2008-08-20 48 17

Wed 20 Aug 2008 in 48,17: 48.1685119, 17.1340127 geohashing.info google osm bing/os kml crox

This was going to be the first geohashing in the Jarok graticule (that some people prefer to call the Bratislava graticule, after the biggest city there, but User:Rgrg prefers the term Jarok graticule, after his place of permanent residentship, even if he spends most of his time in Bratislava nowadays), or indeed, the first geohashing in Slovakia. Quick check on 2008-08-19 evening revealed that 2008-08-20's meetup location falls well withing Bratislava, so it was an obvious decision.

This user earned the Graticule Unlocked Achievement by being the first to reach any hashpoint in the (48, 17) graticule, here, on 2008-08-20.

According to Google maps, the point is just in front of a house inb the middle of Letecká street, but Google aerial photographs are a few meters off in this area, so the expected position was somewhere just inside that house.

The trip started at 17:50 CEST (=15:50 UTC), when User:Rgrg left his work and went to the tram stop. On the way he played his favourite game called "negative time reflexes" with the traffic light, watching car light, and when the red comes, counting mentally up to 2.8 seconds and then stepping on the road - he knows already that it takes 3 seconds for pedestrian green light to turn on. Having achieved spectacular -0.2 second reflex time, he happily came to the tram stop and waited for tram no. 4.

In the tram he tried to invoke Google maps on his PDA to find out the best stop to get off, but that turned out to be rather impractical, since he was standing, holding with one hand, the other hand holding his notebook suitcase. Since he had not his third hand implanted yet, he abandoned the attempt and instead focused on a group of ~10 Italian tourists, happily chatting among themselvs, probably being sure no one understands them. However, User:Rgrg speaks a bit Italian, so he waited eagerly for some deep secrets or erotic hints, but unfortunately they said nothing worth mentioning.

User:Rgrg got off the tram one stop too early, but it was just something like 250 m to the meetup location. He turned on his GPS and walked on, through Vajnorská street, then along the barracks and military police headquarters on Za kasárňou streen (well, if the meetup location fell just in front of the barracks, trying to explain the geohashing principles when being interrogated for photographing the barracks could be interesting... and could earn a Police Geohash achievement :-))

There was no one at the meetup location, save for one man in his overall, not too busy inspecting some unspecified construction accessories some ~20m away from the location - obviously not a fellow geohasher :-)

User:Rgrg took a panoramatic picture of the house and tried to paste post-it note with the words "Internet was here. http://xkcd.org/geohashing/" to the fence, but since it was made out of rough concrete (the fence, not the post-it note), it wouldn't keep, so he just put it between the fence bars.

Google maps where really off, the hashpoint was about 2m from the street, somewhere around the window, so User:Rgrg got about those 2m close to the location (almost within his GPS precision). Unfortunately, he failed victim to integration, since the GPS, mobile phone and camera were all well integrated into one device, so he could not take a photo of the GPS screen....

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  Hashpoint is somewhere in the window at the middle. The road is actually straight, the curvature is made up with lame panorama software.

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  Post-it note with the words "Internet was here" and xkcd URL.