Team Lawrence

A hearty congrats to two genuinely nice folks. Once again a "newbee" shows what slackers we are.

I suggested this even earlier. I only mention it because it seems like a special thrill to markwell a markwell.

This is not accurate. Lawyers do not need to be admitted to the bar in states where they conduct legal education, only where they "practice." There are any number of rulings holding that education does not equal practicing. In fact, non-lawyers generally believe that the unauthorized practice of law statutes are much broader than they actually are. In Virginia specifically, only "representation before any tribunal" or "preparing legal instruments" would be forbidden to non-lawyers in all contexts. Providing specific legal advice is OK if either (1) there is no compensation or (2) the party being advised in your regular employer. For a detailed review of the laws in your state, see the helpful ABA Summary

Excellent tip. It took me a while to figure out where the reviews were, so I'm posting a direct link

I recently discovered these uber-Ziplocks. They are much thicker and tougher than the standard Zippie, are seriously waterproof and even offer odor proof versions. They are the coolest bags ever. You can find them at Backpacking Light or Amazon.

I always thnk it would be cool to have an option to choose what you want to see, but if that made it too painful to implement, I'd still love to get the second email message that told me pictures had been uploaded. If it was for a cache I didn't want to see them on, I could easily enough delete the email or set up a rule to delete it. So my vote would be for the additional notice.

Although I agree that PQs are well worth the fee and that it would be wrong to share them, I'm suprised that a lawyer would characterize a license violation as "illegal." A tort at best, not a crime.

I'm not sure if the patch went in as planned, but it still doesn't appear to work.

I really enjoy when people upload images to their cache logs for my caches and like to look at them. Currently, there is no way to know when that is the case from the e-mail we get listing the log. Attaching the picture would add a lot of bandwidth to the email, so I guess that would be out. Perhaps a notice could appear on the bottom of the log that says "images uploaded" or some such. That would alert me that I have to go visit the page to check it out. I'm not sure how soon the cache note log is sent, perhaps the email system gets the request before the images could be uploaded, but if it was possible to let me know of the images I think it would cool info to have.

Gus is one of the real stars of the Richmond caching scene. It is amazing how many finds they have piled up in a short time. In addition, they have hidden some of the best and most challenging caches anywhere. While noting Richmond milestones, we'd be remiss not to congratulate the topic starter (Team BlackZ) on their recent 100th find. Even more impressive, the current find leaders of Richmond caching, Team Toad, just found their 500th cache a couple of days ago. We're still slackers!

Oddly enough, I just logged in with the intention of reporting this same issue.

I generally love the layout. Adding a place to see our owned caches is a big step forward and lots of the specific features are a big improvement. However, I agree with many folks that I'd much rather see the summary of my caches on the front pages than the summary of my recent logs. It is at least as important and contains information that I might not readily know. The navigation on the calendar could be improved. A drop-down list box of the last 12 months would make it much easier to scroll to a particular date. However, this is a minor quibble. The dates on the quick view still don't render properly in all browsers. It seems more useful to note the things I would change, but I want to be clear that I think this is a big improvement. Thanks.

I got a DNF email from one of my caches on 3/7.

Although I understand the point being made and I generally think we need standards, the fact is that very, very few people design pages that fully conform to the W3C specifications. Just for fun, I ran www.geocaching.com www.amazon.com and www.google.com through the validator and it rejected all three. The first two were rejected for failing to provide proper character encoding in the HTTP Content-Type and the third for no DOCTYPE. Putting out HTML that only renders in IE is one thing, but I don't think it is reasonable to assert that people who don't follow the full spec are to blame for your midnight coding problems. I can't find a browser that blows up on embedded body tags. I only found on that doesn't render the body tag "properly."

Actually, I've come to agree that I don't really care. I was initially more curious than concerned and I think I've come to understand the situation and now I'm pretty far into the "live and let live" camp.

This is probably a good place to commend fellow Virginia cachers for this cache that was a kind of post-hurricane helping hand for some local cachers who suffered damage from the storm. One of the coolest things I've heard of in geocaching.

