brownbag

I was just reading my RSS feeds and look what was in it. Some of them came down before everything was shut down. Since we're opening the kimono. James posted below "I have NOT been offered anything." Here's the message in the officers forums. You decide -- did he get an offer? ---------------------------------- Author: brownbag Posted: Tue Mar 22, 2011 8:14 pm (GMT -7) Topic Replies: 4 Website payment Here's the figures I see from what James has supplied. The website started at some point in August 2009. It ends April 1, or March 31. That's 20 months. Code: DNS 200.00 Domains 40.00 Hosting year 250.00 Hosting 8 mo. 188.00 ------- 678.00 previous check 235.00 ------- to be paid 443.00 With a receipt for the vbulletin and transfer of the serial number to whoever takes over UTAG, we'd pay the costs on it. Otherwise, it's a round $500. I will get a second check written for the vBulletin when I know how much it's for. A vBulletin license is $195 full retail. A complete suite with CMS, blogs and forum is $285. I can't find that they sell anything more expensive than that according to their website (https://www.vbulletin.com/order/) I have blank checks, but can't sign one. Georgia has to do that. It's a long story of red tape at the bank over the signature cards. I will be visiting her and having her write the check. I'm not going to play games with semantics. UTAG was to pay James to host the server on hardware he owns. If he wants to keep everything for lack of payment, it's his. He can choose. The $500 will be delivered upon ftp receipt of the tarballs of the database and website. I will have a check by March 31 to deliver to James. ----------------- Here's his thoughts on handing out Officers forum posts (before the last 24 hours apparently) and thoughts on handing the forums over. I think it matched my original post. ----------------- Author: UTAG Admin Posted: Tue Mar 22, 2011 8:28 pm (GMT -7) Topic Replies: 4 I'm quite disappointed that others have been privy to the "private" posts made in this section. As I've stated in the past, it wasn't about the cost. I've posted at least 3 public messages asking for help and nobody (short of Plumnuts) responded. Brownbag can attest that the current site is very customized. I have been hesitant to modify due to the many hidden URL's and custom applications that have been developed. I ceased the Vbulletin upgrade after finding many non-linked HTML pages for custom applications tied to the PhpBB code (registration, login, etc). I'll be damned if my time & money will just be handed over to Jacob Barlow. As I've stated before, I just don't trust the guy. Give him the code and he''d surely try to get passwords from the membership via the MySQL database. -------------------- That's the last part of the story that I didn't think I could get to.

It's the background unedited private thoughts of the board that Brute has no right to make available, but it shows our thoughts as things transpired. I think it does show we offered him money. I think it shows we were willing to go along with a new organization and to let people decide what to do. As to just letting anyone have the forums and just let anyone run things. Yup. Anyone at the original meeting in 2002 knows that's how UTAG was formed. The original leader got that role by raising his hand. Over time things tend to work out. They will this time. It has never been up to the person who runs the forums to make the decision. If it was, I would never have allowed them to be transitioned where they were. There's a long history of bad interactions between me and BruteForce on the forums. The board said he got it, so I sucked it up and transferred it. I can't imagine anything else I could have to say at this point, so I'll leave it at that.

Not going to play an inappropriate tit for tat. There's been a lot of things taking place in the background that are all for the good. Good enough that Jason (Bonolo) just sent an email to the board+ a couple hours ago and said "I think I can safely step down as UTAG president." I don't disagree with anything James said and don't think I did in the original message. Apprantly his only disagreement was on an offer to pay him. I'm just assuming he didn't look at my last posts in the officers forum at 4 am this morning. The board agreement was to offer $500 without a receipt, or the full amount with a receipt. That was one of the last two messages I posted. It was 5-10 minutes before the board went down. It would have been emailed to him after the other board members agreed. However, nobody on the board was able to look at it and agree. We've now done that by email. I'll be picking up two checks tomorrow evening and cleaning up finances this week. I understand there will be new forums coming up in the next few days, and that at some point the old ones will move to vBulletin and made available. How that will work out in the long run is not my issue. I'll be out the door as soon as I get the funds taken care of. I have the State business ID, Federal EIN number registration and a few other things to pass on to the new committee.

It's been a very rocky spring for the former UTAG. Last year nobody accepted nominations to be on the UTAG board. A few people were specifically asked and ran unopposed. Bonolo did a bang-up job trying to get interest going again. In the end, it didn't work and there were no accepted nominations for this year. As a sub-story two years ago I needed to move the website off a personal server used for other things. I had run everything gratis and used free services for DNS as long as I could. After a year of asking for help, Jacob (Ad0or) and James (BruteForce) stepped forward. I did have reservations about Jacob's lack of having run any sort of website as complicated as what we had built. BruteForce stepped up to use an idle server he owned. He works at a data center and it was located there. He agreed to do it for $250 a year, plus he insisted on moving the DNS from the free service to his companies paid service at $120 a year. That was not explained initially, and we didn't plan on the extra expenses. The board agreed to this. The site was moved. After 18 months, James had had enough and wanted the site moved away from him. With no one willing to be on the board and no server for the forums, the current officers accepted the reality of the situation and posted that as of the May event, there would be no UTAG. After the expected outcry of wonder and professed future support, nobody stepped up to be on the board. HOWEVER, Dr. Jay was willing to be on an informal committee that just ran the forums and suggested an event every now and then. Others jumped in. Jacob said he would host and run the forums. Now that the UTAG membership system and other complex sections of the web site would no longer be needed, there was no reason to believe Jacob couldn't do it. I said I'd help with the transfer. ALL HELL BROKE LOOSE. James refused to have anything to do with Jacob. He said that since he owned everything that was running the site, and the domains, he owned it all and wouldn't do anything he didn't agree to. After paying James an initial $235, he hadn't billed, nor been paid additional money for the last few months. Unfortunately there's been problems with the bank on signature cards. With no bills, and enough petty cash to get by, the current board was lazy and was hoping to just let the next board take care of cleaning up the signature card. James has said since he hadn't gotten more money, despite not billing, or asking for it, he would hold UTAG ransom until someone he trusted would take it over. Once he heard rumors that whoever got the forum database would give it to Jacob, he shut the everything down. His last message said that he believed that Jacob would steal all the members passwords and use them for unspecified nefarious purposes. James had been offered $500 upon transfer of the domains and site database. The $443 of agreed on money he was owed, plus some towards new software he claims to have purchased, but isn't supplying a receipt for. His pricing he wants is considerably more than the software costs according to the manufacturers website. I was in the middle of pulling down the messages when the site was shut down. That's where we sit. The current feeling of the outgoing board is to come up with a new domain, register it and set up new forums for a new UTAG. It can be done immediately and used for preparing for the Spring meeting. Should James ever decide he wants to trade money for the database and domains the new committee can decide what to do. At this point the current board is done except for any help Jacob needs to get the new forums running. SO -- what are your thoughts?

