mtbikernate

But that rate won't hold. Pretty certain the rate you're seeing is coming from folks giving the site a try. It remains to be seen if any of those people will remain with the site.

it won't be long until someone creates a google maps applet that shows the oc.com caches. Such plugins exist for Google Chrome to replace Bing maps with Google's in specific cases (details view on Garmin Connect, for example). Bing's imagery in 3rd world countries compares well to the imagery in my town (rural Texas). Google's imagery blows it away. The street maps are a wash as far as I can tell. The lack of a terrain view REALLY chaps my hide, though. I use it often, though to be completely honest, I prefer other topos to Google's terrain view when I can get it (which is pretty common, since MANY services offer at least MyTopo maps at minimum in addition - like GMap4 and GPS Visualizer).

It's a good start. I will reserve judgment until I actually get to play with the feature.

No kidding. I, for one, will not put my existing caches on there because I don't want to have to maintain listings on multiple sites. Besides, I'm bothered by Garmin's move to Bing's inferior maps. It's rumored that Microsoft forced Garmin into it through terms of some agreement they had. Bing's satellite imagery is abysmal in my area. I won't touch it. And as such, I won't touch Garmin Connect anymore, either. Apparently, I also now have to keep away from Opencaching.com, too, if I want to avoid Bing maps.

Release early, release often. Get basic functionality out there & working well, then add in pieces as needed. If you wait until you have "everything" done, you'll never release. And you might stumble into a new feature you hadn't previously thought of in the process. Also...it is labeled as "beta". Garmin doesn't exactly have a history of "frequent" updates to its Garmin Connect site. Once or twice annually, IIRC. It took YEARS for Connect to approach full functionality after its release. All the while, Motionbased had more features than Connect even has now and Garmin progressively disabled features of Motionbased before Connect was even finished. (I realized my earlier post had some typos, which I have corrected in the quote above)

Really? Don't they have their own maps? No. The maps they sell you come from data that Garmin itself has purchased. The dynamic maps services they use on this site and on Garmin Connect are from Bing, because Garmin has some kind of sweetheart deal with Microsoft. The best I can tell, Garmin's use of Google's maps didn't cost them anything, but there's a lot of speculation out there that Microsoft either through some kind of contract or by actually paying Garmin now has Garmin using Bing maps on its websites. I also just saw the updates from the feedback website. Indeed interesting timing.

if I do a postal code search for my area, the center coordinates also wind up being many miles West of my location. The zip code is the quickest way to get in the general area of my home coordinates, but not the most accurate way. My solution: put a cache in my front yard and use it. I tend to do my PQ's based on the coordinates of a particular cache in the general center of the area I want to search. It's really not even Google's fault that the zip code points are located where they are. They don't generate that data. It probably comes from the TIGER data, which comes from the federal census. You're going to have to take your complaint pretty high up the totem pole to get it addressed.

aw, so I got my terminology wrong. doh! At any rate, certain programs seem to like to use these non-ASCII non-ISO-8859-1 characters. I'm working on a class website project with someone who's using Adobe Dreamweaver to edit the website while I use a couple of different programs to edit different parts (depending on what task I need to do). Everything the other person edits in Dreamweaver winds up with nonstandard characters in it and the codes get really obnoxious. When I try to edit the page later in a program that doesn't seem to like the nonstandard characters, the code gets jacked up and the nonstandard characters get converted into ASCII characters that dont' make any sense. Real PIMA.

Not impressed. It uses Bing maps, which are far inferior to Google's. But that's not a surprise since Garmin pissed off Connect users with that switch last week. Otherwise, it's a bit TOO simplistic. GC is a pain in some respects, but you can't fault GC for providing too little information to people. Garmin does provide too little information. It appears to me that the cache HIDER sets the "awesomeness" rating, which is most decidedly NOT the user rating system people have been begging for on this site. I see people putting 5 "awesomeness" ratings on all their caches on that site very quickly because it's a rather arbitrary thing compared to the other ratings, even difficulty. Until Garmin sorts out that e-mail address thing, I won't be cross-listing any of my caches from here on that site. I'm not a fan of e-mail harvesting. At least my username is protected by virtue of the fact that it was my Motionbased account (which Garmin bought then transferred).

it's not HTML. it's an ascii code for HTML use. it's old, but some HTML editors automatically convert symbols into the codes for back-compatibility purposes. http://www.lookuptables.com/ Not a lot you can do about it.

