TresOkies

Rainy??? What are you talking about? It was 75 degrees and sunny today. Which is why I was mowing the grass, weeding the flower beds, and tilling the garden and not out having fun. Next weekend I'll be babysitting a sick spouse. Being an adult really stinks some times. As for the forums vs. caching... My nearest unfound cache is 40 miles away. I can't just jump up and decide to go caching. I can, however, make a pest of myself any time I choose on the forums. The forums are fun, but not nearly so fun as climbing above treeline at Cuchara to find GC19. You've cleared the first hurdle--some people are so intimidated that they don't even post. Find some areas you are comfortable talking and express yourself. I've met quite a few cachers through the forums. I went hiking with one of our more infamous characters a few years ago and we'd never met prior to that day. He could've been an axe murderer or a cute Japanese girl and I wouldn't have known until I got there. I followed Jamie Z on his bike journey from Memphis to LA and then down the Yangtze River in China for two months. We've never met in real life, but we'll certainly share a beer or two if we do meet. There's a bunch of good people here. Amazingly enough, none of them are from Texas. :o

The team called JandA is in Ardmore, which is only about an hours drive away. Perhaps you could ask them. -E

Alright, it's nut-cutting time. BlueNinja, go out on Saturday and buy a Legend. Don't think about it, just do it. Play with it all day Sunday and all next week. If you have questions about it, ask them here. We'll answer them as best we can. If you are a f'ing newbie, the Legend is a great place to start. Why not the iFinder? It looks to be a pretty good unit, but you will be in the 3% bunch. Just like Mac users and people who use Firefox. If you are just starting out, it's best to be one of the crowd and decide why you hate being one of the crowd, rather than being an outsider looking in and wishing you could play with the cool kids.

The m500 is a solid unit. I carried one for a couple of years. I have a couple of m500's that still work in my parts bin but they have bizarre foreign OSes running on them and I have no inclination to flash them back to English and sell them... The m500 works with XP Pro and Home just fine. Just make sure that you install a fairly recent version of Palm Desktop from the palmOne site to get the USB drivers installed. Keep it in the hard case to absorb shocks and the day to day twists and turns in your pockets. After about six months, you'll want to give it to your spouse, girlfriend or child and get yourself a Tungsten, which runs much, much faster and is in color.

Well, that oughta start some spirited discussions. Care to make any comments about Ford Pickups while you're at it.

Were there any Magellans around? Maybe it didn't want to embarrass them by being too accurate...

This is apochryphal information and not tested in any way. YMMV... I've read that Amazon ups the price the more successive times you visit a product page. I'm not a conspiracy theorist, I'm just regurgitating stuff I've read here. Deleting any amazon or affiliate cookies will allegedly reset the price. Keep in mind, that deleting cookies may or may not have side effects like emptying your shopping cart and making your hair fall out.

It's always at the top. Nobody ever takes time to appreciate the nice rock formations at the bottom, let alone honor them with a cache. It's a good 20' vertical from the summit, and the last 20' is the challenge. I've found cow patties up near where the cache is hidden. I still consider it a 3.5 terrain. I had a cache at the base as well called "The View From Below" because parents were taking their 3 year olds up that thing! The top one was a log book and the bottom one was full of toys. But, the lower cache was plundered a couple of times and I got tired of replacing it. I go up 3-4 times a year and just marvel at the view. N35 28.898 W98 29.982. Look at it on a Topo map. There are some nice shots on the cache page at GC173B.

My signature cache is up there. It about 100' elevation and there's not much to limit your view but the horizon. If you are ever on I-40 in Western OK, it's only about 5 miles off the highway. The view from above is just as cool as the view from below. I'll take a cache at the top of a mountain over an Altoids tin under a park bench any day.

