My wife got a gold star this week.  She told me about a neat site on the internet that allows treasure hunting…with geeks in mind!  She doesn’t give me sites often that I have never heard off but this week she hit one out of the park.

A friend, John Barlow, principal of Blue Ridge Christian School, Bridgewater, VA, told her about it and has experience with Geocaching.  He became my main professional geocacher source.

You can go to the site (www.geocaching.com) and find out more information about it than I can give you here, but let’s look at a summary.

Geocaching is a new sport, hobby, addictive pastime, etc. that people have started who own GPS devices (Global Positioning System).  You may have one in your car or a portable one; which lends itself more to this type of endeavor.  GPS is a worldwide satellite navigational system which is made up of 24 satellites orbiting the earth at approximately 12,000 miles above the surface.  They send data back to receivers, GPS devices, and you can see exactly where you are or where you are going.  Most have mapping capabilities for finding “that place you’ve never been to before” and tell you how to get there.

OK, on to the sport.  You can sign up as a member of Geocaching.com and then look up hidden containers in your area.  You get the GPS coordinates for that “cache” from your device and then go find it.  Is there money in it?  Nope. Is there a nice watch or diamond ring in it?  I really doubt it.  Then why do it?  For fun! 

The container may have pencils in it, a business card, sunglasses, maybe a special Geocoin or just about anything else.  The caches are hidden in places you can find but you may have to hunt for it for a while before finding it.  The deal with a regular cache is that you take something out, put it in another cache somewhere else and replace what you took with something of your own.  Then you report to the site what you put in and all the details about your find, without giving away too many details.

John told me of finding a Geocoin that began in Texas and was bound for Georgia. You find these cached coins and move them closer to their destination.  John found his first at the Grand Caverns Park, Weyers Cave, VA, in mid-August.  He and his sons hid it in Staunton, VA.  He checked its travel history and found that earlier in the summer it was in Alaska and on 9/22 was in Florida.  He said sometimes they overshoot their destination but show up there sooner or later.

Good luck treasure hunting - you may see me hunting around in Harrisonburg soon!

Wouldn’t it be great to be able to travel back in time?  OK, I grew up on “Star Trek: TOS” (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek:_The_Original_Series) and I always thought the time travel episodes were the greatest.  Also, for you really old folks out there like me do you remember “The Time Tunnel” (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Time_Tunnel)?

Are you ready for this?  I found a way to travel back in time starting in 1996 with the “Internet Archive Wayback Machine” (www.archive.org).  I thought that I would share it with you today so that you may also travel in time!

Now don’t get too excited as you can only travel through the world of the internet.

Pretend that you are discussing your company’s old website, before you worked there, or before the name change.  You have a disagreement with someone on what other products you sold then.  With the Wayback Machine you can most likely find the site back to around 1996.  I checked out the DoubleClicks.info site and found the first page I had ever built for the column - way back in December, 2002.  It also had copies of the site as recent as July, 2007. 

Just type in the site you are looking for and you may find what it looked like back in 1996 up until more recently.  Another interesting aspect of it is that if you click a link on the archived site it will take you to that linked site to around that same time!

The Internet Archive Wayback Machine is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization that was started to build an internet library.  Normal libraries are used to store information on books, magazines, research materials, etc. both young and old.  Wayback has the same idea in mind.  It offers a “…permanent access for researchers, historians, and scholars to historical collections that exist in digital format.”  It is located in the Presidio of San Francisco (www.nps.gov/archive/prsf/home.htm) which is a part of the National Park Service, U.S. Department of the Interior.   

The Wayback site includes text, audio, images, software and obviously a compilation of web pages (85 billion, more or less).

The site has lots of things to look at and research with a few clicks.  It has an area where you can even search books.  If the book you search for has no copyright on it you can even read it online.  My wife suggested searching for “Anne of Green Gables”.  In less than a minute I had a copy of it displayed on my computer for her to read, save or even print to read later.  Of course if you are going to print one make sure you have a lot of paper ready to go.

This is an all around great site.  Take a trip back in time and let me know what you were able to find.