hey tanoch, how about you start a new thread for this either here or over in the utag forums. I bet you'd get a better response, and I think the original thread is outdated, from aug '04, so probably. How about you don't start the thread on UTAG since it has nothing to do directly with geocaching and we try to stay away from politicians and religions on the site for those subjects that are not directly relate to caching.

Here's a link to the current definitive list of who pre-ordered Utah UTAG geo-coins and how many. It was created from the PayPal download along with additions for those who sent money directly to JJAC. Link to UTAH list of orders You can look there if you have any questions. You can contact me via the geocaching web site if you have questions or problems. I'll be the primary contact for seeing that these are mailed out. DaMenace has done a great job getting the coins created. We distributed about 400 coins yesterday and sold the rest that were not pre-ordered. We will get the shipping process completed over thenext couple weeks.

So, another outdoor retailer? Yes, there are quite a few virtuals in the City. I actually prefer them to the 35mm film canister or altoids can hidden under or on a lightpole or powerpole. You're not going to be able to place a lot of 50 caliber ammo boxes in the downtown area anyway. With the Mormon headquarters there and a lot of history in the downtown area, it's not a suprise that there are a lot of virtuals covering the monuments and historical parks. I just did a quick experiment. I went to North Denver and did the normal Geocaching 100 mile search for the number of virtuals and total caches and checked the percentages. I picked Denver since it's somewhat similar to SLC. I ended up with 9.2% virtuals there and 10.2% virtuals here. That's not so amazingly different. If you take out the multitude of lame virtuals placed by one guy -- and he's the same guy that placed several lame virtuals on the Vegas Strip too -- it comes down so both places are 9.x%. So quit picking on SLC Anyway, If your interested in finding out about some good local caches of different types, go to the Utah Association of Geocachers website and ask on the general forum about good ones to see based on your criteria. UTAG forums For that matter there will be several books and whatnot introduced at the show. I know that I've been contacted by a publisher to put up a cache with coupons for a free copy of their book. It will be listed as a real cache after the show. If you're going to the show, hit Pequot the press booth for coordinates. (I have nothing to do with the company)

Would this be the same Tim Riker as the BZFlag maintainer? Noel That would be the same Tim Riker. As you can see from his site and apparently already know, he's a very busy guy. Especially since he is a family man and has young children. I didn't want to come off as saying bad things about him. Just that he's not really every been an old time geocacher. I don't believe he ever did more than 1 cache. He didn't like that Jeremy claims some form of ownership over what gets posted on geocaching. His feeling was that he was giving away too many rights on his writing. It was a show stopper for him.

This is my first time on the forums in over a year, even lurking. Since we got local forums, I've spent most of my time there. I've been pretty active the entire time. Bunkerdave (in the list twice) was active, wasn't active, is active again. He had a lot of life changes in the middle that affected things. He's a great guy I need to see more. TimRiker never was a cacher. He was a guy who made his living programming in an opensource marketplace. He did one cache on a lark, hated the rules Jeremy has behind the web site and quit. He just needed to vent about it before going. He lived around the corner from me. He's now moved to a different stage in his life. Cach-U-Nuts are still super active. They just spend more time on the local forums. I get to hang out with them some. It's great. tslack2000 was out of caching for a very long time with other things happening in his life. He's somewhat back, but not super active. He's another great guy. Hopefully, he'll never truly leave.

However, most of the people I meet geocaching are not. I would agree with Jeremy. The population demographics here does not match the total community of geocachers. None of the people I work with have any interest in the hobby. Besides, my dog loves geocaching and she isn't in IT

There is a thread on the Utah Association of Geocachers forums that covers all the details about this incident YIKES! The BOMB SQUAD!!!

in the Utah Association of Geocacher's forums. YIKES! The BOMB SQUAD!!! There were a lot of inaccuracies in the arcticle.

I'm fine if the totals only update when the page changes. It is easy to see when the page was generated and if I really want to know where a person is at this current moment in time, I can just click on their name. The totals let me see new people who are active in my area. I miss them.

Mark your calendar. Saturday August 10, Geneva Park -- Orem. It's from 1-5 pm. N40 18.110 W111 42.742 Watch for the cache event on the geocaching site.

It's not as far South as some of the places you suggested, but it's farther South and closer to the freeway than Saratoga. I don't know if I can get the pavillion with the playground, but it will at least have a covered pavillion, cooking grates and park area. [This message was edited by brownbag on July 25, 2002 at 10:49 AM.]