sea_dragon

Lets try this out....

What's the deal with the cache award? What's the criteria, and all that jazz? I'm sorry if all of the others are already in the know about this, but I'm still fairly new (about 6 months caching), so I have not seen any award type procedings. I'm sure that the other newbies and lurkers may appriciate the info as well. Thanks!

Does anyone really think that kids that geocache are not going to know how to use a knife(or in this case a leatherman) responsibly? How many juvinile cachers are out there who don't cache with an "adult"? My guess is very few. The argument about 'questionable' items, such as multi tools and the like being found accidentily pretty much solves its self in my eyes. Simply, don't place these items in caches that are likely to be found accidentily! That means no unban park 1/1 drive-bys! That could cause a potential problem, I'll give you that. However, these items in a remote, high-star terrain cache should not pose a problem. I totaly understand Groundspeak's stance on this- they're based in the States, so there's the potential for lawsuits gallore. I don't blame them for trying to protect themselves. I fully agree with what was said before, the cachers should be the ones policing caches. If you find something that is of a potentialy questionable nature in a cache, take it with you. There, issue solved. (somewhat). Personaly, I wonder how far the liability thing is going to spiral out with more and more kids raised by TV, and fewer and fewer parents giving a S' about what their kids are up to. It doesn't take an expert to see that the human species is getting dumber and dumber every year. My question is, what's next?

Well, my idea was to go to Truck Lagoon to dive some of the eighty-some-odd Japanese WWII wrecks....and bag a cache or two on the way. However when I looked, I found that there are only two caches in all of Micronesia, both are virts. One looks as though it's underwater, so that suits me just fine! Now to get cracking and see if I cant win me a warmwater vacation now that schools out.

I haven't used it while caching, but a .44 slug will work. It can be a bit light, but it gets the job done. How'd the cigar work out? Must be a bummer on small log books.... Divine, does that mean that you regularly carry squid with you when you cache? Man, I thought that I took the marine bio thing to extremes.

My question is how did the fool and his money get together in the first place? Also, what's the pool up to?

I suppose that I too, am a lurker... for the most part. I have posted with questions and suggestions, and very rarely into a heated topic where I thought that I might have a dfferent POV than had been stated. I usualy check out the forums every day, mostly to see what's going on in the 'caching world when I don't have much time to get out there and find any myself. One thing I have really enjoyed is the uniqueness of the geocaching community - in what other sport/activity does one find such a diverse group of people, in background and especialy in interests outside of geocaching? I find that some of the "off-topic" topics bring this side of the sport and it's participants to the forefront, and are most enjoyable. Like many others have stated, I'm not a fan of the "flame-war-of-the-week" topics, although there is often some interesting insight therein.

Sounds like a cool idea, though one thought here would be, if the money's going to a good charity, why give half of it back to the cachers? Personaly, if this was in my region, I'd think that I small-ish amount, or maybe just a nice FTF prize, a plaque or something like that. Or, how about hitting up a buisness or event for tickets or gift certificate or something. I know a lot of places around here will donate to schools and stuff like that for fundraisers, so maybe if you explained to the buissines or event coordinater what you were raising the money for, you might be able to get something. Having conections with anything like this may help (friends, friends or friends, relatives, etc). Just some thoughts.

Interesting....another way to distract me from my studies. Let's see, I've got a distance of 18.5 miles including disabled caches, and 18.9 miles not including disabled caches. I'm also in a coastal region, with no hydrocaches , so you could say that my stomping grounds are pretty cache rich (2312 w/in 100 mi).

let's try this out..... edit:: what about the size... will it work too? How bout size and color? Now another test::::

Touchstone: Thanks for the link. I had read that post a while ago, and found it quite interesting. I don't think Monterey Bay falls under this as it's a National Marine Sanctuary. I don't think that the sanctuary status will be too much of a problem. I know that altering the seafloor is a no-no, but I can't think of any real probelms off the top of my head. I guess it's time to re-read the sanctuary policies. What I can see as the big problem in the city of Pacific Grove and their rules and regs, which often go against CDFG and Sanctuary. More reading to do. Do I take it to mean from some of the other posts that if I plant it, they will dive? Rock on! Now to think of a hiding place that falls within compliance of all governing bodies and won't be found by every beginners dive class. Hmmm.... that will take some work.

