Wacka

Update on this year's Venona activities. The latest one was music from the Nutcracker Suite (Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy). Somehow people got coordinates in Scottsdale AZ (all way above my head) which Venona verified were correct. Now the west coast cachers will be bothering cachers in AZ. Some sad news from Venona. Mrs. Venona and their dog Lattona were were in a traffic accident. Mrs Venona will be OK, she has a concussion. Lattona didn't fare so well. The accident ruptured a malignant tumor in the dogs abdomen and Lattona didn't make it. Although he is tormenting us daily, we are all sorry for his loss.

It doesn't matter what type of GPSr. I have a 5 year old one and find them as well as someone with an Oregon.

Venona first appeared in 2002 and kidnapped a TB in the SF Bay area. Several geocachers solved his "ACTIVITIES" in about a week, and retrieved the TB. He surfaced again in 2004 to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the USSR getting the atomic secrets. That year, we had to solve more ACTIVITIES to lead us to a new night cache called Dead Drop 238, which was located in a park near the Lawrence Livermore National Lab. About 20 of us met and received instructions from a "stranger" dressed all in black with a ski mask. It was enjoyable and ended with pizza. The another year, a TB hotel in a cacher's front yard was taken by Venona and we received photos of a kidnapped TB with black electrical tape across it's eyes. After solving many activities, it was returned at an event, but only after some people solved an activity that was online for only 15 minutes during the event. Another year he somehow replaced our "Welcome Geocachers" banner (present at Geowoodstock VI) with one that had a purple V on it . This year he has managed to deface the banner at our regional group's web site and we are in the process of solving this year's ACTIVITIES.

Just after Labor Day, we had a very active local cacher that suddenly died from a heart attack. One of our local reviewers knew him well. The dead cacher's daughter also caches. They are all for people adopting his caches and the reviewer will facilitate this in the future. People in the area are doing maintenance as needed now. About 30 cachers showed up for his memorial service in a local state park that he loved to hike in. About two years ago, we had a cacher that died in a motorcycle accident while out caching. Although they aren't adopted out, her caches are still being kept up by cachers in the area. She died about 5 days before an event she was planning. We still had the event and made it a memorial to her. An artistic cacher made a nice collage of pictures and comments that fellow cachers had put on our local site. A few non-caching friends of her's came and were really moved.

If the cache was bad, I sometimes use the phrase "Interesting place for a cache". Sounds like a compliment to some people. A previous message in this thread mentiond TeamAlamo and dgreno, It might have been when they were moving a car from Florida to California and found 600 caches on the trip. If you have that many to log, I expect a cookie cutter log, much less have him remember the cache. I have called him for a hint on a local cache he found maybe two weeks earlier and he said "I don't remember that cache, I've found 150 since then." Or they could be wordy and really put down the cache like I did once: Illegal Aliens hanging around at liquor store around corner-check Cache in sharp holly leaves-check Booze bottle in bush near cache-check Used condom on ground near cache- check Wet log-check.

The cache is a micro. It doesn't describe the camo. A blinky on a log is still a micro, even though the log may be 10 feet long.

I previewed your PQ in the link and it looks fine -500 caches centered in Utah. I clicked the submit data button, then clicked the preview this PQ at the top of the page. Do this and if that's what you get, click the edit PQ link, pick a day of the week and it should run. Sounds to me like you are going to the main page with all the PQs listed and clicking the My Finds PQ button.

Easy fix: Don't use that bloated old IE.

I told you to go before we left home! Couldn't resist based on the title of the thread.

True. I grew up about 25 miles from Niagara Falls. I have seen it so many times, it is ho-hum to me. I knew a woman that lived in the city of Niagara Falls. She went about 5 years at one stretch without seeing the falls.

In Foster City California, the Police Department placed an ammo can cache right outside their front door. I just happened to find it on a Sunday when the front office was unmanned. They had stocked it with trading cards. i took one of a nice looking female officer.

Using IE is probably your problem. Try Firefox.

Go to smittyware.com and down load Cachemate. Pay him $8 (a great investment IMHO). Use your Palm desktop program to load the program on the Palm itself. When you pay your $8, you get a code to unlock the program. Then when using GSAK, slice and dice your data and export as a cachemate file. My Tungsten T(16 M) will hold about 3000 caches. I can even fit more with the SD card I have in it. Never print out descriptions anymore unless there is a necessary photo on the page. Takes less than 30 minutes to load up the Palm, GPSr and print out maps.

