CompassCollector

Care to share?

Jeremy/Elias; Has any thought been given to reducing the number of allowed pocket queries per member on high-load days and increasing them on lower-load days? For example: What if Thursday, Friday and Saturday were reduced from 5 to 4, and Sunday, Monday, Tuesday were increased to 6?

Sure. You can create the PQ but not select any days to run it on. Then when you need it, check the appropriate day from the screen. After it has run uncheck it, and it will not run until you re-check the box. At the present the unchecking after running is being done automatically as an emergency measure to reduce the load on the PQ server.

An obvious change to be made there, then. All PM features should stop automatically the day after the subscription expires. The reason you got all 3 PQs last Fri is because I only got one, as the rest had been turned off without notification. Yes, I did want them. "without notification"!?!?! By my count you were notified 35 times, if you chose to delete the notifications then that was a mistake on your part. [Edit typo] I don't know that I can disagree with Alan on that point. Since Gmail is free, and has a huge capacity, it seems to be popular with geocaching.com users. GSAK users seem to get into the habit of downloading the GPX files directly without actually reading the text. It seems to be a short step to people who may have set up a gmail account specifically for loading GPX files into GSAK. Perhaps this behavior was unknown or unexpected by TPTB. A weekly notification with a differently formatted subject line would be more likely to be noticed by these users (since GSAK would not have downloaded and deleted it). A notice posted at the top of the PQ page would have been noticed, since that is where people who are having trouble getting their PQs are likely to go first. This is what annoyed me, and what I think is annoying Alan: The notification of the change in handling PQs could have been handled better. I had to figure out what was going on, but when I came to this forum, there was the topic about the PQs, which answered my questions. I would guess that the total elapsed time from question to answer was under 1/2 hour. I don't find the current situation all that unbearable, and I understand this is a temporary, emergency patch. I can think of other things that TPTB might do to alleviate the server load on specific days. I hope they are working on long term solutions that will restore normal function soon, and they have said that they are.

Indeed. I believe that in California, for example, it is ILLEGAL to have a laptop where the driver can see it.

Eh. I cross poisonous snakes while I'm out on my daily constitutional. Interestingly enough, I only seem to find them on the paved pathways and never in the wild. I think they're referring to the kind with no feet.

It is worth pointing out here that GSAK is a shareware/nagware program that requires a fee to register and get rid of the nag screen. You can use the program "cmconvert" that came with cachemate to convert GPX (Pocket Query) data to cachemate PDB files. However, GSAK will do that for you in a nice graphical front-end, and will run 'cmconvert' under the covers to convert your data, and will even set up the database file to be sent to your PDA.

My wife enjoys the sport immensely, because it gets me, and the kids, out of the house for extended periods of time.

Call me crazy, but it just doesn't seem reasonable to me that Jeremy and Elias would take an action like this unless it was necessary. I have a hunch that he doesn't like pissing off his customers. Having said that, I am annoyed by the situation. It seems to me that certain other steps could have been taken with regard to notifying members of the changes, and the reasons for them. For example, I also use GSAK and download my PQ messages without reading them, so I missed the announcements included at the top of the pocket queries. When I started missing scheduled PQs, I went to my PQ page, I noticed that several were turned off, and then I came here. It would have been nice to (1) have had a separate email notice go out to all PQ recipients, and (2) had a notice posted on the PQ page itself. All in all, though, I understand the problem and the reasons for the temporary change. I look forward to the resumption of regular service, and I expect and hope that Jeremy and Elias are reading the messages in this forum and taking some of the suggestions for improving PQs seriously. The ideas here are essentially the raw output of a brainstorming session, and there has to be one or two really stellar ideas that could possibly be implemented. In the meantime, I'll just remember that some small measure of advance planning is required in order to get the PQs for the areas I expect to be in during the upcoming week, and as far as that goes, it's not a huge inconvenience. Best of luck, Jeremy and Elias, and please, keep us up to date on developments.

Hi Planet; If the bags are new (unused) you can get two in easily, and three in if you are really good at folding them tight. I got about an inch of new bags from a local store manager after I told him what I wanted them for. After he stopped laughing he gave me the bags.

