caderoux

The NE version was JUST released. The ND version is fine, and I have the whole US - I don't have to renew to keep using the maps - however, I will need to D/L all the ones I expect to use. My European maps don't expire until a few months later, but I do travel a bit, which is why I bought the whole US. The new maps will have updated restaurants, ATMs, etc. I guess I could buy the new version of just my most used local maps to see if they are better. I was just wondering if anyone here upgraded to the NE maps and felt they had improved enough. I could always upgrade to the latest maps at any time in the future, so there's not really any deadline - except I will need to D/L the ND maps before my subscription expires in 45 days.

Bump

Bump

Someone deleted one of my locationless finds on a technicality that I didn't violate 100%. I don't mind that. What I do mind is that when your log is deleted, you don't get a copy of it with the deletion notification. However, thanks to GSAK, I never have to worry about losing information which used to be on the site here.

My Mapopolis MapPack purchased version is ND, and they expire in May. The new NE version is out. I can buy the NE version and get updated maps for $100, or I can keep using ND version maps and spend no money and use that money to investigate other options like Memory-Map, which seems ideal for topo maps. Any feedback on the NE version maps? What about Memory-Map - do people think all its features are worth the extra cost (it doesn't appear to do street-level directions.) Thanks in advance, Cade

I will be in Scottsdale for a work-related meeting from April 27-April30. There will probably be a few hours on a few days when I can get some caching in. I will have a regular rental car. Our meeting is at the Hyatt Regency Gainey Ranch, and although I've been there before, I think it very well might have been before geocaching was invented (I think 1999). What I'm looking for is some recommendations of some good caches and/or trails which can be done in a relatively short amount of time - particularly where there is not an issue of running out of daylight on the trail. Generally, I'm not adverse to hikes, but I'm used to New Orleans (flat as it comes, and generally we have swamp and urban caches). I'll have the camelbak and appropriate caching kit. I've checked here in a few threads, the AZgeocaching web site, and terracaching to look for caches which are recommended or look interesting. I've been getting PQs for Scottsdale for a few weeks now to start to have info in GSAK to read and see which caches are currently popular. However, this doesn't always give a fair view of caches which are now relatively infrequently found, but were popular and well-received when first hidden. Currently the caches I have on my hitlist in GSAK are: GCGEEP - South Lake GC4E67 - The Mummy's Treasure GCHGVR - Mummy's Surprise TCI7 - Papago Park Rock Formations TCL9 - "A" Mountain (Summit) TCLM - Lookout Mtn(Almost halfway) TCIK - Cactuscones TCIX - Bulldog Terra-tory Some will be easy to hit on days where I don't have a lot of time, and others might be doable on a day where I see a few hours of clear time. Any thoughts on these or other caches I should check out? Thanks in advance, Cade

The sponsors idea is turning a lot of people off TC. However, the idea behind it is that the community stays active and involved, in a self-policing way. If your sponsors drop out, you get a chance to find new sponsors - you drop sponsorship for people who aren't behaving or aren't participating. A different approach to the reviewers here, and one which appears to be eliminating the problem with people whining about reviewer actions. No terracaches near me, so no real interest in going there right now.

With the growth of many local and regional web sites devoted to caching, and the fact that the activity is really a local one, I have been surprised not to see many local sites (or even individuals) doing their own listings. All have competent web masters who could probably implement it at least to the level to handle local volume. Supporting only the local cachers and visitors would seem to me to be a reliable way to spread the growth. It all depends if they have the desire or time. Financially, the sport isn't big enough to financially support all the sites and infrastructure which it needs - typically this is a grassroots activity where people come and go, and so has no reliable formal base to draw on. Of course, no one wants to have a distributed database or share listings, so it will never be nice and neat - which is what I suspect a lot (if not most) of cachers prefer.

Yep - saved regularly scheduled PQs ain't working any more. You have to make new ones to get anything. At least I'm not relying on my old automation scripts to bring these temporary GPXes in with their new filenames. Hooray for GSAK 5.2!

It ran about an hour later than the one I manually triggered at about the time of my post, and about 8 hours after it was eligible to be run if I recall the last run date correctly. It looks like I guess it really takes more than 8 hours to get through the queue of eligible old queries on some busier days (Wednesday?).

I think with the timing being so unpredictable it's best to do as Bruce does and have multiple copies of the same query. Get your regular query on a Thursday, and then manually trigger an old one just before you go out on Friday to be sure you haven't missed new caches the night before. You'll always have the Thursday data, and if the Friday one comes before you head out, that's even better. Of course, if you are doing any query automation, you will have to know all the numbers for a particular query if you are doing anything based on file names. With the new GSAK 5.2 beta, I don't even have to do much work to modify automation scripts to bring in different query numbers - I have a one-click process in GSAK which downloads all the the mail from a special gmail mailbox for GPX files and imports them all.

I have a regular one which has been more than 24 hours since it generated. I created a new one to just run once, and it immediately ran. Some of my other daily PQs have run OK after the time I would have expected this other one to run. Is there a backlog running old queries or is this one just fuxored? Not a biggie, since I managed to get the new caches down which I was missing.

