Day One Hundred Six | Geohashing

Monday, April 27th, 2009

Several forces led me to the location where I took this photo. I tried out a variant of geocaching dreamed up by the guy who writes the XKCD web comic wherein a hash is derived from the opening value of the Dow for a given day, and that is combined with the coordinates of a particular zone to derive a set of coordinates you’re supposed to visit on that day. It’s called Geohashing.

See, the other day, I downloaded a geohashing app for my Android phone that makes finding your location as simple as choosing today’s date. I saw today’s location was actually on my route back from school, and ended up where this photo was shot.

I love all of these geo games (geocaching, geohashing, geodashing, etc.) because they literally turn the physical world into your playground. With the GPS on my phone, and all the free time I’ve got these days, I’ll have to get hashing.