Amazing story with a happy ending. Enjoy your "trip". At least the terrain
is quite flat around Stonehenge. I see they give the distances in Km!
Alan C
-----Original Message-----
From: Bob W-PDML
Sent: Sunday, April 13, 2014 10:12 PM
To: Mail List Pentax-Discuss
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.
B
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