Learned Gerbil

BTW, the Elephant is still visible if you go to Battersea Dog's Home. The Elephant is being dismantled next door. Although the canopy etc has gone, the elephant was still very much there yesterday afternoon.

I would just like to make public the views which I have expressed several times in the past in private emails to our reviewers which is that they do an excellent job and display an amazing amount of tact, diplomacy and intelligence to what they do. We would all be very much the losers without them. I cannot imagine that anything would be gained if either or both of them were lost or replaced. I am sure they make mistakes, as we all do, but one or two errors of judgement over the years that may of occured cannot reduce such an illustrious record and they continue to have my every confidence.

I mean a Geocaching.com premium member - you can then access the downloads at stats.geocacheuk.com. There are many tools like POIEdit that can convert between formats if none of the ones you can download has the format you need.

I saw some stuff Thursday and Friday. GQ and I went up on Sunday to see the elephant procession and check on some of my caches in the nearby park. We agree - it was very impressive, and very good fun! It was amazing how lifelike the elephant was, and the obvious puppeteers made it seem more magical, rather than less!

Premium members can download all UK caches in various POI formats from www.geocacheuk.com.

HH, as I pointed out earlier, a charity will almost certainly fall foul of the "supporting an agenda" guidline if strictly applied.

Wouldn't it have been better to with the five years and get a more powerful computer at half the price?

I had no idea that Macs had a browser included when the Web had not even been deployed in a working form (1990). Now I am impressed! BTW, the "looks good" arguement for Macs always irritates me. They don't look good - they look boring and white - So does my fridge. Take the iPod - a design icon! A white box with a screen and a dial - I had a microwave oven that look similar in the late 70's! And what is this about critisising Word for including in a Word document the info it needs for the features it offers users? If it is being suggested that is not a good HTML editor, then no wonder, it wasn't ever designed to be!

Because as owner, you have not edited the freeform text.

If you are talking to the other cache owner about it, you are doing the right thing in my view. I doubt anyone thinks you are critisising anybody, and if you place this cache now, everyone will be looking for the nearby micro anyway!

BTW, the criteria were not always thus - GC.com thinks GC22E5 and GC2823 are 34 feet apart - they are actually much, much closer! They were also laid the same week!

Which micro is it? the owner might be able to move it a short distance.

Although it doesn't work on my very popular Samsung and TPTB do not seem interested.

IE6 on a PC at work only shows the old map and a blank box alongside it with an "error on page" message in the status bar. Presumably the pages now use an ActiveX control that is not "approved".

But then it wouldn't have supported USB!

If the ZSL is a registered charity (whatever its aims) the propsed cache must surely fall foul of the rules against caches which promote an agenda (I know we are getting close to the T word subject again).

I is a possibility, but I have usually had two PDA's a mobile phone and a GPS with me on most of my finds and have had no losses or damage yet.

The only thing that I think is important is that the cache had been published so was available to be hunted. The fact that the coordinates were out is irrelevant - there are plenty of caches out there that have never had their coordinates corrected and people find them every day. The fact tha tthe cache was disabled doesn't mean anything in my view, unless the owner had disabled it to stop people from finding it, for example because of a local danger. If the setter is happy, log it.

I believe that a WiFi connecton has been used to provide the final location of a cache as part of a multi (or was it the answer to a virtual?). I don't think it has been used to log a cache.

Most can be set to stay on when on external power (otherwise your sat nav would switch of all the time) but as you say the weather problems are immense - however - if the log is to be by Bluetooth there is no needfor the cache to be out in the open. As long as whatever it is in is transparent to Bluetooth signals the PDA can be in a building or sealed or weatherproof box with the solar panels on the outside. I suppose the best setup would be for a large bank of panels to charge batteries and have the batteies run the PDA so that it could continue to operate around the clock.

I am supposed to be in South Wales on Saturday I am afraid.

I get - "Jobcentre workers fear for own jobs" More time for caching then!

For street names etc get a sat nav application such as TomTom. For detailed mapping get Memory Map. These are the two leaders. Currently there is no detailed terrain mapping and detailed street level routing application. The two things are based on different technologies.

I have all my finds using a 320 (the hardware and software is the same as the 315 - it is just the default waypoints were maritime). The 310 only goes to two digits of decimal minutes whilst Geocaching coords are to three points so a 310 can be used for caching, but won't get you as close. The 315/320 are good solid, robust (almost indestructable in my experieince) and accurate devices and well worth buying second hand.

I log DNFs if I have a proper chance to look and can't find, or there is some other impediment that the hider needs to know about - like the recomended parking no longer exists and I decided to look for another cache after I gave up looking for alternative parking. As an owner of caches I love DNFs - they tell me if the cache is still challenging or if there are problems with it. What I hate is the people who can't find a cache but keep silent becasue they don't have the balls to say DNF, or even claim a find on the basis that the cache is missing and they would have found it but it has gone missing (even when it hasn't!) This happens a lot on the Central London micros. My favourite DNF I read was for a cache in the Gobi desert It was something like "Was going to set off on the three day drivve to the cache site, but Bubonic Plague was reported in the area so changed my mind" Now that is info the hider and other finders need!