Sunday, January 31, 2010

Photos of winter time Geocaching in Streetsville

Today was another great day out and about doing the Geocaching.com thing. It was a chilly afternoon and 6 hours of hunting them down provided plenty of reason for a hot chocolate and warm fire at the end of the day.

Today's treasures were scattered amongst cemeteries, church lots, urban community centres, neighbourhood forests, and shopping mall parking lots. We found everything from the very small nano sized with log only up to the regular sized with plenty of room for goodies.

Here are today's geocaching photos:


There was a light dusting of snow both on the ground and in the air which provided for plenty of picturesque photos of frozen creeks and snow swept grounds.

For one stop with two geocaches in one forest it took 20 minutes to travel between them. Not because of the distance, but because of the landscape of fallen trees, creeks, and plenty of bush wacking. What a joy to spend the afternoon in the forgotten forests of the neighbourhood.

Over the past month I have gone from "muggle" (someone that does not know about the game) to someone that can't wait for the weekend to start a new journey in search of treasures. If you haven't already it is time for you to learn about Geocaching.com and get outside and enjoy your surroundings!

Sunday, January 24, 2010

Sixteen Xbox 360 Games that Rock plus guides for full 1000K achievement points in under 20 hours

If you happen to play Xbox 360 just for the 1000K achievement points then you have played some awful games (e.g. Darkest of Days) and some games that rock (e.g. Jericho) plus games in between. Games have varying degrees of difficulty in achieving the full 1000K while others are not difficult but take 20 or more hours to complete.

Here are some great games that have achievable 1000K, require less than 20 hours and they Rock:

  1. 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand (guide)
  2. Clive Barker’s Jericho (guide)
  3. Condemned: Criminal Origins (guide)
  4. CSI-Hard Evidence (guide)
  5. CSI: Deadly Intent (guide)
  6. Fight Night Round 3 (guide)
  7. Ghostbusters: The Video Game (guide)
  8. Gun (guide)
  9. King Kong (guide)
  10. Lost: Via Domus (guide)
  11. Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End (guide)
  12. Saw (guide)
  13. Sherlock Holmes vs Jack the Ripper (guide)
  14. Silent Hill: Homecoming (guide)
  15. TMNT (guide)
  16. X-Men: The Official Game (guide)
There are also plenty of sports title that could be used to gain 1000K, however, it'll depend on your tolerance level for certain sports. Generally all of the 2006, 2k6 sports titles can be completed in less that 10 hours, but they can be hard to find at retail or rental stores. Happy achievement hunting!

Saturday, January 23, 2010

Another great day of Geocaching.

Another great day of geocaching with a variety of cache types in Mississauga:
  • Micro caches (really small ones with only a log),
  • Small caches (small one with small pencil and few trickets), and
  • Regular caches (larger ones with plenty of trickets, travel bugs and geocoins to trade)
The Caches can be hidden in a variety of places:
  • deep in forests
  • city parks near homes
  • back streets in bushes and trees
  • cemeteries in trees
  • public spaces (e.g. paper box, trash containers, guard rails)
  • urban streets amongst landmarks

Tuesday, January 19, 2010

Report Writing Tips - Proofreading

It is important to learn to proofread your reports efficiently and here are some tips:

1) Look for Common Writing Mistakes

  • Confusing "it's" and "its"
  • Confusing "their," "there," and "they're"
  • Capitalizing nouns that are not proper nouns, and failing to capitalize proper nouns
  • Run-on sentences
  • Sentence fragments
  • Poor use of paragraph breaks
  • Poor use of commas
  • Confusing commas, colons, and semi-colons
  • Shifting verb tenses

Saturday, January 16, 2010

Geocaching in Mississauga

Outside today with the trusty Magellan Triton 400 GPS looking for geocaching treasures. For the muggles out there that do not know about geocaching check out the Wikipedia entry:

Geocaching is an outdoor activity in which the participants use a Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver or other navigational techniques to hide and seek containers (called "geocaches" or "caches") anywhere in the world. A typical cache is a small waterproof container (usually a tupperware or ammo box) containing a logbook. Larger containers can also contain items for trading, usually toys or trinkets of little value. Geocaching is most often described as a "game of high-tech hide and seek", sharing many aspects with orienteering, treasure-hunting, and waymarking.

Here are some snapshots of the adventures today:

Friday, January 15, 2010

What gamer web sites should be bookmarks?

Here is a mash up of great websites that have frequent updates on gaming news, xbox 360 achievements, gamertag profiles, and PC digital stores.

1) Gaming News

  • www.joystiq.com: Nicely embedded videos, robust posts on the lastest gaming news.
  • www.kotaku.com: Part of larger network, timely posts on the latest gaming news, good comments system.

2) Xbox 360 Achievements
3) Gamertag Profiles
4) PC digital stores

URLs to Show your Xbox avatar and gamertag pics

If you have ever wanted to play around with your xbox.com avatar images and gamertag pics well here are a few links for you to work with.


1) Gamertag pic - small (32px by 32px)
http://avatar.xboxlive.com/avatar/gamertag/avatarpic-s.png where you would change gamertag to your own.

Here is an example of my weeken gamer pic using this link http://avatar.xboxlive.com/avatar/weeken/avatarpic-s.png
2) Gamertag pic - medium (64px by 64px)
http://avatar.xboxlive.com/avatar/gamertag/avatarpic-1.png where you would change gamertag to your own.

Here is an example of my weeken gamer pic using this link http://avatar.xboxlive.com/avatar/weeken/avatarpic-1.png

3) Avatar pic (150px by 300px)
http://avatar.xboxlive.com/avatar/gamertag/avatar-body.png where you would change gamertag to your own.

Here is an example of my weeken gamer pic using this link http://avatar.xboxlive.com/avatar/weeken/avatar-body.png