Sky King 36

Confessions of an FTFer... I wouldn't really say it is about the competition. I know lots and lots of people who have done and are doing long daily find streaks, like the 365 or 366 day challenges that are super popular now. That isn't really about competition, in that plenty of other people will have already done it before you, and it's not like you are going to do it "better" than they did. No, it's something else, it's "self competition" that drives someone to be willing to make the sacrifices, reset the priorities, weather the storms to keep a streak going. I am not a "streaker" myself, but I totally get why people do it, even when they say later "that was hard, I had to make a lot more sacrifices and overcome a lot more problems that I expected I would have had to." So it is for me. I'm sitting at Buffalo Wild Wings with a friend... and all the sudden my phone is making this klaxon "general quarters" alarm noise (that is my notification-only ringtone), and right at that moment, we have to decide... Do we stay here, and finish our diet cokes, or do we shovel our wings into a to-go box and run out into the rain and go? The decision making process is fun. The preparation of needing to keep your crap in the car and your batteries charged is fun. Running into other cachers at the GZ and finding it together is fun, even more fun than finding it first. And as others have mentioned, there's a sense of adventure being the beta tester. I would say that one out of three FTF runs I have made have had significant issues... misrated, wrong container type, bad coords, private property, wrong attributes... All just adds to it for me. Some of my favorite FTFs involved overcoming HUGE posting problems that I had to overcome. I had one whose coords were about 1,000 feet off. The word dionosaur was in the cache name... And I remember a Sinclair station in that part of town... so I go check the treeline next to the Sinclair station, and bingo. Not one other cacher came up with that. And actually, some of my favorite FTFs are caches that had been DNFed for days, or weeks, by cachers with way more experience than me. I have a few where the sum of all the finds for the cachers before me that DNFed was over 100,000. And finally, it's the "now or never" aspect to it. If I put a new cache off and don't go for it, then, it just sorta sits on my list until I am finally in that area. There's really no reason to go grab it today, it will always be there tomorrow, so why not just sit on the couch today and go look some other day. But the FTF... you either go now, right now, or that window is gone. I like the "incentive" that gives me to get going now. I do know some hounds that take the competitive aspects of it WAY seriously, that's not really me, it's something else, something more akin to what makes people want to do the 365 day challenge. Just my two cents.

This depends on whether the caches are loaded as waypoints or as POIs. I use the jjreds GSAK macro, and Garmin's POI loader, and my Nuvi 255 easily handles 5,000 caches and the searches don't really get slow until I am up around 12,000 caches loaded as POIs.

Take a look at the Kimber Jetblaster (consumer) and JPX (professional grade) chemical weapons, they use a small pyrotechnic charge to blast a thick gel OC spray that can't blow back. Highly regarded by LE.

Absolutely. That is exactly what I am suggesting. I do it all the time, where I set up two different front-end web servers with two (or more) completely different IPs, URLs, even different locations, and yet they all run identical code bases, all log in through the same authentication database, and all access the exact same back end resources. So both basics and premies have identical access to identical content, but they are truly logged in to two different websites with two different URLs. In fact one could easily configure apache so that everyone logs into the same geocaching.com server, and if you log in using premium credentials, your session is redirected to to the premium server's URL.

I agree... I use GSAK macros to load caching data into both my Nuvi and my Garmin 60csx. But it is not for the technically faint of heart. The learning curve is kinda steep in that you have to understand Pocket Queries, AND GSAK, AND macros, AND Garmin POI Loader... Try the demo version of NeonGeo for free and see if using that on your HTC gets done what you want to do. I started using NeonGeo as a complement to my 60csx, but actually, I don't even power up my 60 any more and I just do everything on my android.

My best days of caching I usually go home with water still in my hiking boots, mud on my jeans, a few dead batteries in my pocket, a few scrapes and bruises, and at least one clothing article ruined! Here's a pic of a cacher after finding one of my terrain 5 caches where you had to crawl into a muddy crevice so small you had to lay on your belly in mud and wriggle all the way in, and wriggle backwards all the way out... not for the claustrophobic. To make life interesting, every one of my maintenance visits to the cache was alone, at night.

I certainly find a LOT of caches that are actually outside of the caching guidelines, but it has to be really egregious before it is worth making a fuss over. Some time you just have to be callous and say "if you don't like it, let me know and I'll talk you through how the ignore button works." There will be some days when you wish you had a secret button that adds your cache to their ignore list! I should add this though... When they go to the website that you provide, it needs to be very obvious, perhaps even explicitly stated, that they shouldn't enter their geocaching.com username and password. If people are entering in their gc.com password and you are logging those attempts (and thus have their username/password) then I agree, that is totally inappropriate, and in many countries may even be illegal.

