bons

1st, I want to apologise to Duane for being part of this problem. I really thought giving the bug to him would be funny and wouldn't start anymore insanity. I was wrong. I'm sorry. 2nd. Duane's log received a lot more attention than I would expect. I see the bug has been edited since I held it but I have a fear that Duane's log in his own cache was edited long before that bug was. It definately was edited a lot more quickly. I'm assuming and hoping that that fear is completely off base. Nevertheless, I do have that fear. And I'm sorry but I can't belive my logs and everyone else's logs get the same going over his get. Is it really worth the admin's time to watch him so closely? Really, I think it's time that the site itself gets an editing feature. If **** is a bad word then **** shouldn't be stored in the database. The database should do that job for the admin. It shouldn't be a part of the admin job to read certain logs and sanitize it for everyone's else's protection, especially when it's apparently not their job to read the travel bug names. And yeah Duane, I think it's time you changed your name to Duane. Because at this point you could walk on water and be blamed for comparing yourself to Jesus. You're a nice guy, but it took meeting you to realize how nice of a guy you are and unfortuantely there's too many people who aren't ever going to get that chance.

Because two things are being talked about. 1) Guidelines that restrict the placement of caches based on size when what is desired is a restriction based on "lameness" (which unfortunately is a lot harder to measure), because of a perception that bigger always equals better. 2) A requested site change regarding how search functions work. The information requested already comes in a $3 month PQ and is used in free software that already does things this site will probably never do. The important part of this request is the following: The time spent doing this will be time paid for by people who don't need nor want the service. So I'm sorry, but I have no micro hides, no micro guard rail finds so you're off base there. As for a desire to please you, I've found that it's difficult to please people who want things their way and aren't willing to do the work to make it that way. Want a easy way to exclude micros? Support the site. Want better local caches? Plant them, and work with your local cachers to plant them. Praise really good caches instead of insulting local caches and make it a local goal to place the best cache that town's ever seen. But don't suggest wasting limited development time on people who won't pay for it and don't suggest rules that won't accomplish those goals and expect either of those things to fly.

The purpose of a TB is to travel and to reach their goals. It appears that the stated purpose of his cache is to keep a bug from traveling. For example, read the goals of some of those bugs in that cache. Some of them are on a cross country race. And how did the person who picked them up decide to help them on that race? He decided to hold onto them and place them in a difficult cache whose description indicates to me that it had better be really waterproof or you're going to have some wet bugs. Either way, they're not in much of a race anymore. So basicly, the purpose of placing the cache seemed to be to make geocaching a lot less enjoyable for certain members of the community. You can make your own judgements about what kind of person does that. Forum guidelines don't permit me to voice that opinion publicly.

Not really. I fully support your right to place a cache I have no interest in looking for. In fact, I'm likely to visit the area out of curiosity and after having enjoyed my visit, not look for the cache. I've done it before. I'll do it again. I've sucessfully completed virtuals that I didn't log simply because I didn't feel like describing the escargot waltzing beneath the iridium flares. I've gone to the location of a micro in a woods and walked away knowing I didn't feel like looking for it. I didn't complain about any of those or try to come up with a new guideline so I wouldn't have to see such things in the future. I just accepted that, like key lime pie, it was something I just didn't have a taste for but I could understand how someone else might enjoy it.

And yet you're not complaining that ammo cans are easy to hide and that the areas where they are could handle bigger containers as well. You seem to draw the line at the size of container you personally prefer. It's almost as if you want all caches to conform to your particular style. As far as size goes, I want the right container for the cache, and that may not be the largest container for the cache. Dead drops, fake bricks, bison tubes, and clever uses of rare earth magnets have a great appeal to me because they allow for a wider variety of caches. And to me that seems to be the difference between our points of view. You seem to want all the space reserved for the types of caches you personally enjoy. I'd rather have a great variety of caches placed so that everyone can find something they enjoy.

Sax (and anyone else who wants a CD burnt and mailed): PM me with an address and I'll send it out Saturday. As a bonus, I'll include the complete original photo collection in wonderful 2048*1536.

I suspect the major reason that they're in DD MM.MMM is because that's the usual default for a new GPS out of the box.

Should we also change the icon for regular containers to a toilet bowl to describe the conditions of the log book (damp) and the quality of the trade items? There are plenty of good micros. I encountered a nice fun one this weekend in the middle of Sax Man's campout. Actually there was a good long discussion one morning where people kept talking about the micros they've really enjoyed and how cool it was to find them. I'm sorry that some of you apparently live in areas that don't have the kind of micros so many people at the campout were talking about. What's sad is that you seem to be doing your best to insure that you'll never get to enjoy one either.

