ColdMachine

Oops! Time to update the email address on that cache page. Sorry about that! -Ethan

Mmmm...Phyllo...

There's nothing like walking around in the woods with a gun to make you want an excuse to shoot something.

Love the Surefire. Got a couple of those. Sure, they eat batteries, but they blister paint at 50 yards! I've never heard of these Streamlights. No retailers near me. Can anyone recommend an online source? -Ethan

Please lets ban M1 Abrams tank rangefinder equipment from caches. I wouldn't want my young nephew getting ahold of one of those! He only has an old surplus Russian T-54, but if he was able to retrofit it with state-of-the-art rangefinding equipment...THAT could lead to an eye putting-out. -Ethan

A study was done at the Mayo Clinic in which people who were slated to have an eye removed due to cancer volunteered to have class IIIa lasers shined into their eyes for periods up to 15 minutes. Then the eyes were examined extensively on multiple occasions while still in the owners' heads, and (presumably) afterward with an electron microscope. They found no abnormalities. Their conclusion: "The risk to the human eye from transient exposure to light from commercially available class 3A laser pointers having powers of 1, 2, and 5 mW seems negligible." Check out the abstract: Laser pointers and the human eye: a clinicopathologic study. Too bad someone didn't do a study like this when I was a kid. My parents promised me a set of lawn darts for my 7th birthday, but they were banned a couple of months before due to a bizarre, unfortunate, isolated incident. (Lawn darts, not my parents. Unfortunately.) As for whether or not this subject is humorous, no one has lost an eye yet so we can still legally find it funny. -Ethan

I would be careful about buying CacheDragon. It is very buggy, and the author does seem to have abandoned the project. (But happily collected the 20 bucks I was foolish enough to part with.) It would be great if it worked, but it doesn't. At least not on my Axim X5. I can import files, view the cache info, get GPS data, and set the destination cache. The problem is: I cannot get the program to display the distance to a destination cache. The compass points me in the right direction and I can see it on the map, but I never know how far away I am. I worked on this for quite awhile to try to get it working. I emailed the author. Nothing. I guess David J. Stein, esq. is either too busy with his day career as an intellectual property attorney or has immersed himself in his computer science studies. Too bad. There is a real need for a program like this that works! -Ethan

Once I was looking for a cache in the woods near an old abandoned mental hospital. It was well after dark when I found the cache, and my flashlight batteries were dying. I grabbed the logbook and stumbled down the trail back to my car, figuring I could get an extra set of batteries and fill out the logbook there. I was a little nervous owing to the stories about the inmate that escaped years ago and was never recaptured. Supposedly old "Hookhand Jim" successfully evaded capture until the hospital closed, and then moved into the empty buildings. The area surrounding the hospital is kind of creepy, and there were some disappearances and mysterious deaths, so needless to say I was a little nervous. As I sat in my car filling out the logbook, I kept hearing this weird sound, like something was brushing against the car: thump-scra-a-a-ape! Thump-scra-a-a-a-a-ape! I figured it was just a tree branch, but I was spooked. I layed the logbook on the seat, started the car and gunned the engine, spraying dirt, rocks and dead leaves behind me. I came back the next morning to replace the logbook and encountered nothing unusual during the trek to the cache. However-- As I returned from the cache and walked around the back of my car, I saw something that made my hair stand on end and my blood run cold: There, hanging from the trunk latch of my car was a stainless-steel prosthetic appendage. More precisely, a hook. Okay, so maybe that DIDN'T happen... I think we need a new topic: Geocaching Fiction!

I was going to test my latest innovation there, but maybe I should try out my GPS Turban-tenna somewhere else.

It's a virtual cache. There's no grounds for killing it based on what someone might perceive as a lack of coolness factor. People don't have to visit it if they don't want to. Also, the picture of Christi is much nicer to look at than the scary, out-of-focus webcam shots of forty-something cachers that are posted everywhere!

It's a virtual cache. There's no grounds for killing it based on what someone might perceive as a lack of coolness factor. People don't have to visit it if they don't want to. Also, the picture of Christi is much nicer to look at than the scary, out-of-focus webcam shots of forty-something cachers that are posted everywhere!

A relative once gave me a case of MREs. They were about 5 years old when I got them. I had fun opening the packets and eating the cookies and collecting the little bottles of Tabasco sauce. I opened some of the entrees, but didn't eat them. They all appeared to be in decent condition considering the age. One of the entrees was a ham steak. It smelled fine, so... I ate it. (yeah, I know) Just to see what would happen. As you may imagine, my GI tract let me know that I should not do anything like that again. I don't think it was tainted though. I think it was just that my body couldn't deal with the old ham cells. I'm a vegetarian now. Mmmm...Old Ham Cells...