It seems to me that once you have resorted to putting live ammunition in a cache, "idiot" is in play. And have you seen 30-30 prices lately!

True. You are used to military ball ammo. As someone who was a professional rifle shooter (sniper) and terminal ballistics instructor, I can assure you that with the right ammo choices, this is not at all true. A .300 Magnum rifle cartridge delivers more foot-pounds of energy at 1,200 yards than a .44 magnum pistol delivers at the muzzle, and a properly selected bullet will deliver all of the energy to the target. Sorry to take this so far off-topic.

This is at once true, and absolutely false. I would be willing to bet that a HUGE majority of academic research starts with a review of Wikipedia, and then the student author drills down into the sources provided by wikipedia as a means of doing an initial canvas of topic material. This is EXACTLY what Wikipedia's founder intended. Wikipedia itself even prohibits original research, and asks that all material posted be from cited sources, allowing the reader to follow links to the original research and discern for themselves the credibility of the work. And that is all your professors are asking, is that you drill down into original research and discern validity for yourself, not simply quoting the wiki. To discount wikipedia's undeniable influence on academics, society, and culture, merely because wikipedia itself cannot be cited as a source is not being "intellectually honest." I am teaching my kids differently. I am teaching my kids critical thinking skills that they will use to evaluate any source of data, whether it's Wikipedia or a peer-reviewed journal or whatever. I am not teaching mine to view a source they found via wikipedia any differently than a source they found through other means. It is up to them to weigh the relative importance of data accuracy for the task at hand, and with that in mind, evaluate their sources accordingly. I don't care if the portal that led them to that research is Wiki or an academic source or a fortune cookie. I do the exact same thing with OSM... If I am going hiking or biking, and I look at the map and it shows there's a paved bike trail where I want to go... I can flip to the satellite underlay and using MY OWN critical thinking skills, say "does it make sense to me that there'd be a bike trail here?" Without exception, each and every time I have gone through this discernment process, I have found the OSM data to be either equal to, or more accurate than professional sources. And let's be clear here... I am not firing guided missiles, the consequences of an error in OSM is that it takes me a few minutes longer to get to my destination. If my need for map accuracy is too high to trust OSM blindly, then it is absolutely too high to trust Google Maps blindly. To deny that crowd-sourcing is a legitimate means to gather and disseminate information flies in the face of mountains of proof... A huge percentage of commercial web servers in the world run on open source software, for instance. Surely the last human on this planet to ever again doubt the validity of crowd-sourcing is Egypt's Hosni Mubarek, there should be no doubters left after him.

just remember that database queries and the way we "speak" about searches is opposite. When we SAY "AND" in conversation we usually MEAN "OR" in database talk, and vice-versa. You might say "I want a list that includes all the micros, AND all the smalls". In the database world this is always done by saying "Show me a list of caches that are micro OR small"... The most common mistake is "I want to return both caches that I have found, AND caches I have not found yet" so you check "found" and "not found". But what that means you are asking the data base is "return me a list made up of any caches that I have both found, and not found", and of course, the answer to that question will be zero. The database engine looks at each cache one at a time, and says "is this cache both found and unfound, if so, inlcude it in the list, if not, pass it by." Leaving both of those boxes unchecked is actually what you want in that case.

As I have said in a past post in this thread, the free membership is actually a non-issue. If you read the Google Maps API ToS, it is very clear and explicit that non-pay websites have access to the API for free. The real problem is ONLY premium members, we are actually the ones that cause the problem for Google. I suggested in that past post that GS split the premium and basic users so that API licensing is based only on premium member usage.

This is "splitting hairs," but I should probably clarify this for NeonGeo's sake... Those are not a list of "supported" servers, but rather, a list of map tile sources that individuals have found work with NeonGeo by manually entering them into NeonGeo's settings. They have been contributed to the wiki by users, and their presence on the community wiki doesn't imply that Can-O-Bits "supports" their use. I don't want us to run into the same troubles with map tile providers that Groundspeak has just gone through.

Oh, I totally agree there's no requirement at all to keep battery pairs together. The reason I suggest this is, that for those who don't have any kind of battery conditioner, it's very hard to keep track of batteries. You end up with a little box with 30 batteries in it and there's no way to keep track of which ones are older, which ones are in better condition... if you create battery "sets" that you keep together, then it becomes easier to notice patterns and history. I agree, a good conditioner resolves a lot of that.

