Eli Does the Hula

Two posts about kids in one day? I must be going insane!

Pictures of Kids

Fine. Here are pictures of kids.

Eli makes a Lego car.



Kelson makes a Lego spaceship.



Koleman sits by Walter, Kelson, and the picture of Walter that Michelle painted on Kelson's wall.



Milena shows off a lost tooth.

Paperless Geocaching with a Garmin Nuvi 265wt

No pictures of kids on this post. No pictures of people, places or things, either. This post should be completely meaningless to pretty much everybody who normally checks my blog. But I am preserving this as potentially useful information for the internet at large.

In a previous post, I mentioned that I received a Garmin Nuvi 265wt for my birthday. If you use GSAK for your geocaching, you can achieve paperless geocaching with a nice little macro. The main question, though, is if the Nuvi can actually get you to the cache. Here are the steps I followed to fairly easily find a micro cache.

First I selected the cache as my destination, with all the normal automobile driving settings. It directed me to the spot closest to the cache.



OK, now I'm about 80 feet from the cache, and need to exit the van and go off-road.



It's time to change some settings. Go to Tools->Settings.

1. Go to System. Change Usage Mode from "Automobile"...



... to "Pedestrian".



2. Go to Navigation. Change Route Preference from "Faster Time"...



... to "Off Road".



3. Go to Map. Change Map View from "3 Dimensional"...



... to "North Up".



Now you'll see a slightly different look in the Map.



Zoom in as far as you can. Now you should see your pointer and the path to the cache. Since I've set North as up, the map stays steady. In the example below, I know that I need to just turn to the right a bit and start walking.



When you get close, you can touch the top green bar, to get to this screen:



Hit the "Show Map" button and you'll get a nice little map:



This is the only screen where I've seen the Distance show numbers less than 30 feet. When I took this screen shot, I was about 12 feet from the final destination of the cache:



Now I'm back to 20 feet away, but I was actually sitting by the cache. I was in some light woods, and the signal bounced a bit, but I was able to pretty easily zero in on the right spot. I left it and came back for a closer look before I found the micro.



And here is the Satellite screen while I was sitting at the cache:



The cache page listed coordinates of: N 44° 20.252 W 093° 57.972, so that's pretty close.

There, I've done my civic duty.

Geocaching with a Garmin Nuvi?

I was given a Garmin Nuvi GPS for my birthday. It's a cool direction device, which I desperately need to navigate in St. Peter. Here it guides me a few blocks away from my house.



I knew all about it's abilities in that regard. So the real question was this: Can you geocache with it? Well, it's pretty darn cool if you can get all the cache info, including hints and logs:



Hey, we're doing paperless geocaching!



Thankfully this was a super-duper easy cache. I'll have to work with some of the settings to see if this will function as well as the trusty old hand-held to find trickier caches. But paperless is a fun goal, and having the ability to load in tens of thousands of caches... that's kind of cool, too.

Best Concert In The World

Of course. When it's the Greatest Band in the World, what else would you expect.

Last night Michelle and I went up to Minneapolis to see Snow Patrol at the State Theatre. And it wouldn't be Concert Night if I don't take bad pictures with my lousy cell phone camera and blog about it.



Not that you can tell, but that photo wasn't Snow Patrol. It was their opening act, the Plain White T's. They were fun. Here's another bad picture:



Before the show we ate at Seven Sushi. Sat on the rooftop overlooking Hennipen Avenue. Very, very good sushi.

Here is Snow Patrol:



For all you know, it could be Chuck Berry.

The concert was great, of course, despite having technical difficulties. But I won't complain, because I'm not like that. Here's another picture, which I think clearly shows the greatness of both the band and my cell phone.

Back To School Haircut

Eli got an awesome cut and color for going back to school.