The geocaching suggested terrain ratings do not reflect ADA standards. I know enough about ADA standards to know that the average folk will not easily be able to accurately rate a cache based on those standards. Want to talk complicated? Ugh. I have a 1-star cache. It is about 3-4ft from the street (quiet dead-end residential road) which is smooth and well-paved. Access is shoulder height when seated (roughly) though it does require some manual dexterity to access. The GC ratings put it as a 1-star cache, but the handicaching ratings provide further detail about the cache's accessibility for folks who have concerns about accessibility. I rated my cache with the handicaching system and provided that info on the cache page.

considering how Garmin wrecked their Garmin Connect service by using Bing maps, I'll put money on them using Bing maps exclusively for the opencaching endeavor. They suck royally, and I won't touch it with a 10ft pole.

www.gpsfiledepot.com has a lot of maps you can use. Topofusion (software) will make loading raster images easy.

I've noticed the same trend. I have 3 trackables in "the wild" right now and none of them are in a cache or have seen activity in a long time. One was actually logged out of the cache it was in...but that was almost a year ago, and a second one was one of those unlogged bugs that's just missing. I have a trackable in my inventory right now collecting some miles before I release it over the holidays....I'm going to give it a BIG tag that says in BIG letters how to log it and what to do with it. My previous bugs have had relatively small tags, but I'm leaving nothing to the imagination this time.

I was riding my bike home yesterday and as I rode up to my house, I saw a pair of geocachers hunting for my yard cache. Though we'd never met, they knew who I was and we talked for awhile after they signed the log. First find on my yard cache since January (I made it a puzzle to keep traffic down).

This is what my area looks like. cachedensity by mtbikernate, on Flickr I don't go after the parking lot hides or power trails...and the other ones I'm still working on.

I'm working on a master's degree in environmental science...I'm not exactly going to be putting faith in urban myths about exposures to hazardous substances. Exposures are measured in time-weighted-averages. How long are you exposed to the stuff when you're out on the trails? Not long. An absolute exposure at a given point in time may be high, but averaging it over times when you're not exposed at all...really drives the average down. It's a different story for folks who work in the those areas with exposures lasting several hours in a day.

then you better not go to most places in the southwest. Lots of radiation from old mining and weapons testing.

make them different from what is common in your area. I like unique hides. if it doesn't take me somewhere special, then it needs to be rewarding in some other way. easy is fine...but it needs to be different. a random ammo box under a pile of loose bark in the woods is only slightly more interesting to me than a parking lot micro. Typically the only redeeming factor is that it's in the woods. Give me some unique camo or something.

I have a puzzle in my yard. I got a few finds on it at first, but none for awhile. not a lot of active cachers here, so it's not surprising. at any rate, if my neighbors ever express any concerns about the people who search for it (we're good friends and they're aware of the cache, anyway), I'll archive it. one cacher did express concern to me at an event recently. he had driven by and saw my neighbor washing his car and was concerned about the safety of the neighborhood considering the race of my neighbor - and then he proceeded to tell me that he was once shot at pursuing a cache on some Deliverance-esque dead end rural road. I really wanted to throttle the guy (especially considering his profession), but I played nice and told him I'm friends with all my neighbors and I live in a very good neighborhood.

look at maps - find where there are no caches - then find out if you can put your own there. that'll require figuring out who owns/manages the land in question and asking them.

And that's why I made my chirp cache work as a traditional multi, as well. If someone has a chirp, then they can use it for one of the stages. but if they don't have a chirp, then they can do it the old fashioned way, too. I've had one finder get it using a chirp (the FTF), and then the STF got it without the chirp.

BS. There are four Wilderness Areas within an hour of my house. I can drive all the way to the boundary of all of them. Big Slough Wilderness (TX) - county road access Upland Island Wilderness (TX) - multiple county road access points, very near US Hwy 69 Indian Mounds Wilderness (TX) - farm-to-market road access Turkey Hill Wilderness (TX) - state highway access Placement of caches is a management decision left to those who actually manage the land. In the local National Forests, the only blanket ban is a blanket ban on submerged caches, and as far as I can tell a cache within a Wilderness Area may be approved if the appropriate permit is obtained.

My chirp cache GC2HF4P Tricky Trail Tour. The person who was FTF just contacted me to let me know she just got a chirp to play with. FYI, the rating on mine is high not because of the chirp.

You will need to talk to both your reviewer and the USFS management staff that would have the authority to give you permission to place the cache. Staff in charge of recreation management would be a good start, but also the Wilderness ranger and probably the district manager and maybe the district manager's boss and/or the manager who oversees the entire region. I know that the rules for geocaching are the same for all of the forests in my region (4 forests and two grasslands, IIRC) because the policy was developed at the region level, not the individual forest level.