Another Browser Bites the Dust

I just came across an article today titled AOL Pulls Plug on Netscape Web Browser. What's this mean for you? Well, nothing really, unless you like to use Netscape. If Netscape is your preferred browser, dump it. Now. Download Firefox and start getting used to it, because eventually it'll have to happen anyhow.

Netscape will likely continue to live on computers all around the world for years to come--sometimes, it's painful for people to admit they have to give up on their preferred browser--but eventually, new features will be implemented. New standards created, and the old browser will not support them. First, you'll find one site that will no longer work with the browser. Then another. Ten years from now, most major websites may break with your old browser.

And Atlas Quest will be no different. As new technologies are implemented, I intend to use them. There are a number of exciting new CSS constructs I'm looking forward to using as browser support for them improves, and if you're stuck on an old browser, eventually you'll suffer as a result. It'll likely be several years before I'll be able to use the particular standards I want to--Safari supports one of them already, and I bet Internet Explorer and Firefox are working to implement them as well. Netscape--nope, it'll never happen now.

Firefox is built with the same engine as Netscape, so for you Netscape folks out there, that would most likely be your preferred alternate. It's my favorite browser anyhow, much better than IE in my experience. (Especially better than IE6--IE7, however, has fixed many of the problems I used to grumble most about.)

I'll test Atlas Quest with Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, and Opera as necessary. Netscape used to be in that list, but no longer. =) I test most with Firefox since that's my preferred browser, and IE gets tested second most since that's what most people use. Safari and Opera I usually only test if I know of a specific issue involving one of those browsers.

It's official, though. Netscape is dead. R.I.P. Back in my college days, it used to be my favorite browser until Microsoft built the better mousetrap. (Which saddened me greatly when I first realized that IE was a better browser than Netscape--it wasn't until Firefox came along I finally found something that worked better than IE.)

The Envelope Please.....

Atlas Quest does not actually record when a find is recorded, so there are no officially reliable statistics about how many people made use of Free Listing Day or how many finds were recorded. It must have been fast and furious, though, since Atlas Quest did go down for a short period that morning, but nothing a reboot of the server couldn't solve.

The best stats I have for the recording of finds is the AQ Statistics page. It's generated at 1:45am each morning, and yesterday, there were a total of 912,532 finds recorded. Today, it's gone up to 917,199. So overall, 4667 finds were recorded between 1:45am on December 26th and 1:45am on December 27th.

It's not a precise number--people may have started recording their finds between midnight and 1:45 that do not show up in the total, and finds recorded for the 1 hour and 45 minutes this morning are being counted but shouldn't. I deliberately choose to update the stats at 1:45 in the morning however, specifically because very few people are usually on Atlas Quest doing things like recording finds. The vast majority of activity won't take place during those hours.

Of the 4667 finds that were recorded during this period, 1985 of them were listed as being found yesterday, meaning 2682 finds were recorded from before then.

Not really that many, actually, but this is a rather slow time on Atlas Quest to begin with. For the week, the average number of finds recorded is 1340 per day. During the summer, that number could easily averages two or three times that amount.

Anyhow, to make a long story short, I don't really know how many finds were recording for Free Listing Day except that it is significantly higher than a typical day this time of year. =)

For kicks, I'm including some other interesting graphs my webstats program spits out about activity on Atlas Quest.


This graph shows the daily activity on AQ from December of 2006. Couple of things to note. First, weekends show up with a gray background at the beginning. You'll notice, invariably, that Saturdays almost always tend to the be least busy day on Atlas Quest. Mondays, most of the time, are the busiest.

Being December, there is a special anomaly known as Christmas. You can see Atlas Quest activity drop like a rock on Christmas Day, but the drop really starts happening a few days before Christmas before jumping to surprisingly high values between Christmas and New Years. This years graph is pretty much the same. Saturdays have low activity, Mondays have a lot, and activity on the site crashes on Christmas (and the few days leading up to it). No reason to think the rest of the month will play out similarly as last year.

If you're wondering about the colored bars, yellow is the number of visits, dark blue is the number of web pages viewed, light blue is the number of hits recorded, and green is the amount of bandwidth used.

