Thirty years ago Kitt Williams wrote, or rather painted, the children’s book Masquerade. Each page had a picture that contained hidden clues pointing to the location of an 18-carat gold, jewel-encrusted hare buried somewhere in Britain. It sparked a National treasure hunt and sold 2 million copies.
I remember being fascinated with the pictures and the theories and solutions bandied about by those older and wiser than I. The majority of programmers seem to have a fondness for puzzles and riddles, and the beauty and success of the book was that it involved transposing clues to maps and real-world locations.
Geocaching
Geocaching could be seen as a successor to Williams’s book. As someone working in technology and geography it should seemingly be an ideal pastime. However the fact geocaching is a trademarked word owned by a company named Groundspeak kills a little of the mystique. Secondly it appears to me to be the equivalent of driving around in the middle of nowhere with a bad in-car GPS trying to find an address that’s missing from the database.