piper28

It's not great under heavy tree cover, but so far other than that it seems to be pretty decent to me. I've been using geobeagle myself, and so far it's been pretty reasonable.

So far I've been using geobeagle, and while I have to admit there's a couple of minor quirks that I'm not real fond of (I'm especially not a big fan of the icons), for the way I do things it's working out really well. So well that I don't think I'd even consider the "official" geocaching app. Now, that said, I still use a regular gps when caching, and use the phone basically for just looking things up and making note of find/not find status. I've been real impressed with it's abilities to handle having the entire state of michigan loaded into the program at once. (OK, sure, it takes a while to do that initial import, but after that, I'm actually incredibly impressed at how quickly it comes up with the closest caches to you.)

Heck, it'd probably annoy some owners that the name that gets logged in the cache for my wife and I doesn't match the name I log in here. (Generally my wife does the signing of log, and I'm not sure she even knows the name of the account that I use for logging online ). So if some cache owner decided to go through and match, it wouldn't match up. If I got to a cache, had it open, then discovered I had nothing to sign it with, it's going to be counted as a find for me, and if some cache owner doesn't like it, that's their problem, not mine. If I've got a nano that I've opened and can't get the log out because apparently some cache owner feels it's reasonable to need tweezers to get it out, that's going to count as a find too. I'm sorry, but I don't agree that it's reasonable to expect people to bring tweezers with them caching. But quite frankly, any cache owner that decides they need to delete a log that someone said they didn't have a pen and couldn't sign the log, well, for me that person's going to go down as an anal twit who's caches aren't going to be high on my list of ones I want to do. There's plenty of other caches out there, and for that cache owner, I'm sure there's plenty of cachers out there that will slavishly adhere to the letter of their law. Funny, I thought we were supposed to be having fun.

Don't like them myself. I've had several caches in the area that I've pulled up, looked at where it was supposed to be, and just didn't feel comfortable looking for them. I figure there's another 12k caches around in the state, so if I miss one because I just didn't feel comfortable looking in the place it's no real big deal. Somehow I don't think I'm going to get to all of them anyways . Especially at my pace.

I geocache to get out and have fun. Quite honestly, spending lots of time coming up with long, rambling posts seems somewhat counterproductive to that. Now, I try not to make them as simple as TNLN, but quite frankly, I'm not a writer, I've never wanted to be a writer, and geocaching isn't going to make me start being a writer.

To be honest, i think that the 10-30 foot range or so seem to be the worst offenders for creating a social trail to them. Probably because people all look for the easiest spot to work their way back in, and that tends to be the same spot for everyone. It's generally not that hard to find the spot everyone went looking for the cache from the trail. Farther back maybe people will start taking different routes, hard to say.

I'd say the day that these overpriced, quirky gadgets show up on woot! for $5.99 is a bit closer. I can hardly wait to read the ad copy. I've got to be honest, I tend to think that this is a more likely occurrence. Just because someone makes a product, doesn't mean people are going to buy it. I'm a little skeptical that this is going to produce huge numbers of sales, and it'll be interesting to see if in a year from now the company still exists. Ironically of course, the only people we know for sure have been buying these are geocachers already .

BTW, as a note on cache attrition: In Michigan, we seem to on average lose between 50 and 100 caches a week (and at least during part of the year, gain 100-200 caches a week). There's obviously some seasonal variation in there. So we're losing about .5 to 1 percent of the caches in the state every week. I couldn't tell you the average age of a cache that goes archived, because that would take, well, more effort than I'm willing to expend at the moment . (Hmm, actually, we're up to about 12000 caches, so those percentages are a bit lower than what I said.)

I'm still pretty happy with the 60csx for caching, and use a Dell Axim for the paperless part. Ok, yeah, I have to carry another device, but I'm not limited to only having 2500 caches or whatever the limit is on those devices. (I use the custom poi stuff on the 60csx). I just wish I could find a setting to make my custom poi's show up and not the real poi's at a zoom level I'm happy with.

I make my wife sign the logs, and she's been known to put our names down and not put my geocaching id in the log, so someone doing this would end up deleting my logs probably. If they did, so be it. The only thing that would probably annoy me is that I'd guess it would now show up as an unfound cache in the pocket queries? That'd probably get annoying pretty quick. But really, the difference between 123 finds and 125 finds is not exactly high on my list of things that are going to ruin my life. I know there's a couple of caches I've found on vacations that I never got around to logging online anyways.