Also, if you are going to take the time to do it, then please try to "do it up right"... A lot of people upload their track, but they don't go in and specify the surface type and things like bike vs. pedestrian only. Taking a couple of minutes to "perfect" the data at the time of contribution saves sooooo much work of going back and setting it later. I have been editing the trails in my area that have been entered and updating their surface, and it has been a long slow process because no one did it to start with. To be useful, people need to be able to know if it's a paved county bike trail or little deer path in the woods. Also... There are programs that do auto-routing on bike paths now, so it is important that you properly connect, or not connect, trails to each other, or to roads.

We could get into a whole debate about this, but take it from someone actively involved in mapping. There is no comparison, crowd-sourced mapping distantly outperforms professional mapping by such a wide margin that no one even talks about it any more. In my metro area, I am hundreds of times more likely to be misrouted by the streets on a professional website than I am to be misrouted by a bike trail on OSM.

Smart phones have been bashed forever, but to a great degree, they don't deserve it any more. Out in the field I actually have 3 GPSrs on me... My Garmin 60csx, my android, and my Blackberry Style. I cross check them often and I am long, long past the point of being surprised how accurate the phones are. Using all three I will end up with three slightly different fixes, usually within about a 10 foot/3 meter circle, and believe me, my Garmin has no monopoly on turning out to be the closest. Even in foliage my 60csx does not have the edge over smartphones it used to have. Since i started using NeonGeo on my android, it has been my primaray caching machine. I still carry my 60 in my pack in the woods, but that is as a backup and for ruggedness, not accuracy. I have done about 300 caches since using my android and have 6 DNFs, and in all that time, I have not fallen back on my GPSr once.

Absolutely. I have Firefox 10 with greasemonkey and both of the plugins from this thread running on my Air, and also have Chrome with the Chrome-compatible script on it... both seem to be solid.

Is the firmware up to date? Have you tried Garmin tech support?

I think you need to reset your expectations... If you can get 1-2 years of regular use out of NiMH batteries, that's about all you can ask for, and even then they are an unbelievable investment. In my GPS... I probably replace my batteries once a week. I recycle my NiMH about once every year if I use them heavily. Let's do the math shall we? My annual investment in GPS batteries is $2.50. Since I alternate my Garmin between battery pair "A" and "B" I actually get about 2 years total use out of 4 batteries. My annual investment in alkalines just for my garmin would be 104 batteries * 20 cents per battery = 20 bucks. Between my bike head/tail light, my digital camera, my caching flashlight, my headlamp, and my GPS... I buy about $20 of NiMH batteries per year, vs. over $200 if I bought discount alkalines. And, I put about 500 fewer batteries a year into landfills. There's a moral imperative here that transcends just saving money. But my costs are a good rule of thumb... NiMH batteries cost about 1/10th the cost of generic alkalines and about 1/40th the cost of retail name brand batteries in small quantities. In most slow-draw gear like a GPSr, I get slightly better life (10-20%) out of a new set of NiMH than alkalines, and probably about 10% less than alakalines after a year of charge cycles. In high draw devices like my digital camera, my NiMH batteries start out lasting roughly 3x longer than alkalines when new, and it takes about 1.5 to 2 years before my NiMH batteries have aged to the point where I get roughly equal life between alkalines and a single NiMH charge. NiMH chemistry, like lithium ion and polymer batteries is much better equipped for high current draws that just kill an alkaline. And what people have said about chargers is so true. Even back in the days of NiCd batteries, people always talked about memory effects. But Malloroy Batteries did some serious research and found that 80% of the time that cell degradation had occurred, it was actually a chemical breakdown caused by cell overheating during charging, and NOT "memory" that was to blame. A big part of NiMH's supremacy over NiCds is not just power density, but resilience to charge overheating. Charge heat management is a HUGE problem in Lion batteries. Part of the high cost of Lion batteries is that a thermal cutoff is actually engineered into the internal workings of a Lion battery. One last thing. I don't mix and match batteries, it's too hard to identify unhealthy cells that way. I pair them up for life, use them together, and dispose of them together. I use a label maker and label my batteries with their main purpose, which set, and purchase date (like "Garmin 60csx Set A, 2/12). I have had tremendous luck with Tenergy brand batteries, which I have been buying from All-Battery with tremendous results. I use the regular 2500 mAh AA cells in everything except my camera, where I use the low discharge batteries (eneloop equivalent). I carry 8x AAAs and a minimum of 4x AAs, usually 6 or 8, in my day pack using these cases from a company called "InAnyCase". OK, one last thing, and I mean it! Don't buy NiMH batteries if the manufacturer does not specifically state the capacity. The maximum power density available for an AA battery is 2,600 mAh, and yet most consumer over-the-counter batteries you buy at stores will be 1800-2000 mAh. It gets worse as you go up... Consumer C cells are almost always 2500 mAh... in other words, it is just an AA battery in a larger can. C cells should be about 5,000 mAh, and D cells around 10,000 mAh. AAAs should be about 1,000.