When going as a group, take the fewest number of vehicles possible. In fact, stick some in the back of a pickup and let 'em hang on for dear life while you cut corners and hop curbs. Think I'm joking? Have your route (more or less) planned out but don't be so rigid that it can't change. Go with someone who's been through the area before and wants to pick up some stragglers--they can show you where the caches are. Take along a few printouts of the geocaching main page to hand to Mr. Police Officer who wants to know why you are driving like a maniac with four adults in the back of your pickup. I'm a big fan of caching for the experience of it--seeing new places, taking photos, and enjoying a hike. But crazy 40+ cache days are fun in their own way too. You get home (or to the hotel) completely exhausted but hyped on adrenaline so that it takes a couple of hours and a couple of beers to wind down. It's possible to have fun both ways.

Ditto that. I would be with my fellow Okies in Tulsa this weekend but I can't make it. They know why and I have a hall pass. -E

There is also the iSilo browser. It's a commercial product, but its offline document builder is much better than the Plucker Desktop. If you can get your hands on Blazer or Web Pro, you can just copy the web pages and graphics directly to the SD card on your handheld and browse them with file://card_name/cache/index.html Get CacheMate. I was skeptical at first, until I went on a long day of caching with a couple of friends. We searched for 40 caches and the guy with CacheMate was much faster at retrieving information than I was with Plucker. I plopped down my $8 then and there.

If you upgrade the MapSource program to version 6.5, then you can read GPX files directly into MapSource. Upgrading the program doesn't upgrade your data--it just adds features to the PC program.

Lessee... Using MetroGuide 4, I can get MA, RI, and CT in 30.1 MB. This selection overlaps the boundaries a bit into NH and VT as well as a bit of Long Island. Granted, MetroGuide 4 is a bit dated, but it does do turn by turn navigation. Using Topo, the same area takes about 13.5 MB. -E

You can have multiple maps on the device at once but only one can display at a time. There is a screen where you turn maps on and off. If two map sets from different products overlap, one will take precidence over the other. As for how much maps, which products are you interested in and where do you live (more or less).

alsey, Use the Search feature to look for posts by a cacher named JamieZ. He's fairly prolific on the boards. He spent an exciting month in China last summer rafting (sometimes) down the Yangtze river with a guy who swam the length of the river. He kept an email log that was fun to read. He has posted several times in the forums about his adventures in using a GPS in China. He's a Magellan guy, but I believe he had to use an eTrex of some kind while he was there. -E

Well, it's not welcome so much as "welcome back". For 20+ years, I had a $50/month film processing habit. When I went digital for snapshots, that film processing went to about $50/year. I don't mind my little point and shoot too much, but I always felt like I was missing something. I bought the kit lens and the Tamron XR Di 28-300 zoom. I already have some nice primes and zooms from my film gear, even if they aren't full auto. All of them support aperture mode, though. I discovered kef.com while doing research on this camera and I hope I don't get into the "lens of the month" club. Already have one. I'm not sure if I'll go down that road. I've never been a stickler for true colors. I was a big fan of Tri-X and Pan-X film, not Kodachrome. Too funny. On a whim, I bought the Pentax Optio S5i at the same time as my dSLR. I gave it to my wife to carry in her purse, but truth be known it's for the exact situation you mentioned. Thanks for the links. I'll download them and give them a look after I wear myself out this weekend. Cheers! -E

If the developers of the firmware and installer were worth half their weight in sand, they would have more than one check to prevent this from happening. On the other hand, I've seen people use mighty big hammers to force things into places they shouldn't be. If you manage to get the wrong firmware into a device and get the bootloader to load it, you might cause some damage. Then again, if the bootloader is worth a dadgum, it will let you reload a proper firmware patch over a bad one. That's if the bootloader is any good. If not, you're screwed. Send it to the manufacturer, let them pry it open and reflash the unit. That should be good for about $125 plus shipping.

Yes, it was an April Fools topic. It's good to see that not only did I manage to waste time here, but it spilled over into the yahoo! group of Okie cachers. I'm sure I'll pay for this one at Spring Fling. heh.

