WalruZ
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Posts posted by WalruZ
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But maybe that statement means something...........IT'S GONNA EAT AT ME UNTIL I FIND OUT WHAT IT MEANS!!
It means that the saying the eTrex won't work in the forest is not a valid statement.
indeed, it is a comment from someone who is hysterically assuming you are bashing etrex's. pay no mind, but check out the window first if you hear the doorbell in the middle of the night. those people can be touchy.
a few things...
the gps you have is fine. It really doesn't matter what kind you have. really.
most gps's are iffy at best under full forest canopy. that is normal, most (although not all) people report some degree of this problem.
your problem is one of expectations. you don't really need to have the gps on the entire time you are heading for the cache. imo, that's a good way to drive up the price of energizer stock. (yeah, yeah, rechargable. whatever.) If the GPS says you have a mile to go, west, turn the dadgum thing off and hike a mile west, then turn it back on.
A newbie mistake (mea culpa) is to trust the arrow more than you trust the terrain. If the cache is indeed a mile west, turn the GPS off and look for a way to go a mile west using trails, unless you are out in the middle of BFE. Even then, at least look for a way to use the terrain. In most cases there is a trail that will take you near the cache area. A GPS is not a substitute for a trail map.
consider that the cache hider posted coordinates, which means that his/her GPS worked at the cache site. The likelyhood is yours will too - it is mildly bad form to hide a cache underneath tree cover so dense that you can't get signal. (otoh, some people think it is fun to hide a magnetic in a tunnel and then pace off to the edge, climb up, pace back and take the reading.)
also, yes. the arrow is determined by comparing successive positions. if you stop and then just turn around the arrow won't adjust until you move a bit in some direction. if you move into an area where you have no signal, the arrow, if there even is one, is worthless. if you hold the gps down and walk, then hold it up again, the arrow (which assumes, sorta, that the gps is being held flat facing forward, at least for most gpss), will be wrong - until you have traveled a bit more, holding it as it expects to be held, in the clear. get the picture?
Tthe arrow is not your friend, don't trust it much unless you are holding the unit out in front of you as you are walking along in a clear area. for example, should you be having trouble in that last 40 feet or so, try just walking at a tangent to the area you think the cache is in and see where the arrow gives you a hard 90 degrees right or left. do this more than once, using different tangents.
Don't forget to enter your car as a waypoint before you set out.
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oh jeez... I was eating when I read that!
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so... you didn't try to turn him into a GeoCacher? I mean, that would really help us when it comes to dealing with land managers.
"Ah-nold he-yah. I vant to hide zees cache een zee pahk. You weel let me, no?"
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perhaps you should go to unit pricing instead of flat pricing. charge a certain amount per log.
or... you could just charge per post in the forums. that would probably pay for the main site by itself.
(yes, i'm just kidding)
(well, not about the forums)
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as an aside, i think it's interesting that you chose to display the *current* number of finds for a cacher next to any find that displays. It would have been perfectly valid to structure it so that the 'find number' that displays is that cacher's find number at the time the find was made. So that on the first find I ever made, the 'number of finds' next to my ID would be 1. In a way, it would have been *more* informative. Doing so would have moved that data into the cache data and saved you much woe. Of course that's water over the dam now, but...
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well, i'm sure you're too busy to discuss architecture much, but here's hoping your new codebase implements a seperate database server. With a data-intensive app like this, that is where you need to throw the hardware. The webby-bit is almost secondary.
If I could even pretend to be a DBA and not just a run-of-the-mill programmer, and didn't have a son here in the bay area, I would be camped in your server room tomorrow. You need triage, then you need to assign a person to profiling. The Linux based sql's will explain what they're up to to some degree, I can't believe that MS-SQL won't do the same somehow. You really need to keep an eye on all your searches - when schema's change, they can unexpectedly degrade into linear searches. Profiling has to be part of change management in a data-centric environment.
I've seen the movement towards GUIDs. Have you implemented a GUID translation table? Drop some of the WP/ID indexes and look them up using a two-step process on a master GUID table. Too many indexes on your main tables could be killing you.
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have mercy. trying to fix these sorts of web server problems while the site is running is like trying to re-stripe a freeway without laying out cones. i'm suprised they haven't just taken the site down for a day.
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at least one would hope that 20 years ago there weren't any female interns carefully examining his Yung-Wang-Chung.
I got my worst case by going offtrail and fighting my way through about 100 feet of Poison Oak thicket. My arms were brick-red from wrist to armpit.
I saw Marky two days ago and he had an incredible case. Like the ones you see on the Zanfel website. He told me his arms were weeping so bad he had to wrap his arms in towels for a few days.
I have used this stuff, and while it isn't a cure-all, it did stop my itch. What can happen though is that exposure to enough oil will result in it making it's way into the lymph system, and then it can spread all over the body.
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Oh noooo, here comes another sickening post from Mopar and Geo Ho about a girl with a paddle and no canoe and a guy with a canoe and no paddle
I thought that was a Brand New Pair of Roller Skates and him with a Brand New Key, and... well, never mind.
So far my limited experience seems to say that the GeoCaching demographic skews towards the retired and the wish-they-were retired male. This dismays my friends, who wish I would connect with some female and bore her with my long rambling stories so that they would be spared hearing them. They keep saying "find yourself a woman!" - as if there were an aisle somewhere, perhaps at Target, where they were stacked like cordwood just waiting for me to come by with a cart.