A week or two ago I went out, and I think we had 4-6 dnfs, and 2 finds for the day. Some days the geocaching gods just don't like you.

I happen to like cemetery caches, but I wouldn't do one like this personally. I don't want to be doing anything that looks like I'm messing with a tombstone, three's enough problems with vandalism in cemetery's that I don't want anyone thinking I'm involved with that. Here in Michigan we have a lot of old, small cemeteries. It's not that unusual to wander through one and see tombstones dated from 1820 to 2009. It's an interesting cross-section of history. One I visited the other day, many of the names on the stones matched the name of the nearby road. That said, I've driven away from a lot of cemetery caches because there were people in the cemetery and I didn't want to disturb them. It's one thing to poke around a large cemetery with someone on the other end of it, but with a smaller one, I just don't want to get in the way.

FWIW, I vaguely recall my Jeep also said in the manual that you can configure it by putting it into some configure mode and then doing something like 3 tight circles in an open area (preferably away from any large metal masses). However, my Jeep's an '02, and I don't think I've set it since then, so I'm a little vague there . Rain sensing wipers are great. Never had a problem with dust setting them off though. At least on mine they do swipe once when you turn the car on though, which is kinda annoying. (Oh, and you learn real fast that you shouldn't open the driver's door, reach in and turn the car on when the windshield is covered with snow. Or, at least, you learn it once a season if you forget from last year.)

Just don't forget to bring a shovel for that first part of that time to clear the snow away.

Last week I certainly didn't have any problems getting reception, although I was a little further south and east from there. I know on cruise ships I do have times when I just don't get reasonable reception on the balcony because of the structure of this ship, but I'm definitely surprised you wouldn't be able to get it while up on deck. Well, I was getting reception fine up until I killed my supposedly waterproof 60cs with water .

Ok, the curious part of me wonders why these towers built like this all have a pointy bottom end. I'm sure there's some logical reason (and I suspect even without the pointy end it wouldn't add any real stability for something that tall), but I have no clue what it is. Anyone know?

The way I golf, I'm not sure fine distinctions like distance to pin vs center of the green makes much difference in most cases . I've thought about doing this myself, but haven't had a chance to golf in the last couple years .

Whoa, I've been doing something wrong. You mean I'm supposed to hit the ball out in all that green grassy area? What are all those trees for then?

Actually, all LCD screens have issues with polarized sunglasses (at least as far as I know). Thankfully, at least in the 60CS, the orientation is ok that it's not a problem. (Turn it 90 degrees, and you can't read it). LCD computer monitors, and heck, even the lcd displays on a gas pump all interact with the orientation of your glasses and the panel.

Hmm, for some reason I was thinking I only had till the end of October. Guess I have a couple more days to at least try to get that straight flush, now I just have to find time to do that this weekend.

Well, maybe compared to something like Rhode Island, but not compared to real states.

Since I largely seem to be looking in some of the same areas as a tapeworm, I can say that there's suprisingly few lines here in michigan that seem to have the real potential for the royals. I'd have to look at my notes for the state, but most of those look like ones that aren't doable as royals anyways. (I often feel like I'm running around behind a tapeworm.)

After my trip out this last weekend, I'm starting to think that 6th place might be overly ambitious for me. I was just having no luck whatsoever. I'd find locations where I could find witness posts and not the benchmark, heck I found an access cover and still never found the benchmark once. Thoroughly disheartening, I'd hoped to collect a spare royal or two, plus the straight flush I need. On a brighter note, I did end up on a cool forest road that weaved amongst the trees, just barely big enough for a single lane of traffic. I was astounded it was in my gps maps. (Of course, compared to the one I ended up on on the west side of the state last year that was in the gps maps, this one almost seemed like a major road). There just aren't enough of these types of roads in Michigan.

Is this really a look at the future? Digitalglobe has been collecting half meter stuff with the satellites they already had in orbit before this one. Seems like this is more just an expansion of what they already have available (and it frees up the quickbird satellite to concentrate more on color imaging, which is only 2.4 meter resolution). I guess I'm just a little underwhelmed that we're still only at half meter resolution in commercial satellite imagery. I mean heck, the mars reconnaissance orbiter is something like .3 meter (although I'll concede that atmospheric differences might make that a little easier).

You realize of course that if Apple bought Garmin, we'd be doomed to units that have the batteries sealed into them.