Bob -after the recent stories on this list of high tech snafus it was really
great to hear your story of high tech success - wonderful!
Kenneth Waller
http://www.pentaxphotogallery.com/kennethwaller
----- Original Message -----
From: "Bob W-PDML" <[email protected]>
Subject: OT: Apple doesn't fall far from the tree
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.
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