Maybe the sport is evolving naturally in favor of micros. Perhaps more micros is the natural balance of geocaching. And yet,oddly enough, I never see complaints that someone placed a regular where a much larger container would still be supported. That's a guideline that favors larger caches over smaller and much like the guidelines that favors caches over virtuals. I suspect it'll have similar results, or possibly worse ones. If people are worried about the proliferation of cheap caches, I'll tell you right now that I'd prefer those caches be magnetic key containers than cheap tupperware. I don't think that you can legistlate time, effort, and cost in a way that will give you the results you personally desire. I suspect Dave Ulmer, who placed the first cache, would be very happy if that's exactly what happened. I could be wrong about that but that's the impressision I've been given. Personally, I wouldn't mind one bit but I'm not going to lobby for that type of change. If it happens, it'll happen naturally. Yep. And that includes the now defunct locationless and the now harder to submit virtual. And now there's a third type you'd like to see limited. After all, isn't it your goal to insure that geocaching will cease to be be what it is now? They have the same limitations as other caches. You seem to want them to have their own extra set of limitations, just like virtuals. Has it occurred to you that the proliferation of micros you don't like is a direct result of the limitations on virtuals and a change of rules regarding micros will simply result in a proliferation of lame decon boxes or lamer tupperware? No. The point is to go somewhere, look for something, and have a good time. If we always have to find it in order to have a good time, then we ought to quit trying to actually hide it. There is no shame in a DNF and often there's a lot of fun in one. At least for me there is. Either that or Jeremy will add the ignore feature to the site or you'll learn to do it in any of the tools that allow you to ignore any caches you don't want to find. Ignore them and let someone else have a good time with them. That's what they're there for after all. You're not expected to like every cache. You're not expected to look for every cache. You don't have to find them all.

I'll give you a spare 20% just because I've met you and found out how nice of a guy you really are. Now all we need to do is find a moderator who can move warning amounts around.

Perhaps you missed it but a micro is a "real" cache. It's not a fake cache. It's not a wannabe cache. It's not kindof a cache. It's a real cache. ---------------------- Now I can understand someone not wanting to hunt a particular type of cache. You're free to define what you want geocaching to be to you. You can decide what caches to hunt, which ones to ignore, what kinds to place, and list them with whatever services you choose within those services guidelines. But when people start suggesting that a service needs to change their guidelines to cater to the type of cache they personally enjoy then I really have to wonder how selfish they really are. You have the choice not to look for it. You have the choice to log a DNF or a note instead of spending hours doing something you would not enjoy. But when people start thinking they have an obligation to prevent other people from placing caches that other people enjoy on the grounds that it's not their personal cup of tea then I have to wonder what the future of this sport really is. Maybe we should have the phone book stop listing Japanese restaurants since so many people don't like sushi. Maybe iTunes should remove all the Country and Western songs from their playlist. Maybe the dictionary shouldn't list all those slang definations. Or maybe we can learn to accept that there are caches listed that we personally aren't interested in and get on with our lives. ----------------- Humor note about the Geo Court and the micros Torry keeps being worried about. The cache in question wasn't a micro. It's described as an Ammo Box (small). Bad placement can occurr with any size container. It's just as possible to have the police called or someone hurt on a regular sized cache as it is on a micro. Actually, I think I've read about more problems in the forums with regular sized caches than with micros. So if we follow Torry's line of reasoning and the historical data, I'm thinking that any limitation to what can be placed would probably affect regular sized caches a lot more than micros. ----------------- Be careful what you ask for. You might get it.

robertlipe: That's twice you've talked about "broken/defective implementation". Would you like to elaborate, perhaps with a link?

Get them while they're hot. (They'll get taken down eventually). The photos (27 meg!) 110 photos from the campout with some added shots of Capulin Volcano since many people made that trip as well. I have photos of the church on the backroad to Capulin if anyone wants it (It's not in the zip). I also have the originals as 2048*1536 if anyone wants a more detailed copy of anything. The zip also has an extra shot of the white truck taken from the top of the Mesa from the optical zoom competition I was having with NevaP. It's cropped to 400*300 but otherwise it's untouched from the original photo. The movie (10 meg!) I couldn't get a group picture, so I resorted to taking a short movie during the food fest. I really want to thank agent7719 for doing all the cooking. That was a lot of people to feed. Special shout outs also go to 360 for the Original Can Of Beans and the Iridium Flare view, The Plugge Family for the cache on the hill and the on-the-fly Urban Micro, New England n00b for his donations to this event, Sax Man and family for the incredible amount of effort they put into this, and I want to give my thanks to everyone who came. Without each and every one of you, this event wouldn't have been the unforgettable event that it was.

