On Monday, we went on our first geocaching expedition. Geocaching is a combination hike and treasure hunt — you get the latitude and longitude co-ordinates of a “cache” from the geocaching web site, plug them into your GPS, and then go find it. The GPS is only so accurate, however, so it’s not like once you get to the co-ordinates, you look down and there it is. You need to look under rocks or piles of leaves or in tree stumps, stuff like that. You can find some in the city as well, though I suspect those ones are harder to find — you can’t just leave one on the sidewalk.

The web site has thousands of caches listed, and each one has an indication of how hard the cache is to find, and how difficult the terrain is. You can put a cache halfway down a cliff wall, but then only rock climbers are going to be able to find it. There are also caches hidden underwater for scuba divers to find.

The cache itself is generally a tupperware-type box or ammo container that has a log book in it, and sometimes some little “prizes”. The idea is that if you take something, you leave something as well. The one we found wasn’t in great condition though, there were some rusty coins in it, two pens that didn’t work, and a plastic toy. We signed the log book and then took the broken pens and left a good one.

Sometimes, the cache owner makes a game of it, and creates several caches, each of which contains a “clue”. Once you find all the caches and put all the clues together, that gives you the location of the final cache. Some caches also contain a trackable item, which is something that has a code you can enter on the web site. The idea with those is to take the item from that cache, leave it in another one somewhere else, and then update the web site. Then you can follow the item’s progress around the world.

I borrowed a GPS from a guy at work, just to see if this is something that the kids would enjoy, and sure enough they liked searching in the bushes once we found the general location. According to the web site, there are numerous caches around our area, and there are some up north near where our parents live. We’ve even found a bunch in France, so we might try a few of those when we’re over there next summer (bought our tickets last week!). We’ve signed up for a geocaching “class” at the Royal Botanical Gardens in October, so that should be fun as well.

While ripping CDs onto my iPod, I’ve noticed at least one and possibly two songs that have grammatical errors in the titles. This seems unbelievable to me. It’s not unbelievable that the original songwriters got it wrong, but that they and everyone else who read the song’s title before the album was released got it wrong.

Interestingly, the errors are similar in both cases. The songs in question are “Given The Dog A Bone” by AC/DC (should be “Givin’…”) and “Taken The Pain” by Haywire (should be “Takin’…”). Errors in the lyrics themselves I can understand, and I’m sure sometimes they’re put there intentionally, but I think these are just plain ol’ mistakes. I haven’t confirmed the lyrics of the second one, but it sounds like “You’re takin’ the pain from my heart…”. However, it could be “You’ve taken the pain from my heart…”, in which case it’s not an error.

At one point, I thought there was some serious redundancy in the Paul McCartney song “Live And Let Die”. The lyrics sound like “But in this ever-changing world in which we live in…“, but it’s actually “But if this ever-changing world in which we’re livin’“, which makes more sense. There’s “A Horse With No Name” by America, which contains the mind-boggling “In the desert you can remember your name ’cause there ain’t no one for to give you no pain“. I’ve completely given up trying to analyze lyrics by some bands; Matthew Good (he has songs called “While We Were Hunting Rabbits”, “Advertising on Police Cars”, “Ex-Pats of the Blue Mountain Symphony Orchestra” and “Girl Wedged Under The Front Of A Firebird”) and The Tragically Hip (“There’s a cannon shooting coconut cream, forty gallons in a steady stream” ) are good examples.

Of course, in the original cases, it could easily be that whoever was responsible for the liner notes was solely responsible for the error. Tool’s album “Lateralus” has a song called “Lateralis”, but that is apparently a typo on some pressings of the CD. But if it’s just a typo, the story’s not that interesting.

