Geohashing has been great fun so far. There are hundreds of users on the wiki, and I’ve gotten to wander places like this:
There’s been a small change to the algorithm to deal with time zones. This change does not affect anyone in North/South America (excluding Greenland), does not affect Saturday meetup times anywhere, and does not change any currently known upcoming meeting times. The change:
For every location east of Longitude -30 (Europe, Africa, Asia, and Australia), use the Dow opening from the previous day — even if a new one becomes available partway through the day.
Put differently (the same functionally for everywhere except islands in the mid-Atlantic):
Consider any Dow openings published after noon local time to have occurred on the next day.
This is necessary to deal with time zone problems. For a lot of Europe, the Wednesday Dow opening was learned near sundown Wednesday, which meant they couldn’t use it to get to daytime meetups. For east Asia, they had to visit weekday locations the next day. A bunch of solutions were discussed, and I decided this was the cleanest.
The official map tool is being updated with the new behavior concurrently with this blog entry. The first coordinates that will be affected by it are Tuesday’s. Again, this does not affect anyone in the Americas.
Moving on — Saturday’s meetups are looking good! Today’s location in Boston was fantastic. I wasn’t planning to go, but it looked so interesting on Google Maps that we couldn’t resist checking it out. The picture above is one of several. Saturday’s meetup is in a less picturesque place than Friday or Sunday — suburban Hopewell. We’ll probably gather only briefly at the actual point, then head to the nearby state forest for walking or town center for food and such.
Also, good luck to phire, who was last seen on IRC an hour ago, leaving to mountain-climb to today’s coordinates in Christchurch, New Zealand. Congrats to the Denver graticules for getting organized so fast (and in a split city, at that!). And thanks to everyone for going along with this idea! The weekday trips have been great fun so far, and I look forward to getting the meetups going over the next few weekends!
xkcd 