Let's move on....


This is the graph of AQ activity this year. You can see the summer months are clearly busier than the winter months by a wide margin. Peak activity is about double the activity in February. (February gets short thrift not only because it's a winter month, but it also only has 28 days.)

December is a bit short right now, but that's only because there's three weeks of activity in it. The last week of December, historically, is pretty busy, so that month should increase from where you see it now. Probably to about the same level that June is at.

The colors mean the same thing here as in the last graph, except there's an additional color used in this graph--orange. That's the number of "unique visitors" that Atlas Quest recorded.

This is the hourly breakdown of activity this month. The time listed is Pacific Time--completely arbitrary, but since I live in Pacific Time, it's convenient for me. =)

Peak activity happens during the 6:00 evening hour. The rise of activity during the morning is likely east coast folks waking up for work. The morning peak ends during the 9:00 hour--three hours later. Presumably, most of you folks are checking into AQ just as soon as you can once you get into work. ;o)

The least busy period for Atlas Quest is between midnight and 3:00 am, which is why all of the nightly updates are done during that time. The server has extra time then to twiddle it's thumb, calculate P and F-counts, backup the database, and calculate those fascinating AQ stats you can access. If I do major updates of the site, I also try to do them during this period to reduce bothering as many people as possible.

That's about it for this installment of Letterboxing is Fun! Hope you enjoyed yourselves. =)

Free Listing Day begins.... NOW!

Boxing Day, 2007, is also Free Listing Day--the day when everyone, including non-premium members, can record all their finds. Specifically those pesky unlisted boxes that are not found on Atlas Quest.

No, there are no real benefits to recording all of one's finds. Your logbook is still the ultimate source of finds, but many people enjoy seeing all their finds listed in their logbooks and their official F-count increase. An additional benefit to a complete online history of your finds, for those who are into statistics, is the new My Statistics page.

It's usually a perk reserved for premium members, which isn't too disappointing if you consider that most non-premium members don't have complete find histories that would allow for accurate statistics. But for those of you who want to check out your stats, that page will be available for everyone on Boxing Day only. Record all your finds, then check out the statistics on them!

Enjoy the perks while they last, however. At midnight (Pacific time), they'll disappear again the next Free Listing Day.

How to record finds from unlisted boxes? Use the Record Find/Attempt link under the Letterboxes menubar option. Type in the name and type of the box. Skip the author--that doesn't matter for unlisted boxes. Atlas Quest will first list all of the listed boxes it found that matches your search parameters. Then, just below that, shows a list of unlisted boxes that others have already recorded finds on that match your search, or an option to tell Atlas Quest that it's a completely new listing.

Use the links and options in that second half to record the finds of those unlisted boxes.

Happy Boxing!

Ho! Ho! Ho!

Hope you're all enjoying your holidays, but I interrupt your fun for a few announcements.

First, the somewhat-irregular "Free Listing Day" will occur on December 26th, a.k.a. Boxing Day. It was a tradition started to thank those folks who are not premium members yet still provide valuable contributions that others may enjoy. As much as we love letterboxing, there are more important things in life such as families or getting an education that money can be spent on. Free Listing Day started as a salute to those members who are valuable contributors to Atlas Quest, but may not have the financial means to become premium members. Often times, your suggestions, answering questions on message boards, or adding to the help pages can be as helpful as cash.

This is only the second time I've used Boxing Day as a Free Listing Day--I probably won't use that day again next year since I'd rather keep you all guessing. ;o) There will be more Free Listing Days, but it's meant for members who use Atlas Quest regularly and are the real contributors--not the folks who drop by once in a blue moon. That's the reason I don't provide more advance warning of such days, as well. Those who visit once in a blue moon will probably miss their opportunity. Those who log in daily probably won't. ;o)

Next up: Amyrica compiled of a list of folks willing to help me out while I walk from Key West to Springer Mountain. About 30 people in total offered help, including one lawyer who offered legal help in Alabama if I should need it. ;o) I tried calling you all this weekend just to thank you for your offer to help, but finally ran out of minutes on the calling card I was using. (Actually, I started with Amanda's cell phone since it had free minutes on weekends, but she left town on Saturday so I had to resort to the old calling card after that.) I did try calling everyone at least once, but it seems *some* of you thought I was a telemarketer or something and didn't answer my call. ;o) Despite that, I did manage to successfully contact about two-thirds of the folks on the list, which took several hours and was rather fun. For most of you, it was the first time I'd talked to you voice-to-voice. It's always interesting trying to guess what you might sound like as I'm dialing the numbers. I really enjoyed talking to you all.