On a radio show from Friday (which I listened to today via podcast), they were briefly talking about the English language — the difference between “further” and “farther” (I have no idea what the difference is), and how you don’t “revert back”, you just “revert”. One that always bugs me is “rate of speed”, as in “the car was moving at a high rate of speed”. Speed is a rate, so there’s no need to say “rate of”; just saying “…moving at a high speed” is perfectly correct, and “moving very quickly” is even better. Another one of those examples of people who try to sound more intelligent by using big words but end up sounding dumber because they use the big words wrong. I have heard people talk about others being “ignorant” when they really mean “rude”, but “ignorant” sounds better. They, of course, are ignorant of what ignorant really means. The classic line from The Princess Bride comes to mind: “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

Ironically, earlier in the same show, one of the guys had used the term “literally” incorrectly. He talked about someone who “literally took the bull by the horns”. Unless the guy was a cowboy or bullfighter, I don’t think so.

After thinking about Bob Layfield for the last few days, I thought about other people I used to work with, and googled a couple of them. Most of them I either couldn’t find, or found minimal information, but one turned up in a number of places: Alykhan Jetha (known as AJ) is the CEO of a company called Marketcircle, based in Toronto, which makes Mac software.

I don’t remember much about AJ. I worked with him at Comnetix for about a year, maybe a little longer, before he left. One thing I do remember — he was an Amway rep, and tried to get me into it as well. He invited me to lunch one day, saying he had a “business opportunity” for me. I had no idea what Amway was, but he gave me the whole dog-and-pony show. He told me that software development was what he enjoyed doing, and it paid the bills, but the Amway thing was going to make him rich. “In ten years,” he said, “I won’t need to work anymore.” Don’t know how well that worked out, AJ, since you’re still working. Then again, he’s CEO of a company that looks pretty successful, so I’d say he made a good decision or two somewhere along the line. Congratulations AJ!

I have been given the Amway spiel three times now, including once by a guy I didn’t know while in line at Harvey’s. My logic for saying no was that I did not go to university for 6 years, obtaining two degrees in computer science, to get rich selling toilet paper to my friends. That sounds snooty, and I suppose it is, but the real reason is that selling toilet paper and whatever other products they sell will not make you rich. The way you get rich with Amway is by selling the concept of Amway itself, and recruit people to be below you in the pyramid heirarchy. Then when they sell toilet paper to their friends, you get a cut. Do that enough times, and have some good sellers (or even better, more recruiters) below you, and you can make a bundle. Of course, I don’t actually believe in the concept of Amway (it’s just a legalized pyramid scheme that sells products to generate the income, rather than just having people “send $x to the person at the top of the list and then add your name to the end of the list”), so it would be hard for me to sell it, and I would make a lousy salesman anyway.

AJ is actually the second person I used to know who is an executive of a tech company. I first knew Cameron Ferroni through my buddy Jeff, since they were both engineers at UW. I remember thinking his girlfriend Gail was really cute, but way out of my league. Gail and I eventually became friends, and then she and Cameron broke up a couple of years later. A year or two after that, in 1992, she asked me out, we started dating, got married in 1995, had two kids, and are still happy together. After graduating, Cameron started working at Microsoft, where he worked on Windows for a while (writing some Winsock specifications that I’ve actually happened upon at work), and then basically invented the freakin’ Xbox and was General Manager of the entire Xbox software team. Now he’s also happily married and is CTO of a company called Marchex. Hey Cam, if you’re looking for your RAMPage rugby shirt, you left it at Gail’s place, and she gave it to me. I think I might still have it somewhere. Oh, and congratulations to you too!

Update: Forgot a couple: Crispin Cowan was a Ph.D. student at Western when I was there doing my Master’s. He was CTO of a company called Immunix until they were acquired by Novell. Don’t know if he’s still employed by Novell. I remember him describing hockey as a very stupid game, which was as exciting to watch as a packing peanut bouncing around in an air duct. Bastard.

Also forgot Brad Siim, another friend of Jeff’s from engineering. He was one of the founders of PixStream, a Waterloo company that was eventually bought by Cisco for many millions of dollars, making Brad very rich. He was also bored, apparently, since he left Cisco and went on to co-found another company called Sandvine, where he is now COO.