<sigh/>
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Yep. The birds are thousands of miles up there and they don't transmit with all *that* much power. The signal your GPS receives is so weak as to be barely different from the noise in the environment. This is one (of many) reasons it actually takes a bit to lock on. Not only does the GPS have to solve many equations in parallel to sort out what time it actually is (based on the times that the birds are transmitting), and thus calculate your position, but it has to deal with bad data. If the GPS receives some corrupted data it just throws it out and keeps listening. Since it doesn't take much to hose the signal (say, leaves), this is why you keep switching from bird to bird as you walk around. The GPSr listens to more than 4 birds, it just chooses the 4 that it likes the best. If one goes odd, say because you're standing in front of it, it just switches to the next best.
Your cell phone uses alot more power, and if you're more than about a mile away she no workee (sometimes she no workee anyway.) This is why you should not duct-tape it to your head. Well, that and also as a fashion statement it is SO 90s.
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Note also that server failure is one of those fast-growing lines. as traffic goes up the processes handling the requests bump into each other *much* more than when traffic is lower. assuming the slope of the traffic line is constant, at a certain point the failure rate just heads for the sky. IMO, adding to the size of the 'wait queue' is just going to unmask problems elsewhere with (as I've seen), memory consumption and resource locking.
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I think we should rename the server(s) "Jeremy's Kids" and have a telethon for them...
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1. if you get server busy errors you can refresh that page (the 'busy' page) and (at least IE) will re-sumbit the contents of your controls. You can actually do this multiple times until the log 'takes'.
2. Some web sites have tiered service. Free is slow and unreliable. Pay is faster and better. I wouldn't mind that. What say youse alls?
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most do's & don't are for yourself rather than for others, and most of mine have to do with long hikes.
Do waypoint the car.
Do carry an emergency poncho if there's any possibilyty of rain.
Do carry plenty of water in hot areas.
Do know how much daylight you have left, or how to get back to your car in the dark with a flashlight otherwise. This was by first big lesson. I set my cell phone alarm to ring after 1/2 the remaining daylight is gone. I figure if it took me that long to get to that spot, it'll take me that long to get back. It usually works pretty much like that. A related 'do' is Do get started early.
Do let someone know where you're going and when you expect to be back. A note on your car isn't a bad idea.
The only real difference between a newbie and an experienced geocacher is that the experienced geocacher will poke the dog turd with a stick to see if perhaps there isn't a rolled up log in there.
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Any thoughts about implementing a preferred server setup for ultra-premium members?
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look at the log for "trigger happy" (GCGAEW). Recently found by Kablooey. He has a 'user web page' as part of his profile. He is the last to find the cache, and every log on the cache features a 'user web page', which is his user web page. This may not be the case if someone else finds it. Bug appears to be that if last finder has a user web page, all logs show that user web page as a link.
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sometimes people look at cache pages at work - music is not welcome.
there's a cache in my area called "burl ives", where a music clip is available should you want to hear it. that's the way to do it. if you just want to play music, well, that sort of thing is like "cool ringtones" - a good way to brand yourself as a techno-schmuck.
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something i would like to add in terms of influencing the ebrpd - they are under the gun themselves to keep from losing money in our new terminator-run government. They recently went to a good bit of trouble to put together a report that justifies their existence and positions them as an important part of the Quality of Life in the East Bay -- something, btw, that I fully agree with and support.
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highly recommended. give yourself extra time, some of those micros are nasty.
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If you're hiking out yonder in the woods
And you have to imitate a bear
Examine those leaves you're about to use
With the greatest possible care!
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There's one in the South (SF) Bay area that I have heard about but not gone after. Although I don't have the name, I am told that it is the size of a grain of rice, (the people I was talking with were very adament about that), and yes, it has a log in it. You can only do it an night as the cache can only be seen under ultraviolet light. You have to have a UV light to find the cache, you would never see it otherwise.
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The contents of your cache will change randomly over time. Some people will take something and leave nothing. Some people will take nothing and leave something. Some people will take one thing and leave three. Go revisit the cache after awhile and see what it contains - it's really sort of neat to see that the container has stayed the same and the contents are completely different. As long as the contents are reasonable, don't sweat it.
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yeah, we know who is in charge. word is there is an edict to remove caches from him. our question is what is the best approach to take - as a group? individually in an ad-hoc way? or what?
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EBRPD Banning Geocaches? is a thread dealing with a problem in the San Francisco bay area. Two counties on the east side of the bay, a very large area, have parks administered by a regional parks body. It's a lot of land, and for some reason they have gotten a bug in their bonnet and, word is, are banning geocaches from their parks.
We locals are trying to figure out the best way to approach the problem. What we would like is advice from people who have had the same problem in other parts of the country. obviously, personalites will differ, but any case studies would interest us. What happened? How bad was the problem? How did you structure a response? What was the outcome? What suggestions might you have for us?
Thanks in advance.
How Geocaching Helped Me To Actually Get A Life
in General geocaching topics
Posted
Until you have read "Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television", you do not really realize what an insidious force it is. Jerry Mander does an excellent job of arguing that not only should you not watch TV, but that TV shouldn't even exist.
I had heard about GeoCaching but didn't really understand it. Then I read about it in the paper and it 'clicked'. I've been out doing it ever since. The most important thing to me is the physical activity. My part of California has lots of hilly country. At first, it was a real struggle to haul my carcass up some of even the smaller hills. More and more I have found myself going up them with fewer rests at a stronger smoother pace.
I saw someone tonight who told me she has been runnig 2 miles a day. "I just do it and get it over with" she said. What's great about caching is that I like doing it, so I'm pretty sure I'll be hauling my blubber up those hills long after she's given up pounding around a track.