Many of you noticed a minor update I did this last weekend where you now can use multiple different tags on letterboxes. That was an idea proposed on the message boards which intrigued me, and off the cuff I didn't think it likely that it would happen so quickly, but after thinking about it for a few days, it occurred to me that implementing such an improvement would be surprisingly easy to do. I updated the back end of Atlas Quest to support up to eight different tags in just a couple of hours. It was that easy. The front end--the part you see and interact with--would be a bit more complicated. It used "on/off" toggles. Tags were either on or off. Now I had a set of eight tags, each of which might be on or off, and a panel of 16 buttons to turn on or off each tag seemed rather excessive. I spent a few days mulling over the best way to allow you to interact with the new feature. I could go directly into the database and tag boxes with lots of different tags and it worked just fine. I just needed to "widen" the view a bit so the rest of you could see it too, though.

I did that, uploaded the changes, and now Atlas Quest supports up to eight different tags. Why eight? Why not six? Or ten? Ten is a nice, round number? Technically speaking, there's not really a limit to how many tags I could support. Each tag is stored as a bit in the database, however, and eight bits make up a byte, so I figured I'd use the whole darned byte. Using less wouldn't save any space in the database, using just one more tag would have required two bytes of data. May as well just round up to sixteen different tags at that point, but that just seems excessively silly. So I settled on eight, in short, because some geek--probably not unlike myself--decades ago decided that eight bits should go in a byte. =)

Only premium members get to use all eight options, though, as an added perk for helping to support this site financially. Atlas Quest would not be what it is today if it were not from the financial support of premium members. Not to worry if you aren't a premium member, though--you still have three tags you can use, essentially tripling the number of available tags that you had before. Not bad, huh? ;o) Figured everyone comes out ahead with that feature, though premium members certainly are coming out further ahead.

What else, what else...? I'm slowing getting ready for the Big Day when my hike begins. Yesterday I dehydrated 5 pounds of ground beef, tonight I'm working on getting the water out of spaghetti sauce. Last weekend I discovered a local source for instant beans, which I didn't even realize existed until rather recently. I'm now figuring out what sorts of meals I can use beans in on the trail--a luxury item I never had on the Appalachian Trail. (Nobody carries cans of beans into the woods, and the non-canned variety take way too long to soak and cook.) Instant beans, though. Wow. The possibilities. =)

I still have lots of preparing to do, though.

Tonight I've also spent working on my flash drive--which will allow me to take the entire Atlas Quest development system with my on the trail. The software I'll need I installed and got working a long time ago--now I'm getting all the settings and options set to how I like them. I'm writing this blog entry from the version of Firefox that's running off of the flash drive now, in fact. Installed a bunch of extensions I like to use--Web Developer, View Cookies, FlashBlock, and even stumbled onto a new extension named PDF Download that I thought I'd try. Managed to get Thunderbird working to download my e-mail. Now I'm figuring out how to use a program that can make backups, or sync the data on the flash drive with other locations. Very cool stuff. I'm working on a backup of the flash drive as I type this now.

So that's what I'm up to. There's a few last minute things I'm working on for Atlas Quest before I leave, but most of them aren't particularly noteworthy. I'm afraid of making any substantial changes at this point since if something breaks, I may not be around to fix it. The things I'm tweaking generally have a very low chance of causing problems. Like themes. =) Ugh--I still don't think I'll get all the themes I want to get done... done. Saves something new for me to do next year, I suppose. =)

I'll be spending most of tomorrow with family. There are some folks around these parts that will be getting AQ calendars under the Christmas tree. ;o) For now, I just want to stay up late enough to catch Santa Claus in the flesh. That creepy little guy manages to sneak into the house every year and I never catch him, but darn it, I'm going to catch him this year. I know it!

