hung over than I [↩]
4. Plus mid-sixties temperatures. Beautiful! [↩]

Wesley Games, Outdoors, Stuff

I’ve been on XBox Live now for quite some time, but never bothered to mention it as… well… I just never thought to. But a recent blog post over at KJToo.com showed that it was possible to grab a picture of your new avatar for the onlines and I just had to have one of my own.

So there I am. It’s cartoony and a bit more kempt than me in real life, but it’s a pretty good likeness nonetheless. My Gamer Tag is HorsemanThe5th¹ so if you want to play Catan, Carcassonne, Tiger Woods 2009, or even some GTA4 multiplayer², stop on by.

1. Would you believe that 5th Horseman was already taken? As was 5th_Horseman, Fifth_Horseman, FifthHorseman, FifthHorseMan, HorsemanFifth, Horseman5th, 6thHorseman, The_6th_Horseman… And every combination you can think of up to a reasonably disturbingly high number? Well, they are. [↩]
2. I’ve been meaning to try the racing out. I tried the shooting and it was ever so lame. [↩]

Wesley Games