EDIT: Received an e-mail that suggests I should have done some searching before posting.

Here in scenic Richmond, Virginia we have a little friendly first finder racing that takes place between three or four of the local cachers. We aren't too serious (no one gets up an hour before dawn to be the first on site at first light) and I know caching isn't really about any kind of race. On a cache that posted this evening (I know for sure it was between 5 & 8 pm), I realized it was in a shopping center very near to my house and thought "how hard can it be to find a cache in a shopping center?" The cache page said hide-a-key, so I figured it had to be a pretty predictable location. I turned out to be right and found it pretty easily. As it turns out, there was already a log in the cache that was posted three days ago (well before the cache was posted on-line). Even stranger, the hider and the first finder are from a few states away from here and appeared to be travelling together. I ran across a cache this weekend that they visited and they wrote one combined log. In fact, in the cache I found, it says that the hider stashed the cache while the first finder was in the store next door. Is this odd? Since I know you will ask, the cache is listed here. I just wondered what others thought about this.

I know what you're working on! We're pretty much stuck as well.

I know at least two local cachers that have been trying to adopt and clean up abandoned caches -- we might be able to help you if you want to drop me a note. We have also been having a conversation with Hydee about a cache that I suspect you may have in mind.

I wrote a small utility I call iCache that takes GPX files and converts them to a format suitable for use as Notes on a 2nd generation iPod. It uses hyperlinks, extracts all the data thet I find useful into an easy to read format and provides a "click thru" interface to decrypt hints on the fly. I've given it to a few people here and there, but make no concerted effort to publicize it. GPX files are compliant XML files and any utility that works with XML can read them.

My wife uses the 301 and she likes it very much. It seems to do better than our GPS-V in terms of locking up when you first turn it on unless you have moved it a long way. When it first wakes up after a long flight, it takes longer than the V. She loves the compass and the form factor. There are many of these discussions in the GPS Units and Software forum.

I generally agree with Criminal's point of view here and I've never asked anyone for permission on my few caches, because I believe that it should be regarded as presumptively permitted unless explicitly regulated in some way. I generally agree with my hero, Grace Hopper, when she says that it is easier to ask forgiveness than get permission. However, after thinking about this for a few days since I first read this post, I have come to doubt my position is the wisest one for the good of the sport. I still think it is perfectly legal and justified to hide caches without permission unless it is demanded, but I think it may tend to result in negative consequences overall. It seems that in many parks or federal lands or other community property, the subject of geocaching must eventually be addressed by the appropriate land managers. In the case where no one seeks permission, it may be that the person who addresses the subject is the wrong person. A recent example would be the NWR fiasco where the law enforcement group is enforcing a ban. It may be that a solution can be negotiated or it may be that geocaching will be banned permanently there. The action was taken in a forum not selected by geocachers and the decision could be made without any input by cachers. The NPS decision was much the same story -- the decision was made without any input from geocachers or Groundspeak and left everyone with the much more difficult position of negotiating a reversal of an established position. If the general approach was to seek permission where practical, the forum for seeking approval would be selected by cachers and the decision would be made with input from cachers. Ideally, there would be a coordinated approach either directed by or coordinated with Groundspeak. They could at the least prepare presentation materials to ensure a consistent pitch that put our best foot forward. It might be that more parks and venues would be lost to us as forcing these decisions would result in some adverse results, but there is no assurance that those same parks might not eventually make the same ruling anyhow.

Being a Virginia boy, I know more about their laws than those of other localities. In Virginia, it is fairly narrowly defined as "all waste material disposable packages or containers but not including the wastes of the primary processes of mining, logging, sawmilling, farming, or manufacturing" under § 10.1-1414 of the Code of Virginia. Geocaches would appear to escape that definition, although I know of no case law on point. Your state will have different laws, I am sure.

I sent a message about an hour ago from geocaching.com that never got transmitted to my account. Either the mail server is down or very backed up. Just thought I'd let you know.