Wassamatta With Atlas Quest?

As most of you probably know, I'm planning to take off the first few months of 2008 to hike from Key West to Springer Mountain, about 1,800 miles from start to finish. Who'll be in charge when I'm gone? Who'll be able to keep the site running or get it back up while I'm off battling with alligators and bears?

Yes, you're favorite punner--wassamatta_u is an official webmaster and administrator on Atlas Quest with the keys to the kingdom. He's actually done a heroic job on a couple of occasions when I was fast asleep to get the server rebooted during troubles and helping to fix a couple of problematic bugs along the way, so you should be in good hands. Nice to wake up and find out that the problem's already taken care of!

There is another webmaster I brought on board more recently who prefer to stay anonymous at this time--at least until he (or she--I'm using he in a generic sense rather than calling him--or her--an it which seems rather rude) becomes a bit more familiar with the system. Wassamatta would be the head webmaster guru to keep things running smoothly while I'm out of touch, however. He won't be developing features or fixing anything but the most major of bugs--he does have a day job to attend to (such as his Boxers and Briefs gig). Basically, his goal is just to make sure Atlas Quest stays up and running, but he can also help out in ways that no one else can since he'll have direct access to both the code and the database.

There are also five admins (including myself) and a dozen or so moderators to help keep the site running, so they'll be able to help out with most problems. The top of the food chain, however, are the webmasters, and wassamatta_u is your man. =)

I've always wanted to say this publicly, but thank you wassamatta_u for all the help you've already provided over the last number of months! Glad to see you've finally gotten over your shyness!

State of the Thru-hike Address

As many of you may know, I'm planning to start in Key West on January 1st, then hike nearly 1,800 miles to Springer Mountain. If all goes well, I will arrive on April 16th.

Carrying a computer on my back isn't going to happen, so making sure Atlas Quest stays up and running while I'm out of touch is something of a concern for me. What am I doing about this?

First, I've stopped all major development on the site. I'm working to get the site as stable and bug-free as possible. I've been tweaking queries to make them run faster.

Second, I've added two new webmasters and admins this year. Hopefully if something does go wrong, they'll be able to fix it without my help. If you need help from an admin or webmaster, be sure to contact them from the Contact Us page. The link is at the bottom of almost every page on AQ.

If you do contact me directly, it might be several days before I get the message, and may be weeks (or even months!) before I can do anything about it.

Third, I've started paying for an "Enhanced Monitoring Service" so if the site goes down, a 24/7 support group will jump into action within 15 minutes to get the website back up and running.

And finally, I've reactivated my PocketMail device. Some of you old timers might remember my using it while on the Appalachian Trail to write those detailed trail journals. Once again, I will be writing trail journals, but it'll be my link to the outside world.

I'll have my AQ mail forwarded to it so I can check mail from any phone I cross paths with, and I'll be able to reply to them. (I will not be able to log into AQ, however, so I won't be able to DO anything on AQ--just read and respond to AQ mail.)

I've also decided to post my adventures via Blogger. They have a nifty feature where I can post blogs by sending the blog entry to a special e-mail address. I should therefore be able to post much more regularly than I was able to on the AT. Later, when I have access to a computer, I will compile them and add photos into an official Great Adventure, but for the most up-to-date info about my travels, you'll find it on my blog. I hope to update that at least every couple of days.

What else? I have the entire AQ development machine on a flash drive that I'll be carrying with me. If something does go wrong, I can get off the trail and onto a computer--any computer-- to fix it.

Oh, the reason for this post... It's actually a test. I'm typing this on my PocketMail device, and I will e-mail it to my special blogger e-mail address, and it should (in theory) automatically post the message to the Letterboxing Is Fun blog. All without a computer. =)

There will be a new blog just for my hiking adventures at http://www.floridatrail2008.com

I'm still working on it so there's nothing to see at the moment. When it's ready to go live, I'll make it a default blog that everyone on AQ will automatically be subscribed to. (You can unsubscribe at any time if you're not interested in it, however.)

