Excellent! Paul via phone
> On Apr 13, 2014, at 4:50 PM, Bruce Walker <[email protected]> wrote: > > That's quite a story, and great to hear it has a happy ending too. > > >> On Sun, Apr 13, 2014 at 4:12 PM, Bob W-PDML <[email protected]> wrote: >> In three weeks I'm cycling the Sarsen Trail >> <http://www.wiltshirewildlife.org/sarsen-trail/bike_it> with a friend. I >> don't normally cycle off-road, and my bike is a lightweight tourer, so I >> thought I'd better try it out and perhaps borrow an off-road one if I didn't >> think my audax would stand up to it. >> >> So today I took off the mudguards and rack, fitted some cyclocross knobbly >> tyres and headed up to Oxleas Wood, some ancient woodland about 5 miles from >> where I live. >> >> I put my wallet, iPhone, camera, glasses, bike lock and a book in a nylon >> stuffsac, which I then put into a seat bag. My plan had been to reward >> myself afterwards with a nice cup of tea and a good read in the wonderfully >> badly-kept-secret cafe they have up there, with magnificent views east - I >> believe it's the highest point in London. >> >> It was a dark and stormy night. The woods were dark and deep. No. It was a >> beautiful spring day. My bike looked really cool, the woods were lush and >> green. The forest floor was a cliche of bluebells, so I kept stopping to >> take pictures. It was a bit of a drag fishing the camera out of the seatbag >> each time, so I decided to strap it, in its CCS case, to my belt, and went >> off charging around again. >> >> Half an hour later, I realise I didn't close the seat bag. My favourite >> wallet, my credit cards, driving licence, Oyster card, £75- cash, iPhone, >> glasses, bike lock (£100!) and Marivaux are gone. >> >> Dilemma. Rush home and cancel everything, or try to find it. I spent 3 >> fruitless hours randomly searching the Ice Age undergrowth, like some sort >> of Hansel & Gretel, lost in there. Trees and leaves and sodding bluebells >> all look the same after a while but you soon get to know all the empty beer >> cans, bits of bog roll and pre-loved condoms in the whole fucking forest >> when you're stressed out of your mind. >> >> So I gave up and came home. On the way of course some fuckwit in a car >> decided he was the only fuckwit who should be allowed on the road and we >> ended up in a shouting match which finished in comedy when he said "you >> wouldn't say that if I wasn't in this car", to which I wittily reparteed >> "get out of the fucking car then", and he drove off. Marivaux could have >> learned some things from me. >> >> I cancelled my cards, and was looking on the iPad for a way to disable the >> iPhone when I found this Apple thing called, er, Find my iPhone. Hmm. Wonder >> what that does. So I tried it and it showed that it was still in the woods, >> and let me set it to lost, so hopefully it wouldn't let anyone else play >> with it and find all my dark secret things. I was resigned to losing the >> cash. >> >> Now, I hope someone from Apple gets to read this, because it's a great app, >> but it would be even greater if it told you the coordinates of the centre of >> the circle where your iPhone is, and the radius of the circle. >> >> So, I opened my GPS programme, which is called ExpertGPS and is pretty good >> <http://www.expertgps.com>, and by squinting a bit and finding a couple of >> reference points on the maps, made a stab at a waypoint for the lost phone, >> as well a waypoint for a reference point on the ground which marked out a >> line to follow. I then loaded the waypoints onto my GPS, and cycled back to >> the woods. >> >> It took another hour of searching, but this time methodically, and I found >> it. >> >> It felt like a miracle. I made a waypoint on the GPS where I found the >> stuff, and when I got home again compared the actual position with the one >> I'd crudely made based on the Find my iPhone result. They were only 17 >> metres apart, which I think is not bad under the circumstances. >> >> So at the moment I love Apple. >> >> I hate Dell though, because the screen on my laptop seems to have failed. >> Guess I'll have to replace it with a Mac. >> >> Oh, and the bike performed superbly. >> >> B >> -- >> PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List >> [email protected] >> http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net >> to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and >> follow the directions. > > > > -- > -bmw > > -- > PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List > [email protected] > http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net > to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow > the directions. -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