One cache that was recently archived in my area showed that the newbie did not read anything. The cache lasted for about 3 months. They had two finds the first day and placed a cache the next, and no finds after that. Reading the logs, I noticed the cache was an ammo can with original markings and no sticker. The cache contained food and a letter opener (knife). The coords were about 50 feet off and there were homeless that regularly drank nearby. The "final straw" came when after the the fourth DNF in a row, someone said "I should have looked at the page and saw that it was placed by a newbie". The cache owner erased the page and put in a paragraph that stated that the cache placement was ok because reviewers visit the cache site before they go public and that they wouldn't disable the cache. The local reviewer archived it a few hours later.

5 gallon bucket with 100 film cans. the log is in one. Fake nail in a telephone pole (used an existing nail hole) at a busy intersection at a park. Fake bolts, fake dog poop, Fishing line leading to an underwater container where there is a lot of old snarled lines lining the brush along the shore. Multi/ puzzle where you need to decipher a symbol on a token, need a mirror, tape measure and a black light and a hidden bag with equipment to set up to point to the cache. Fake galls on oak trees Nanos in snail shells on metal objects. Nanos in nut shells laying on a bridge with many other nut shells. A multi where the phone number on a sign to call about illegal parking was a number that gave you the coordinates to the cache. The civic code cited was the cahe ID#. A cache at a company that makes the software that recognizes your voice ("Say yes for ..."). You pick up the phone at the door and say a phrase and you get directions to the cache. And many more I forgot.

Put Cachemate on the m100 ($8). In GSAK, export as a Cachemate file. All the info except photos will be transferred. Next time you sync your palm, the caches will be downloaded. A m100 will hold about 200-300 cache listings. (2M of memory).

Move the coords for the unpublished pages to the middle of the ocean if you are worried about them.

I know a couple in the top 10 geocachers. The husband has a M-F job and the wife has a job where the days off vary. Whether it is him , her or both finding the cache, they log log it.

In my local area, there are several organizations that control many parks and open spaces. One of them with hundreds of caches in the dozens of parks they have was considering a geocaching policy. Our local organization sent people to the monthly board meetings and worked with them every step of the way. The result: All caches have to be within 30 feet of a trail (only involved less than 10 caches being archived or moved). If the rangers have a problem with a cache, they will contact a person in our group named as the liasion for the park and they will resolve the problem. We will be notified of cleanup efforts. A group of about 12-20 cachers from our group filled two stake trucks full of litter (including tires and an oven- they couldn't pull the car up the hill) last year at a cleanup effort. The parks people said that was the best cleanup effort they have ever seen. Our local group has been invited the last two summers to man a booth at a local festival promoting the local parks and open spaces. We will be using our good relations with this group as an example that we can cooperate with the other park authorities in the area.

There is a problem about not being able to adopt caches when you can't contact the owner. A cacher in the area died in a motorcycle accident while out caching. People in the area have unofficially adopted the caches and maintain them as a memorial to her.

There's your problem!

I did one at a local community college where the cache was hanging on the Campus Security building ! - They knew about it. I did one today that was in front of a local Juvenile Hall. It was put there by one of the guys manning the front desk. He said to wave because you are on camera!

Nothing serious but came close. There was a micro on what used to be a major bridge in the area. it's a 1.5 terrain. There is a paved hiking trail with a paved spur up a 3 foot high incline to the old bridge's road surface. The bridge was closed in the 1960s and was used as a fishing pier for a while. Where the incline meets the bridge surface, they have shifted and there is a hole with fennel growing out of it. After getting the cache, I'm looking at my Palm and I step in the hole and sprain my ankle. Sat for 5-10 minutes and limped to three more caches that day (dumb). Where I had stepped was about 6 inches deep, but in the same hole about 4-5 inches over the hole went several feet down! If I would have stepped a few inches over, I would have went down to my knee or hip and probably broke my leg in several places. This happened in early February and the ankle ached on hikes until I sprained the other one finding a cache on the way to GeoWoodstock VI.

Seems like a German armchair cacher. All his logs are his screen name. Looked at the US places. Bradford, PA, Rochester NY, NYC. Italy and two days later- Alaska then 3 days later- LA. Several I saw where he was the last or second to last finder before they went missing.

Feed the hamsters!