ares's blog

My apologies to those I've told that this post has been coming. You'd think that with the COVID-19 crisis I'd actually have more time to write this, but that time has been consumed by other things. The long and short of it is that most of the 2020 season has been cancelled. We already had dates slated for a handful of summer hunts:

Yup. The 2019 summer treasure hunt season kicks off today with the Somerset Pea Soup Days Medallion Hunt. It just hit me that I never wrote a wrap up of the 2019 Pioneer Press hunt. Perhaps its because nearly four months after the fact my face is finally starting to thaw out. Yes, the 2019 hunt was a cold one. I managed to get out for about 3 hours the Tuesday of the final week of the hunt, bundled up to the nine's. I don't envy those who were out there that last day, except for JC. H certainly earned his prize!

Whether intentional or not, some Coolerheads managed to appear on this years Winter Carnival button. 

 This year's treasure hunter Winter Carnival button features a group of hunters digging around a tree in an otherwise unidentified park. The button release had folks wondering what the source of the picture was. Wonder no more. The picture was on the front page of the Friday, January 24, 2014, Pioneer Press, with a title of "BRRR-URIED TREASURE HUNTERS"

The Water Cooler has been operational here for a couple of months now, so I thought I'd give a quick update on it.

As of right now, a few changes have been made based on feedback of the folks who have used it. The big one that's still out there is the inability to delete comments. At this point, there's a tradeoff between how we want the forum to look versus deleting comments. If we want to maintain the look linearly, I have to lock down the ability to delete comments, because deleting a comment right now results in all of the replies also get deleted, which would majorly screw up comments in a linear fashion.

That all said, I'm working on migrating the forum posts from the forum archive section of the database into the main site management system. This consists of several steps:

If you're still active on Ableminds, you know that for the past few weeks it hasn't been well. The latest update we have from them, as of Saturday is as follows:

The Ableminds Forum database is corrupt and we have been unable to find a way to recover it. We consulted a few other experts and there were a couple of suggestions offered, but unfortunately it doesn't seem possible to recover most of the information that was in the database.

The hunt has been over for nearly two weeks now. Rob scored his third Winter Carnival Medalllion find just after the 12th clue came out.

I was destined to be a weekender this year. With schedule changes at work I just couldn't get the time off. So, settling for nightly meetups in the bar and Friday night, Saturday and Sunday afternoon digging was the plan.

As they always do, however, plans changed.

December. Its that time of year when we all start thinking about the holidays:

• Hanukkah
• Festivus
• Christmas
• New Year's
• Medallion Hunt
• Winter Carnival
• Super Bowl

You get the idea. For me that means trying to spend some time doing stuff for this web site, always frantically hoping I can get something new added before the hunt and the Carnival, knowing full well that if I don't, it'll be there waiting for me next December (although I am going to commit to getting the Able Minds archive into this site before the hunt). It always does, and I don't mind. But as I get myself into that particular mindset, I find myself poring over the site statistics. This year, I've come across several interesting landmarks and milestones that we've hit this year.