N97 24/7: The NYC Challenge

The moral of today’s story is don’t cheat, or it will bite you in the ass…

Today we were split into two teams and given a running lists of ten GPS co-ordinates to input into Ovi Maps, along with further instructions as to what to do once we got there.

I headed downtown to Astor Place with my teammate for the day. to find The Cube, otherwise known as The Alamo. Once there, we had to snap a couple of photos (which was easy) and I had to move it a bit (which was nearly impossible).

With one landmark under our belt, we headed into the local Starbucks to relax and wait for our next co-ordinates. But the numbers we were given to punch in to our N97s were in the wrong format — degrees, hours, and minutes with decimal places versus degrees, hours, minutes and seconds.

Being too lazy to perform a simple conversion I instead took my cue off of Matt, who figured from the additional clues that he could get us to where we were supposed to navigate to without actually having to navigate to it — the arch by the Brooklyn Bridge shown above.

He was right about the arch, but dead wrong about the location.

I certainly didn’t mind, and truth be told was equally complicit in this navigational crap-shoot. But the detour cost us much of the afternoon, and though we did eventually make our second checkpoint soon afterwards it was pouring rain and dinnertime.

Final Score: 2/10

… Although I should point out that we were back at the hotel to enjoy our in-room massaging chairs a full two hours before George and Jon. So I ask you, who was the real winner here?