Okay, let's see if we can get this post to post!

Letterbox Trading Cards

Thanksgiving Day, for those of you not in the know, is a pretty slow day on Atlas Quest. Which is expected--you should be spending quality time with friends and family and enjoying the day off of work. Many of you, I suspect, might even be off letterboxing, dragging along those friends and family despite their protests. This is good. It isn't call "quality time" for nothing. ;o)

So I thought I'd use the relative lack of activity to do one of my rare daylight updates to Atlas Quest. This particular update: Support for Letterbox Trading Cards, or LTC for short. I've also seen them called Letterboxing Trading Cards and Letterboxer Trading Cards. All the same, though.

You can now create, list, find, and search LTCs on Atlas Quest as a distinct type of letterbox. No big shocks about how that works. It's all the same as before--just that you now have an option labeled LTC whenever there were options for box types. Additionally, I created a separate section in the help pages explicitly for Letterbox Trading Cards. If you have questions (or answers) about them, that's the place to go. Not to mention the LTC message board as well for discussion about them.

I have to admit, when I first heard about the idea of LTCs, I groaned. "What do we need another type of letterbox for?" But I brushed it aside, figuring it was a passing fad.

Probably a month or two after I first heard of them, my opinion of LTCs changed, and you can blame Batty Girl for that. ;o) She surprised me with a package full of them--probably from a dozen or two people in all--and they were absolutely amazing. Wow! How cool! I showed them off to Amanda, and even brought them with me to the Western New York gathering where I showed them to a couple of other people. "They're not trying to change my mind about LTCs, and they're doing a darn good job of it!"

But I still worried about it being a passing fad and didn't do anything with it. Wait and see, wait and see....

A few more months have passed, and there's still talk about them. More and more people seem to be asking about them. More and more people seem interested in them. At the Bye Bye Turtle gathering, dbltall brought an album filled with this amazing little pieces of art, while everyone else around the table oooed and awwwed.

I've finally decided, LTCs aren't going to go away, so I finally decided to officially support them. Anyone who already listed a box that started with the letters LTC--I've automatically changed the box into an LTC. If you listed LTCs but didn't bother to prefix them with those letters, you really should. I'll come through in another week or so and convert any new boxes that start with the letters "LTC" into an LTC.

For now, there aren't any special attributes that go with them. There are no special tools to track groups of people who want to share them. (Some people have adopted trackers for that purpose, but trackers were never designed to handle LTCs so use them at your own risk.) Perhaps in the future I'll add attributes and tools, but for now, I'll start things simple and see how they evolve. The LTCs of today could change over the next several months, perhaps dramatically so. No sense building a bunch of attributes and tools that may not be useful down the line.

So that's what's up on this Thanksgiving Day. =)

I'm exhausted, and I haven't even started yet!

As many of you know, I thru-hike the Appalachian Trail back in 2003, from Springer Mountain, Georgia, to Mount Katahdin, the highest point in Maine. What a grand adventure! You can read all about it in my Great Adventures if you're interested. Some people have told me I'm quite amusing and that they're a lot of fun to read. =) I've even started turning them into a book, but it's only about half done at this point. Still a lot more work to do before it'll be published.

I started working on Atlas Quest a few months after finishing this great odyssey, and have continued working on the website ever since. It started as a small project to get back into the groove of things--I hadn't worked for two years and my programming skills were rusty. Then I was going to get a 9 to 5 job, work at it for a couple of years saving up lots of money, and if things went really well, get laid off again so I could thru-hike the Pacific Crest Trail. =)

Except I never stopped working on Atlas Quest, and I never did get that 9 to 5 job. Which leaves me with a quandary--how can I get myself laid off?!

The trail is calling me, though. I miss the trail. I started my hike on April 16, 2003. That was the day I saw my first white blaze, and I stood at the summit of Springer Mountain. I remember the weather--sunny and warm, and by sunset, the breeze became chilly. I'll always remember that day. Every April in particular, I feel the pull of the trail. And every April 16th, I imagine all those poor, foolish souls that hiked up to Springer Mountain with the intent to keep on walking for another 2,176 miles.