LOL... +1 ! You are correct Sioneva, prior to this the maps were free. It is extremely hard to monetize a map tile server. Google Maps is an enormous investment and resource drain on Google in return for very little revenue. As I have said much earlier in this post, Google is just the latest of many (will soon be all) providers that can't continue providing high volume tile services entirely for free. Google has some pretty good revenue streams in place for tile services to android devices, but serving tiles for embedding in another company's website is a free service that has only cost, and no revenue.

That is all google does. They don't create the content, they merely list the content that others have produced. And the act of providing that listing costs them BILLIONS of dollars a year. The NYSE doesn't actually create any stock, they merely provide a listing service for companies that do... And that listing service costs hundreds of millions to operate. The acquisition cost for a cache listing is zero. But the acquisition cost for the servers that listing will sit on is not zero. The acquisition cost for the software on those servers is not zero. The acquisition cost for firewalls, routers, and load balancers is not zero. The acquisition cost of employees and licensing is not zero. Without those investments, all you have is an ammo can sitting in a tree that no one knows about.

I work with companies like GS (no, they aren't a customer) for a living and I can tell you from deep subject matter expertise this is simply fundamentally flawed thinking. "We deliver our product primarily over the internet" is NOT a synonym for "inexpensive." It is not like delivery by means of UPS is the only real expense a business has, and once avoided by selling a product online, then you're rolling in cash. If you were to go back and ask Facebook, Google, Yahoo, whoever... And ask them about what their cost structure looked like back when they were at a few million in revenue... They would all say the same thing. "The development, hosting, network, and security costs required to scale our application to a global audience wasn't 5, or 10, or 20 times more expensive than we thought, it was hundreds of times more. We thought for year X we would need to spend $200,000 on infrastructure, and it ended up being $30 million." I'm not sure if you've been catching the news lately, but, plenty of companies are operating that tight. You don't see many companies under $1 billion in revenue paying out dividends lately for a reason, it's because their EBITDA is just a few percent above or below break even. And if you do a little research and come back with a list of companies that are doing better than that, my response will be "they're doing better because they don't make the potentially survival-risking mistake of undervaluing their product and giving it away 1% here and 1% there." More importantly, you can't have it both ways. Your assumptions about GS having the moxie to negotiate Google down are also flawed. Let's assume you are right and that GS has, and I quote directly, "no significant expense in the product that they sell." And they go to Google and say "by our calculations, we're going to have to pay you a few million, and we aren't doing it. You let us in for $50K or we're simply going somewhere else." If what you say is true, then the Google sales rep would be rolling on the floor. He/she would say "let me get this straight... you guys are making millions of dollars of profit on $4 million in revenue doing nothing more than repackaging our product, and you only want us to get 1.25% of the action? You guys are crazy. It's 500,000, take it or leave it. Don't let the door hit you on the way out." If you're a Google sales rep, here's a quick way to get fired. Take a product that costs many millions, take a slice of it that retails for $3 million, and sell it for $50K. Drop that bad boy into your sales forecast for next quarter and see what your VP of sales has to say about that.

I still think you are being wildly optimistic about the cost, but even if you are not... OK, let's assume your $200K is the actual number... For a company the size of GS to simply eat that $200k and not pass it along? Again, this gets back to what I said earlier, that people have this perception that Jeremy is just rolling around in a hot tub filled with 100's, that is, when he isn't out driving his BMW 9 series. Quite the contrary, $200K is a staggering amount of money for a company the size of GS. There are tens of thousands of companies that are 10 to 100 times larger than GS that operate less than $200k above or below breakeven, and even for them, a delta of $200,000 would be a complete game changer. This is what the posting of the Louis CK video was all about. GS gives the vast majority of its users the vast majority of their services for free, and when they need to make all their salaries and pay all their bills from the tiny sliver that is left to make any money from, they are villainized.

This "conspiracy theory" exhibits a fundamental misunderstanding of how c:geo works. c:geo doesn't get its map data from geocaching.com. The individual user's android actually goes directly to Google to get the map tiles for the background. The problems with c:geo have nothing at all to do with the change from Google maps to OSM. c:geo breaks pretty much every time that GS updates geocaching.com, and it takes anywhere from a few hours, to at most a few days for the c:geo guys to examine GS's HTML and modify the app. There are plenty of things that GS does that just baffle me, but even then, it seems unlikely to me that degrading their own product by switching off of Google maps is just a ruse to disrupt c:geo users for the few days until there's a new release of c:geo. If GS really wanted to, they could kill c:geo easily, and instead, they largely just ignore it.