At Sax Man's campout we were all given a waypoint and told to place a flag where our GPS thought the waypoint was at. The vast majority were all clustered around where the little girl is walking. If you had sat on the ground with a walking stick you could have knocked most of them over with the stick. Except the one on the left... At the next event I want to try it again, giving everyone two flags, one for WAAS and for for WAAS off. I'm also thinking about color coding them by brand and antenna type.

Pretend I lived on the east coast and I had a great reference point in my yard and I told you my extremly accurate GPS was reading 6 feet off to the north because of the local reception. Now if you lived in the same city as me, you might adjust your readings. If I spent enough money on this setup you might adjust your readings if you were in the same state even. If you were in a different time zone, would you bother adjusting your GPS based on what my GPS was doing no matter how much I spent on this device? That's why I turned off WAAS.

http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=swag Swag n. (slang): loot. Swag meaning loot definately predates geocaching. It was a term I knew long before I heard the word "geocaching".

Bons would wonder why you're comparing someone doing donuts with their truck to a person walking. How many orders of magnitude are between the two? It's not apples and oranges. It's a pallet of watermelons vs. a grape.

I like this bit because it illustrates something important. The wagon ruts are still visible. We know it took a lot of wagons constantly following the same trail years make ruts like that. There were a lot of wagons involved in those cuts in the earth. I can't even imagine my cache getting that many visitors in it's lifetime. Those wagons were drawn by horses. Horses that weigh a lot more than you and I. Horses with a smaller, sharper, footprint. Putting more pounds/sq. inch on the earth than we ever do. Horses that leave footprints in places you or I simply don't. And yet only the ruts remain. The horses alone couldn't do the damage. Years of wild animals couldn't do the damage. It took heavy vehicles with thin tires that cut the earth to do anything like that. The OP is talking about 20 people walking back and forth to a cache as if that did the same damage as wagon trains and tanks. I'm sorry, but there's a matter of scale here. When I start doing more damage in my sneakers than a bison or a horse or a deer, please, let me know. --------------- http://www.qsl.net/n7jy/trinity.html has a lovely little quote about an atomic bomb testing site. . This is not an uncommon discovery for those who have visited the sites of atomic bomb tests. And yet somehow the footprints of 10-15 geocachers leave a trail that will not repair itself. Does that make sense to anyone else here?

http://contrapunctus.net/league/photo/pcd0423/011.php - The same guy doing his thing in San Fran. http://www.elaccess.com/devotion/rocks/ - more rocks. http://www.klatu.com/lix/rockatier/ - some other people doing the same thing. It's a really cool skill. It's sad when someone learns how to do something magical and we decide to distrust them rather than enjoy it.

A few notes: 1) For the basic line of Garmin/Magellen units, price doesn't affect the accuracy. Price reflects all the other little things that come with it. 2) WAAS is not all that it's cracked up to be. Do a search on WAAS and the most common phase you'll find is "I keep it turned off". 3) Don't trust the unit to tell you how accurate it is. From your bearing comment, it sounds like you'll want a unit with an electronic compass.

Good link, thanks! I hate to laugh after actually reading an informative article, but I'm having a hard time making the adjustment between tanks going over the ground and geocachers. Do I really need to lost that much weight?

I really want to see the report that explains how 20 people (10 back and fourth) walking along a trail over a period of a week can destroy the soil, plants, animals, or anything else in the area to the point where it can no longer be recovered. How the heck does the land survive it's own animal population?

Driving roughly 235 miles to host said event Driving an hour more than team 360 for the same event and praying I remember to pick up beer before I go.

No. We lost 3000 people because some people some where decided to kill them for reasons I can only guess at. Over 200 years ago 4,435 people gave their lives for freedoms that you and I currently enjoy and it seems like you're willing to discard in an effort to keep the life you value so much. Since then hundreds of thousands of soldiers have joined them, fighting to preserve those freedoms and trying to insure that others have the chance to appreciate the freedoms we so often take for granted. I am not a terrorist. I don't want to be treated like a terrorist. I'm not going to treat my fellow citizens as terrorists. And I certainly won't turn my fellow citizens in like a traitor going to the secret police.

You mean things like people sneaking in the woods and hiding containers for ammo and weaponry or maybe people carefully hiding things under park benches or taking photographs of buildings or large structures? I can see the FBI knocking on CarleenP's door right now. I'll pass on this one. I'd rather land in the home of the free than the home of the secure.