Tags: Ron Doyle, Star Trek, Way Back, WayBack

First off, all of the Pownce (www.pownce.com) accounts that I promised to give out last week are now gone…plus a few extras I came across.  Thanks to those of you that were interested and don’t forget to let me know that you have signed up and I will add you to my friends list.

I received a question about eBooks this week; like, “What are they?”

When you see the letter “e” added to anything you can be fairly certain that it stands for “electronic”.  Email for instance…electronic mail.  Therefore an ebook (or eBook) must be an electronic book, which it is.  An official definition could be something like, “an electronic version of a traditional printed book that can be read digitally by using a PC, PocketPC, cell phone or other type of device.”

Next, where do you find these ebooks?  One of the best places to find the classics would be “Project Gutenberg” (gutenberg.net).  They say they have over 20,000 books most of which are found in the public domain of the U.S.  They also say that they average over 3 million books downloaded per month.  “Public Domain” means that the item (book, software, etc.) is available at no charge because it’s copyright, patent, or trademark has expired or has been waived for public use.

Here you can find a lot of the classics like “The Three Musketeers”, all of Arthur Conan Doyle’s “Sherlock Holmes” books, and even “War and Peace”.  You just follow the links and download them to your computer. 

You can also buy most of the latest books in the market in ebook form (usually from $5-$18).  Check ebookmall.com, or just use google.com to search for “ebooks“.  If you are looking for a specific author or title just “google” them with “ebook” added.

Be careful!  There are several different ebook formats out there with several requiring special software to read them; like Adobe, Word, MS-lit, and MobiPocket.  I like to use either HTML (web page format) or TXT formats.  I have a preference for the TXT (text) file format as it is readable without special software.  Just make sure that you have the software that can interpret the files and make sure you price the software before paying for the ebook.

One last new term for you, “Podcast Books”.  Years ago we would have called these “Books on Tape” but not today.  These books may be downloaded to your MP3 player and listened to on your way around town.  They also start at free (www.podiobooks.com - new unknown authors) to some at $50+ (www.audible.com - the newest books out).  You download them and listen away.  I sometimes enjoy these with my 90 minute roundtrip ride to work each day.

Today I will tell you about “Social Networking”, which I am not much of a fan of, but from the emails I receive, many of you are.  Most people will need a definition of sorts before I get started, so here goes. 

A Social Network started out as a group of people who usually have the same hobbies, jobs, political leanings, etc.  The owner of a site writes their thoughts, findings, feelings and expertise about these interests on the internet.  The social part comes in where people of similar interests find their Blogs (combination of the words weB and LOGs) and then read and/or discuss what is said by the original poster to the site.

Many people make long lasting friends from these sites.  I would rather pick up my phone and call a friend to talk about life, but I guess I am just an analog guy in a Web 2.0 world…even though I am a geek.

I am writing this article more specifically about, “Mini-Blogs”.  I have heard them referred to in different ways but I like that term.

There of several of these mini blogs in the forefront.  For each of these I will give you a link to my site mini-blog.  Don’t get too excited, since I don’t care for them I don’t really post any juicy information but I thought you may want to take a look at them.  You might like this and find you enjoy writing and reading thoughts and ideas.

Twitter is one of the first that I ran into (http://twitter.com/rondoyle). Twitter is about the most basic.  You can type up to 140 characters and people can instantly read what you wrote. 

I will put the next two together as they are similar; however, I am sure the pro users of each may disagree.  They are Jaiku and Tumblr (http://doyle.jaiku.com and http://rdoyle.tumblr.com respectively).  I feel that Jaiku offers many extras but they are both pretty slick.  With Tumblr you can post pictures too…check mine out.

Pownce is last (http://pownce.com/Elyod).  If I were a blogger Pownce would be my favorite.  The reason it is my favorite is because it just seems to have a lot of “stuff” and is fairly simple to use.  Pownce just started up a few months ago and is now in the testing phase.  You can only become a Pownce member by invitation from another member.  Check out my Pownce account if you want one become a member; the secret word is “hummingbird”.

The reason I don’t care for blogs is that the majority of them are opinions and boring day-to-day happenings.  Also, they started as people sharing similar interests; however, today it is about becoming a “friend” of a blog.  The game seems to be to see how many friends you can get on your blog, whether they participate or not.  Boring.