I have no desire to thru-hike the Appalachian Trail again--been there, done that. But I want to thru-hike other trails, and I set a goal to do the Pacific Crest Trail in 2008--five years after my Appalachian Trail hike.

But the responsibility of running Atlas Quest is something of a quandary for me. For the most part, the website is pretty stable as long as I don't muck around with it. Things go wrong when I start adding new features and making changes.

I decided to bag the Pacific Crest Trail for now. It's so remote, I'd have a difficult time checking up on Atlas Quest regularly, and if something DID go terribly wrong, I'd have a hard time getting off the trail and into civilization to do something about it. But the trail is still calling me....

And so I decided to thru-hike the Florida Trail instead. From Key West to Pensacola. About 1,300 miles, across alligator infested swamps and no mountains to scale. =) I figured it would take me about three months and take me through a huge swath of Florida I've never seen or explored. Start on January 1st, and end sometime near the end of March or early April.

Half the length of the Pacific Crest Trail, it would only take me out of action for three months instead of six. And the Florida Trail is in a much more populated area of the country. I could check up on the site much more regularly (I'm hoping for at least two times per week, rather than the once every week I would have expected on the Pacific Crest Trail). And if something does go wrong and I need to jump into action, the trail is never far from civilization. There's even quite a number of letterboxers in the area who would likely kidnap me from the trail just to get AQ running again if it came to that. ;o)

I just added a new webmaster, so there are now three of us. Both of them would prefer to stay under the radar for now, although I suspect many of you can probably guess at who one of them is. Hopefully they won't have to do much while I'm off hiking, but at least there will be two people around who can restart the server as necessary. They won't be adding new features or anything like that--just making sure the site stays up and running and monitoring the site.

So I'm trying to get all my affairs in order before hitting the Florida Trail. The "paperwork." Some of it quite literally is paperwork. I need to acquire permits, fill out forms, and blah. Not really fun. I'm getting rid of my car--I won't have need of it in Florida and it'll just cost me money to leave it sitting in my mom's driveway the whole time. Atlas Quest is the sticking point, though. I can't just up and carry a computer with me the whole way, but in case of some Atlas Quest emergency, I want to have my development system with me!

So I've figured out a way to put the entire development system on a flash drive. It's very slick. I plug the 2 gig flash drive into a USB port, and my entire development system is available. I can actually run the entire website off this flash drive! It's pretty freaking cool! So I'll be carrying that with me. Technology today is amazing!

The Florida Trail Association puts out a magazine called Footprint. The last copy I received mentioned that 12 people thru-hiked the Florida Trail last year. Twelve! Over 2,000 people attempt the Appalachian Trail each year, and hundreds make it. Not even a baker's dozen pulled off the Florida Trail, though. I'd be in a rare group indeed if I make it. =)

I don't really know much about the Florida Trail, and there's not nearly as much literature about it as you can readily find about the Appalachian Trail. But there is one book, by a Mr. M. J. Eberhart (a.k.a. Nimblewill Nomad), who thru-hiked the Eastern Continental Trail from Key West, along the Florida Trail, to the Appalachian Trail, and finally the International Appalachian Trail deep into Canada. Even AT thru-hikers such as myself think he's crazy. ;o) But it covers his travels in Florida and it's the only book I could find with a detailed description of his trip through Florida, so I ordered it and started reading it several days ago.

It's not an especially impressive book, and in good conscious, it's not something I'd recommend for most people. He uses way too many exclamation points, and if you cut out every sentence where he thanks a hiker, trail angel, trail maintainer, or God, I think there might be three pages left to read. =)

There is a connector trail between the end of the Florida Trail and the start of the Appalachian Trail, however, and I never really gave it much thought. It runs through Alabama and Georgia, and from what I heard, is mostly a bunch of road walking. Not exactly exciting stuff.

Except... it connects to Springer Mountain. Where I started my first thru-hike, back on April 16, 2003. It hit me yesterday afternoon--I have to do this section. It would complete my Appalachian Trail hike. It would add another 500+ miles to my hike, and I figure I'd arrive at Springer Mountain sometime in mid-April if all went well.