Criminal, rock on! I totoaly agree with what you've said about freedom, laws, etc. I've alwasy stuck to a pretty basic code of behavior, of which there are two main points: 1) be willing to accept what you've got coming to you, and 2) tread lightly. For the first point, Criminal does a good job. Basicly I've always figgured that if the risks and reprecussions of an activity are something that I can deal with, then full steam ahead. Yeah, we all break laws all of the time, often by telling ourselves those little white lies. Think about the last time you were late for work folks... did every one of you stick to the speed limit? I'm thinking that that's a definite 'no'. So we all bend or break the rules, it's bound to happen. The main factor is how do you deal with it when you do get caught. So as to the topic at hand, if one were to place a cache and later be asked (or forced) to remove it by a land manager/property owner, what do you do? My thoughts on this tend to be along the lines of, 'well, I shouldn't have done that, I guess it's time to move the cache'. Yet how many of you out there would be more inclined to tell the manger/owner where they could put that cache? Which brings me to the second point... Tread lightly. Maybe it would be a good idea to stop and think about the actions before going through with them. Getting into a heated argument with a land manager or property owner may not be the best route to take. Why? Well, it's probably going to make you feel better for a short while, but how about when one goes too far and ends up having all cahes banned from an area? Or how about being blacklisted from a park on a personal level? Does anyone out there seriously want that? Methinks that perhaps the best way to tackle the situation is to do your homework and find out if permission is needed at all. Secondly, why not hear the complaining party out? Maybe there is a good reason why a cache can't be placed. Maybe the complaining party will change their mind once they've heard you out. You never know until you go there. I think that working with the system is not a means or giving up ones freedoms, but rather a way of exercising them. Getting the appropriate premission seems to me to be a matter of respect. Respect for the individuals who maintain the lands that we all cache in. Respect for those at the top who have to deal with irate land managers. Respect for those people who make this sport possible. I guess to make a long post short (probably too late, I know), I think that CO Admin and the GC.com guidelines as far as getting permission for the placement of a cache are dead on. It may be easier to beg forgiveness than it is to ask permission, but who want's to beg in the first place? An after thought here.... many posts up it was mentioned that geocaching being in the spot light is a bad thing, and that something along the lines of a magazine article would be this kiss of death. I beg to differ. Yes, there will be many people who will find out about this sport who have no business here in the fist place, but along with them will come the very lifeblood of the sport- dedicatied cachers who want this activity to persist. Open your arms to these our breathren, for the others will drive back home in their SUV's wondering whay anyone would do something like take their car out into the middle of nowhere an have it get all dirty. It's happend before. Look at any other outdoors activity, flyfishing, biking, SCUBA diving. As soon as the novelty wears off they will be gone. And then you can buy their GPSr cheap!

I'm thinking that the Monterey area need a hydrocache (or a dozen ). Something that's SCUBA/freedive-able. I've been trying to come up with some ideas on how to pull this off, pretty much I've only gotten as far as a dive slate for the log, and everything else is waterproof. Any other ideas?

Hey! The one time where my cell-bio class comes in usefull! The best park of the bird for fuel is in fact the dark meat. I'm not sure about the iron thing, or the tryptophan, but the for sure thing is the mitochondria. As we all have tried to forget from high school biology, the mitochondria is the "powerhouse of the cell", it's where ATP (the cellular energy/currancy) is made, so all of those little organelles are giving you that boost of energy. Sort of.... I'm not sure how that transfers over once you get into digestion, but there you go. And I agree with the previous post, the white meat makes the best sandwiches.

Ok, don't panic and head back down to the bunker quite so soon... this pole reversal isn't going to be quite that dramatic. Yes, it's been over 700,000 years since the last one. Yes, the magnetic poles will be scattered for a little while, but they will stabalize fairly quickly. The acctual shift will happen relativly quickly, maybe over the course of a year of two, though most likely we're taking days to weeks. It could also begin much sooner than has been mentioned here, some of my profs were saying just last week that we could be looking forward to this in the very near future, maybe five years at most, again this could happen tomorrow, or next week. Nobody's entirely sure -- there has been no research done while one of these shifts has happened, so a lot of geologists are very excited. I'm almost afraid to think about how many journal articles are going to come about due to this. It'll probably be the most documented geological happening since St. Hellens. For the record, don't buy into the whole "the pole shift will mean the end of the world" hogswallup. There has been no correlation what-so-ever between mass extinction events and magnetic pole reversals. None. Nada. Zilch. None of the extinction record line up with the magnetic sediment records obtained from core drilling. So, no birds are just going to drop out of the sky. They just might be a tad confused for a while.

Forget the pie, this sounds like a kickin' smoothie! Though, I'd double the Bourbon

Let's see...work and school the day before, and work, work and, ....um... more work the day after--- Black Friday, the worst day of the year to work in retail. Shudder . So it looks like my Turkey Day will be spent studying for finals (if I get motivated enough), maybe some caching, and looking forward tro Christmas with my family while in the company of a buritto and a couple of brewskis.

