User:Youhas

Who is this Youhas fellow, anyway?

Youhas is a cubicle-going dork, both living and working in Santa Clara - near Great America, right next to the San Jose-San Francisco graticule split. Already well-versed in driving all over the esoteric barrens of the universe - a consequence of attempting to visit every U.S. county within his lifetime - he intends to visit those weekend SJ/SF hashes that arise when his social calendar is clear, plus weekday ones when the proximity fates smile upon him. (Also, on those 1-in-200 occasions when Santa Cruz has a land-based hash in its graticule? Oh, he is so there.)

Once upon a time, Youhas - who also goes by Antwon, by the way - spent a ridiculous amount of time pumping out content for his intermittently-heralded antwon.com website. At some point, not even the mighty Internet could provide the emotional validation needed to keep such a beast running; it has since fallen into mild disrepair. You can still see him put up the occasional post in his LiveJournal (so 2003, I know!), though, or follow him on his oft-chirped-in Twitter feed.

Geohashes Visited

2008-06-14 - Made it out to the San Francisco geohash - the first official Saturday meetup actually manifesting on dry land for that graticule! Missed out on all the theatrics involving the shotgun-toting individuals, though, for better or worse. Either way, though: good times!

2008-07-02 - A successful suburban geohash visit, meeting up with Tapin on a tony residential street in San Jose, near Campbell. (Well, technically, the point itself was in someone's living room; I didn't have the chutzpah to go knocking on anyone's door to request access, though.) No need for fancy-schmancy GPS devices or anything to suss out this point, either - Google Street View fortuitously included a house number to aim for and everything.

2008-07-10 - Another successful suburban geohash visit - again in San Jose, this time near Santa Clara University. Again in or around someone's residence, meaning that the point was actually "visited" from the nearest available stretch of sidewalk. No matter, though. Close enough for me!

Failed Geohash Attempts

2008-06-15 - Google Maps failed to give me driving directions to the location, true - but the satellite map showed that the road I'd be on totally continued onward! With the geohash right along the shoulder and everything! Undaunted, ventured out towards the hills outside Milpitas... only to find that Google Maps had truncated my drive with cause: the road in question went headlong into a chain-link fence. With no immediately obvious pedestrian workarounds, either. Oops! Live and learn, I suppose. :-)

2008-06-16 - Thought that this location would fall on one of the Stanford trails, being near the Felt Lake area and all. Turns out it's actually on a private, for-wholesalers-only tree farm. By the time I'd found that out, though, I'd run out of both time and ability-to-interact-with-authority chi, sadly. No random workday xkcd meetup for me this time around!