I got a GPS unit the other day.  My friend Jake at work had one that can attach to a Palm V, but his palm V broke.  I offered to buy the GPS attachment for $50 and found a palm Vx for $20 at the pawn shop.   I figured $70 for a GPS with map software and everything is a pretty good deal.
   
    Now, some of you may be saying to yourselves "Why a GPS?"  Well, I will tell you.  Actually, I will show you.  Go to www.geocaching.com and you will see why it is so great to have a GPS. 

    Geocaching is basically like treasure hunting.  You get coordinates off the website for a treasure box ("cache") and put them into your GPS.  Then you just follow the arrow until you find the box.  You can take anything from the box, but the idea is that you leave something in return.  My crew back in Colorado used to do this a couple years back when it just started out, but now it's gotten huge.

    There are like 100 caches within 10 miles of my house.  I set out on my skateboard and found the nearest one in about ten minutes.  I left a toy truck and took a jack in the box antenna head thing.  There will be much more of this happening, although none of my friends seemed very excited about it. 

...

    So a few weeks ago my wirelesss card disappeared.  I was pretty upset about it, but I have integrated wireless on my main laptop (the card was for my other two laptops).  Anyway, I have a hard time with believing that it could have been my room mates who took it. 

    The plot now officially thickens.  My CD book full of movies and software was taken today.  Both my room mates said they saw it under the coffee table this morning.  Matt and Steve were both gone all day.  Matt thinks that maybe our neighbor , Kage, might have come over and taken it.  He's a shady character to begin with, and our landlord made the mistake of keying both apartments with the same key.  So far nobody else had figured it out, or so I thought.  That needs to change.

    A suggestion was given to me to go over to Kage's place when he's not home, let myself in, and search around for my stuff.  I don't think I could do that.  I'm pretty sure I would not like to stoop to a thief's level. 

    So I am taking counter measures.  I set up a webcam pointing into our main room where it can see people who come in and out.  I put some software on my computer that will detect motion and then record a picture every second to the hard drive.  I'll leave it on for the next few days and see what it comes up with.  I think it's a pretty sweet idea.  I could buy like 5 webcams and wire up the whole apartment.  Some may call me crazy.  Maybe I am crazy - but I'd rather be crazy with all of my possessions intact then sane and possessionless.