geocaching

I've just finished loading a couple hundred geocaching waypoints around the Austin area into my GPS. Of course I didn't do that by hand, but wrote some python code to use the Garmin protocol to load the waypoint data. The waypoint data can be downloaded in XML form from the geocaching web site.

This is the first nontrivial program I've done with python, and I'm finding that it's quite nice. I did have some minor trouble with unicode vs ascii string data, but I'm sure that's just my own unfamiliarity with python's handling of such data.

So now that I have geocaching waypoints in my GPS, and my GPS is usually in my car, hopefully I'll be more spontaneous in looking for caches. However, the GPS doesn't hold very much information about the cache except the location, so that makes it a bit more challenging if you don't have a web browser handy to look up the cache info. Maybe I do need a cell phone that does WAP after all...