There's probably about a half dozen ways to do what you want. Try them out and pick one that works for you. Some methods will require fees for registering software (e.g., cachemate, GSAK) and some can be done entirely free of charge (e.g., spinner + plucker). Best of luck, and there are a lot of people doing 'paperless' now, so you should be able to find help for whatever method you pick.

My $0.02; Although I have GSAK and use it and enjoy it, I think the first stop for someone who is just setting up PocketQueries would be to try some of the free tools first ( ClayJar's Watcher, Lil'Devil's GPX Spinner, Plucker, Robert Lipe's GPSBabel) and see how they work for them before trying out GSAK.

When I met a cacher at this cache I simply bellowed across the field "DID YOU FIND IT?".

Just buy the lanyard and tie it around your head. <flashback to the '70s, dude>

You embed an img= tag in your profile. I've seen several people use world66.com, for example, the link: http://www.world66.com/myworld66/visitedSt...emap?visited=CA should display an image with California in red. There may be other sites with similar capability as well. Go to the 'My Account' page, click on 'Edit Profile' and then in the "Latest News" or "Biography" section, put in the html code as <img src="http://www.world66.com/myworld66/visitedStates/statemap?visited=CA"> Replace the "CA" with a list of the 2-letter state codes representing the states you've cached in. Make sure to key in your password at the top of the page before you try to save the changes.

I have heard from a former National Park Ranger, that the bears in different regions exhibit different behaviors. For example: In some natl. parks they will tell you to put your food in your car. In other natl. parks the will tell you *not* to put your food in your car, especially if you like your car, but to hang it in a tree instead. Bears are fairly smart, and many of the behaviors are socially transmitted: They learn from other bears in their area. My best stab at advice is to check with local authorities about what is best with regard to the local population of wildlife, instead of relying on generic advice about bears in general.

My daughter Rosie taking a water break and looking at the sunset from near the top of Fremont Peak, just south of San Juan Bautista, CA. The sunset over Monterey Bay, as seen from Fremont Peak

No. Yes. ditto. As the owner you get to decide if they followed the rules and to enforce them as necessary.

I have more than one geocaching.com account. Before we go labelling everybody with 2 or more accounts as 'sock puppets', lets consider valid reasons why they might be created. In my case, I have two accounts because I cache both as myself, and with my children. When I cache with my family I typically go to caches I've visited personally before. That way my kids can have the geocaching experience, and I can let them look for the cache on their own, but still be available to give them hints and pointers, etc. Having the two accounts makes it easy for me to figure out which caches I've visited alone, and which ones I should take them to. Is that a 'sock puppet'? I don't think so. In the case of reviewers: I will not begrudge the reviewers a separate account from their 'regular' geocaching account. I've seen things get too personal here in the forums, and I've heard about things getting personal "out there" as well. If I were a reviewer, I'd want a separate account just so I could separate the roles, pretty much like a separate the roles between my two current accounts. As long as geocaching.com knows that X account goes with Y person, I don't see why I need to.

The notation "2200'" from the intersection that defines Ino gives me coordinates of N37° 46.046' W76° 47.614' (or 37.767433,-76.793567) for the North West corner. These are slightly different than the ones posted by QOCMike, but they're pretty close (138 feet) to his first point. Since I arrived at it by a completely different method (Delorme Street Atlas 2004, measured 2200 feet from the intersection of 604 and 614), that's pretty good confirmation that the numbers are close.

Just to add some background: Jpatton is correct. The notation "S 49 53 00 E" is a bearing. That format is most commonly used by surveyors and geologists, and is a bearing off of a 'quadrant' (or "quad") style compass. On these compasses, instead of having the degrees marked from 0-360, they are marked with 0 at N and S, and 90 at E and W. The notation above says to take a bearing 49 degrees, 53 minutes East of South. So, 180 degrees (South) minus (East) 49 degrees 53 minutes equals 130 degrees 7 minutes. This system has it's advantages in that reversing the bearing is a simple matter of substituting N for S and W for E. This makes taking a backsight to check for errors in the field a lot easier, and less error prone. [edit: corrected because I can't tell east from west ]

Thanks!

Can someone please Markwell me to a thread discussing how to put html tags into log entries? I want my log entry to have a link to another website. TIA

"Came by for Joani, found container empty of wives and all swag. I found a note that said 'Gone shopping with the girls and Marky's credit card."

Eye Doc. It's all his fault.