Wouldn't it be ironic if I arrived at Springer Mountain on April 16, 2008? Five years to the day I started my AT thru-hike. Five years to the day I last stood on Springer Mountain? It would be prime thru-hiking season as well. I could see those fresh-faced hikers, aching, blistered feet, carrying those 60+ pounds packs up the Approach Trail. I'd be ending my hike, lean but strong, with a beard after not shaving for over four months.

And darn it, I want to be on Springer Mountain April 16, 2008. I don't just have an end point, but also an end date. Maybe Mark can pick me up and bring me back down to Atlanta, and I can take the train back to San Luis. =) That was the route I took to Springer Mountain in 2003--Amtrak from San Luis to Atlanta, and Mark driving me up to Amicalola Falls.

I can't think of a better way to end a hike. =)

The Springer Mountain finish is only an idea I got yesterday, though. I'd been planning to end at Pensacola, Florida, but I need to start doing a bit more research about that connection trail between the Florida and Appalachian Trails.

My hike just got 550 miles longer, and all I did was read a book.

The trail is calling me, though.

Key West to Springer Mountain, January 1-April 16, 2008. That's my goal.

-- Ryan

PS. If anyone is going to the Microsoft Annual Shareholder meeting at 8:00am in the Seattle Convention Center tomorrow morning, keep your eyes peeled for me! =)

Rise of the Tortuga

My long lost signature stamp still has not resurfaced, despite rumors to the contrary. Perhaps someday it will, but until then, I needed something new. My original turtle stamp was supposed to last for 100 finds, then I was going to replace it with another signature stamp. Five years later, I was still using that stamp old turtle. Oh, it was upgraded--with boots and everything! But it was old and I wanted something new and fresh for a long time. Something with the words "Green Tortuga" already carved on it so I'd no longer have to write it in by hand anymore.

It's been weeks in the making, searching for that perfect image that captures my essence. And at long last, it is time to unveil my new signature stamp!

For those of you who often ask, is it okay to change your signature stamp once you've started using it? If I'm any example, the answer is YES! Don't feel stuck with the same stamp, find after find, month after month. Feel free to shake things up a bit and carve a new one. Perhaps a small stamp for those logbooks that don't have room for large ones. Perhaps seasonal stamps. Perhaps different signature stamps for different parts of the country. There's no reason you can't have a whole pocketful of signature stamps.

That said, I'm terribly lazy. I probably won't end up replacing this one unless it becomes lost or damaged. And when the time does come to replace it, I'm sure I'll create another completely new stamp just to shake things up again. =)

Carpe diem!

Death of a Tortuga

The Tortuga Boots signature stamp was born on a wet, dreary day in August 2003 in the state of Connecticut. The frogs were out thick, and Amanda of Seattle fame carved it in honor of the Green Turtle's Appalachian Trail thru-hike. The left boot clearly says AT, but Amanda never did like the right boot that says 03.

Ryan retired his old bootless signature stamp and has been stamping in with Tortuga Boots ever since including an estimated 60 or so trail registers, 800 letterboxes, and 400 exchanges. Not to mention the 500 or so stampings of invoices, envelopes, and other miscellaneous items. In four different countries.

In March 2006, the stamp traveled to Dartmoor and the famed Cranmere Pool letterbox.

It has exchanged with such luminaries as wassamatta_u, Celtic Quinn, Trekkie Gal, Wisconsin Hiker and Martini Man, Doublesaj n Old Blue, Alaska Homeschoolmommy, Dixie, Eidolon, and--most recently--Webfoot.

Tortuga Boots is survived by his older brother, Tortuga Barefoot; his caretaker, Green Tortuga; his mother, Amanda from Seattle; and far too many friends from around the world to mention by name.

Memorial services may be held in Gorham, Maine, the last known location of Tortuga Boots. In place of flowers, it was Tortuga Boots's wish that donations be made towards premium memberships on Atlas Quest.

We'll miss you, Boots, but you will not be forgotten.....