It’s nice to know some things remain consistent. Every year or two I re-take the keirsey test to find out what my ‘personality type’ is. It’s been remarkably consistent. Tonight, once again, I scored as an INTP (Introverted Intuitive Thinking Perceiving).
The test I used is here.

I hate to see a good thing get ruined.
One of my daily joys was waiting until around 1pm when TheDailyWTF would update with a well written story about some workplace / tech related problem that really made the reader go “Wha de FU?” The articles were very well put together, the story behind each posting was interesting and detailed, and it was nice hearing about oddities in the tech sector each day.
Around the middle of last year, the writers added a new feature, the “Code Snippet Of The Day”. A sidebar bit of content where code-specific WTF’s were posted and readers would comment on where the problems were and how they might be fixed. I found the CodeSOD entries somewhat distracting – the writing style was stilted and boring, and would classh with the normal content.
Then, the site changed it’s name.
It was no longer “The Daily WTF” – it was now “Worse Than Failure”. The various reasonings behind this move were shallow and rang hollow. It was simply the next step in a blog owner trying to broaden their content base to be able to provide more diverse content. New posters were brought in, and the article quality dropped precipitously. Instead of one high quality article a day, we had a 3-5 poorly written articles, intermixed with CodeSOD’s.
Now, the final insult.
This week they are running “Classics Week”. Now, I’m all for nostalgia. It’s great going back into the archives and pulling out truly outstanding articles from the past and reminiscing. But the authors on TheDailyWTF are doing no such thing. They are posting classic articles from as recent as nine weeks ago.
Ladies and gentlemen, a classic is something I may have missed in the distant past, or something that stood above all the others and should be brought back. When doing ‘classics’, you don’t just repost recent articles.
I’m sorry, but TheDailyWTF has destroyed itself in the process of trying to expand itself, a process all too common in successful blogs. I bear no antipathy toward Alex Papadimoulis, the owner of TheDailyWTF, but if I were to make one suggestion to him, it would be “Alex, stop. Return to what you were doing well. The new content is not working.”

One of the things I like best about the Geocache caches is that they’re rarely placed in random places without anything interesting around them. Last week I visited a spot in Northboro where a storm in the late 80’s flattened 5+ acres of pine trees with a microburst.

Today’s hike and find involved going 2+ miles into the woods near Nobscot Mountain (it’s not much of a mountain, but it’s a great hike), not far from the famous Wayside Inn. There, buried deep in the woods with no markers or anything, I found… Fords Folly.

According to the geocache site, this structure was built in the 20’s by Henry Ford:

n 1923, Henry Ford stepped in to protect the Wayside Inn as a “splendid example of colonial America.” He purchased nearly 1500 acres surrounding the Inn, built a traditional New England style chapel, a field stone grist mill (rumored to be the “most photographed historic site”) and moved The Redstone School or “Little Red Schoolhouse” (of Mary and her little lamb fame) to its current site. In addition, Ford moved the old Parmenter-Garfield general store from Sudbury center to Marlboro and built “Ford’s Folly” (the 60 ft. dam up on Nobscott Mountain, so named for its refusal to hold water despite years of labor). Obsessed with historic authenticity, all construction and renovations had to be accomplished in “the traditional manner” using only man and oxen power.

Further information is available at Wikipedia about the Wayside and the abandoned dam.

When I saw the entry on the geocaching site, I was certainly NOT expecting to find a huge 30′ dam in the middle of the woods. The entire hike took about 3 hours total, including finding 3 geocaches along the route. gmaps-pedometer has the route, as best as I can map it. It clocked it out at 3.6 miles, but given all the twists and turns of the trail, as well as a couple forays to interesting vistas or other trails, the total hike was probably closer to 5 miles. It certainly ranks up there as one of the more tiring jaunts I’ve done, but the weather was perfect, the trees were all a-whistle with wind, and the bugs haven’t -quite- made it out yet.

I’m beginning to think one of the most brilliant changes to come down the tech pike in the last 10 years is the realization that a USB port provides a nice steady 5 volts at 100ma of power to any device attached to it. The device can even request more current (up to 500ma).

Since just about every computer nowadays includes a USB port, most manufacturers of mobile equipment have made it so their equipment can recharge from an available USB port. For those of us who carry a lot of extraneous gear around, this has eliminated the need to haul a half dozen different power supplies along, and negated the need to invest in bulky and frequently twitchy “universal” power supply solutions.

For my part, here’s a list of gear I regularly carry around..

• Treo 650 – with a retractible ‘sync / charger’ cable from Treonauts, I have one small cable I can use for hotsyncing and recharging.
• Jabra BT500 headphone – Jabra thoughtfully provided a very short USB cable (about a foot long) that is perfect for just parking the headphone next to the laptop to recharge.
• Sony MZ-RH1 MD recorder/player – This has been fantastic – though the recharging isn’t as fast as my Treo, the connector types are identical to my camera cable (and many other devices), so a special cable is not needed.

Because of this, the only ‘power’ supply I need to have with me is the one for my laptop.

All is not peaches and cream, however. My Olympus C-770 camera does not charge off the USB bus, unfortunately, and has resulted in me being stuck with a dead battery on more than one occasion. I chalk this to the relative agedness of the camera, and take heart in knowing that the NEXT camera I get will definitely have USB recharge capability.