You can't do this natively in GSAK. However, a creative user would be able to get around this by first writing an external program or batch file which did the compare and if the files were the same then just delete the file before GSAK sees it. Basically to impliment this in a bat file all you would need is a command line compare utility that returns an error code after comparing two files if they are different. A google search should be able to track such a utility down. You could even include this batch file at the very start of your GSAK macro using the RUNPGM macro command. Instead of managing all the input files like i used to (I don't know why I would keep copying the originals to my PDA every time, even though I only used my hitlist), what I do is bring the GPX files in and delete them. So there are never any old GPX files to worry about. I guess if I absolutely did want to keep them, I would move them to another directory with overwrite anyway. This would be a much simpler process than worrying about determining dates and stuff. SO I guess what I'm saying is that you could also do it after bringing in the files, and always keeping your inbound folder clear. From GSAK, I automatically export only the GPX files I want to a separate folder. (With the 5.2 beta, I'm rocking and rolling - I don't even use Outlook anymore - I've got a separate gmail for just GPX files, a button which brings all the emails in, and a button which does the export/maplet/mightysync - two clicks - which could even be one. Y'all are going to freaking love 5.2!!!!!!!!!)

It was not here - only the main site, and the problem was persistent from just before the time of my original post, through my reply and a while thereafter. I returned after an hour and a half or so, and it was no longer happening. At one point there was a timeout error waiting for the database. Given the symptoms, it looked a lot like the db was tied up with something like backup or batch query operation which had locked a large number of records or a table.

EOM is short for End Of Message I only ask because I just posted a log, and then all of sudden it seemed to die - I'm not seeing anything else wrong with my connection here, and I didn't see any other posts or announcements of downtime.

EOM

"Non-anonymous" forums do tend to the higher quality, that's for sure. But participation is definitely lower, because people seem to enjoy the protection of (pseudo-)anonymity which forums generally provide. The forums here are on the well-above-average side - that's because it links forum activity to other profile information which is non-posting related - namely your geocaching activity, like photos and logs. I've never been one for online personae, and I use my real name everywhere. Cade

We have had a lot of crime over the past couple years from surrounding neighborhoods, and this is exactly why I've held off. However, there is a TB hotel in a nearby suburb which is a huge locked mailbox right by the side of the street - talk about driveup. Best part is that it's easy to keep an eye on and is not really muggleable. My TB hotel suspended in a tree by the airport on the other hand has gone AWOL.

Sometimes this happens when someone finds the cache accidentally or as part of a trial run. At least in the case of trial runs, the "FTF" actually delays logging in order to give other people a chance to FTF, and then log with their correct date after the cache is approved.

After a long gap over the holidays and with a lot of caches to clear out, I did 21 out of 22 attempted last New Year's eve spread end to end over the New Orleans area. The first cache was found at ---(2004-12-31, 8:18:07)--- the last at ---(2004-12-31, 15:57:32)--- just over seven and a half hours between first and last finds including lunch etc. I wrote all my logs on the route in the PDA, too. I used GSAK to prep the list, exported the entire hitlist to MapPoint, removed the caches not really feasible for that day (like the ones in Florida) and optimized route. I had laptop in car, and referred to the map as I went along. Since then, I've been keeping the New Orleans area pretty clear - so there's really no way for me to get big numbers here - but got to get over to Chalmette for a few I'm saving up for a run, and then I'll widen my "regular" area to include Houma, Slidell and Biloxi.

Ummm, the heart of this activity is finding a geoCACHE, not just waypointing stuff you think other might want to look at. There are other websites in place where you can do that. For this particular one if you have to be from the area to understand why it's so important then I would say no. There should be an obvious "WOW" factor and reading info signs and trying to comprehend the economic impact of something sounds like a good stop on a trip to stretch your legs, but not a "WOW". I've heard this argument before (physical caches are the basis of the activity, etc), and I don't think it is born out by the creativity and demands of the community here (including non-geoposters). The wow factor argument from the guidelines on virtuals is also very tired. I get 0 wow factor from an ammo can in the woods after a 5 mile hike. And it's too subjective if it's now depending on where you come from or what you've seen before. The sport/hobby/activity is not called long-hike-ammo-can-finding as some would make out. I prefer a physical cache, and someone could probably clamp a magnetic micro right on the turbine. There is always going to be poor cache quality, but as far as I can tell, this site has (rightly) realized that it is not possible to police this - but that's a problem with all the cache types, not just virtuals. The non-traditional cache types weren't forced on the community here - people invented them and asked for them. Some people probably got tired of hikes for a rusty ammo can. People wanted to compete for FTF, they wanted to visit caches and talk about them with other people. People wanted to do something no one else had done with a hide before. The creativity is astounding. gc.com can either provide a listing service to them or they can take their business elsewhere. Having anyone tell them it's not real geocaching, however, is disingenuous - virtual caches and locationless caches were here before a lot of these people even heard of geocaching.

As long as your coordinates are right - I'm pretty sure Grand Isle or thereabouts is going to be within range - Louisiana Highway 1 goes all the way down and then back up to Grand Isle - so the highway pretty much has to cross that latitude.

I generally only ever set out to find caches on my GSAK hitlist. I log the caches contemporaneously in GPXSonar, so there is no writing necessary when I get home either. I export the notes and bring them into GSAK. I also delete the cache from Mapopolis - so it's no longer on the map. The only problem is I also have notes on some caches in my hitlist which are still in progress or are repeat no-finds. Anyway, ignoring any of those which I didn't finally (wonderfully) find, I go to the ones with notes and log the caches online. Then I simply remove them from my hitlist (uncheck user flag), and also usually uncheck watch, too.

I believe I may be able to help you out on this one (South Louisiana - towards Grand Isle will also fit your coordinates), but not sure when I can get down that way - I'm in New Orleans.

I've also got a similar home-grown automation, but Clyde's solution is going to take it to more people by making it mail agent independent and open to everyone.