I've always thought that it's all in the eye of the beholder. For example, I've heard about people complaining about rocks in a cache, and well, I'm a bit of a rock hound, so if I think it's an interesting rock, I'll take it. I generaly try to keep my trades even, though that too is a relative thing, such as taking some quasi-interesting 'junk' and leaving a cool shell or something. I don't know if it's good or bad, but I also tend to move things between caches, things like toy cars, green army men, plastic critters, etc. will often find their way back into a cache after I've retrevied them. The way I see it, somebody may acctualy like what they find, everyone has their little things that they think are niffty, so why am I to judge? Now, broken stuff is another matter, but sometimes it's not always busted broken, sometimes it's just a new battery and that gigga pet or calculator is up and running. I haven't found any big ticket trade items yet, but I have found some plastic marine life toys that are now surrounding my desk. This may be off topic, but as it relates tro trades, who knows? Anywho, what're the toughts about trading for a travel bug, either picking up, or dropping off?

For you youngsters: Godwin's Law prov. [usenet] "As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one." There is a tradition in many groups that, once this occurs, that thread is over, and whoever mentioned the Nazis has automatically lost whatever argument was in progress. Godwin's Law thus practically guarantees the existence of an upper bound on thread length in those groups. However there is also a widely- recognized codicil that any intentional triggering of Godwin's Law in order to invoke its thread-ending effects will be unsuccessful. So..... this means that Rush's arguments about the democrats has is a dead topic? That must be the longest running dead topic out there. Sorta like some sort of topic zombie that won't stay dead, or my grandma's fruitcake for that matter... no matter how long it's been around, it's never going away. Hey, that'd be a nifty-tom-ffty topic, "What have you used a fruitcake for(aside from acctualy eating it)"

I concur with whats been said thus far already, it sounds like there are some major issues below the surface here, and they're gonna pull a St. Hellens on you. Counsling is definitly a good route to go. Most likely a nessecary one. as for taking your kid out caching with you, all I have to say is don't listen to your wife. Take the munchkin and if she argues (hopefully after the fact), explain that you are spending some quality time with 'em. I can think of a whole lot of things that you could be doing that would have a much more deletarious effect on you kid. As for suggestions on how to bring you wife around on the caching issue, here's one that worked for me to show that it's not a crazy or entirely stupid activity: Find some nice city park that you didn't know about before you started caching, and take the whole family out for a picnic, or something of the sort. After I started caching I found some fantabuous areas that I'd never known about, told my friends about them, and lo and behold, they checked out the areas and decided that caching wasn't so off the wall as they had thought. Whichever way this thing goes for you, good luck and keep on truckin'.

Wow! These new forums ROCK !!!! Fast, and by golly, it's snappy! It'll be fun playing with the font, size and color options. Great work everyone!

This may be a crazy idea, but who knows, it may be so crazy that it just might work. Since there's the prominent note prior to entering the forums about the server problems, and the other problems (such as the hassel of moving threads), what about deleting the old threads that haven't been "active" in, say, three months or so? Who knows, maybe some sort of housekeeping would help speed things up and resolve the issues. It may not solve any of the problems, but it might be a good stop-gap measure to aid in some of the delays until a better/permanent solution is found. Like I said it's probably a crazy idea, and I will be the first to say that I'm not a computer techie, so I'm probably absolutly clueless in what I'm saying (as far a computers go). But what else do you expect from a biologist? As far as the slowness rant: I couldn't even access any of the threads in any of the topics all day. We all breathe liquid for nine months, your body will remember. - The Abyss

Wow, I always thought that I was a pup in this group, and this thread proved it. I would have gotten my Eagle in '98 if I'd have had a troop. I was a cub scout, a webelo, and a boy scout, though only for about two months before my group disbanded. The scoutleader lost interest, and nobody was willing to pick it up, so I never even earned a badge. There weren't any other groups within a reasonable driving range(that being the distance my mom was willing to take us), so I didn't get to do any scouting things. I totaly regret that. Though I have always been into the outdoor life, and from an early age I was hiking(though in those days it was more of an exploratory wandering), camping, fishing, hunting and learing as much woodlore as my little pre-gelled brain could hold. It's paid off pretty well, even before I was in high school I could track (especialy usefull when 'counting coup' with waterballons ), forage for food (very handy in college) and even taste the weather. If I had the chance to go back, I would definitly have found another group and kept with it. Maybe I'll get to do that with my own kids in the future, though that's a loooong way off. We all breathe liquid for nine months, your body will remember. - The Abyss

one more time.... We all breathe liquid for nine months, your body will remember. - The Abyss

Ok, lets try this again...