There is a way, only backwards from your thinking. If your camera's internal clock is set according to the clock on your GPS (which is just a hyper-accurate clock), then QuakeMap will stitch together the timestamp that is stored in your shots. JPG images have non-picture metadata in a format called EXIF. This includes what brand of camera you are using, the shutter speed, f-stops, time, etc. QuakeMap grabs this info and syncs it with your track log and produces a map of where you went overlaid with the photos you took. Pretty cool, huh? I don't know if RAW image data includes EXIF or not. The DS will take images as JPG or RAW. I'm hoping it does, because I'm planning to use RAW for some of my shots, just to see how it stacks up.

Hey, I said I was atoning for my previous behavior. Then again, there are still people posting to that thread--I guess I will have to come clean around midnight. I can assure you, that while I did use photoshop on those pictures, it was only to trim out the extra pixels for those who aren't broadband-enabled yet.

There's nothing wrong with a point and shoot, if it meets your needs. You can get perfectly good photos from a point and shoot. I like having control over all my settings, which is why I wanted to get back to the SLR format. The model name for my camera is "*ist DS". It doesn't roll off the tongue nicely, like D70 or Digital Rebel. On the photography forums, most refer to it simply as the "DS" and that works for most folks. There are a bunch of new digital SLRs that were announced at a recent photgraphy trade show (PMA). Canon and Nikon are both coming out with new models aimed at those people who want to step up from the point and shoot form factor but are willing to trade off certain features. Street prices for a body + lens will be around $700. Check out dpreview.com if you'd like more info on dSLRs. I've download QuakeMap and I'm planning to try it tomorrow to sync my photos with my GPS track log. If it works, I'll put some of those shots on my web site. -E edit: fix url formatting

My new toy arrived yesterday. I bought a Pentax *ist DS digital SLR and I'm still giddy. I'm like a 7 year old on Christmas morning. I'm planning a little driving/caching/photography trip for tomorrow--it's supposed to be a nice clear day here in Western OK. For those of you who are interested.... I went with the Pentax because I have a fair investment already in K- and KAF-mount lenses. I've had Pentax film cameras for 25+ years and the DS will use all but one of my existing lenses. I went digital about 4 years ago with a Sony point and shoot and I really missed the ability to control things. The DS gives control back to me, with 6 megapixels to boot. It's a very slick camera and I'm still learning what everything does. I considered the Nikon D70 for a good while. It really is a sweet camera but I couldn't justify starting to buy a whole range of new lenses when I have perfectly good lenses sitting in my gear bag. I did not consider the Canons because if I bought one, I'd have to take back some of the things I've said in arguments with a good friend. After 25+ years, there's no way I'm doing that. If you want to follow my progress, I'm going to start filling this gallery with some of my more interesting shots. I'll probably also keep a running log on the main page of my site. Hope to see you out there! -E

As a way to atone for my earlier indiscretion... I was as a meeting last night and the speaker handed out pens with her agency name and phone number on it. I thought this might be a nice pen for some of those Altoids-tin micros. The clear plasic lever swings up and pushes the pen out of the barrel. When you are done, you flip the lever back down and the barrel retracts. It's a little awkward, but it beats having nothing. I'm not sure where to get them, but if you have a bunch of log-only micros, this might be a nice addition. Or, just whittle down a Bic... If someone could find where these are sold, you could put your team name on them and put them in all the caches you find as a sig item.

Either will be fine. MG4 and MG5 has two different data sets. MG5 data comes from NavTeq which is allegedly more accurate. I don't like the NavTeq data because it omits certain physical features like lakes and rivers. MG4 will autoroute on a device that supports it, MG5 will not. The legend does not autoroute, so it doesn't matter for you, either way. It's entirely your choice which you like better. When you download your maps to the Legend, make sure the "include routing data" check box is cleared (not checked).