nericksx

Well that certainly explains why the "free" map that I got with my device was a download. No such thing as a free lunch, right? My map from openstreetmap.org just finished downloading, I'll be curious to see how it looks.

I didn't do anything wrong, but it may be that it was a download and not a disk. When I got my GPS, I got a code to get a free 24k map. It's all managed through MyGarmin.com, my unit didn't even come with software. The web app says that my 24k map is associated with my GPSMAP62 and can't be downloaded to my Etrex. I'm downloading an open source Topo which should be fine since I'm basically setting this unit up for the kids, but that's not really the point. If the map cost $20 or something I could maybe see making the licence device-specific. But since the map is $100, its a little ridiculous to make a user buy multiple copies. Sorry if this is "old news", not everyone who Geocaches has owned a GPS since forever.

I've been geocaching for 4 years and always used my smartphone. I finally bought myself a Garmin GPSMAP62. It was a bundled deal at REI, so I got a free 1:24k topo map for my region ($100 value!). Yesterday at the REI Used Gear sale I scored an Etrex Legend Cx for $40. W00t!!! I figured that I'd go ahead and load up my regional topo on to my new Etrex and life would be AWESOME!!! Wrong, wrong, wrong! <rant> Are you KIDDING ME, Garmin?!?!?! You charge $100 for a map and I can only use it on ONE device?!?!? Even Microsoft lets you install Office on your laptop AND your desktop. The RIAA's got NOTHIN' on you hosers! When I buy an MP3, I can listen to it on ALL my devices. </rant>

My original idea to post here was to suggest adding an RSS feed to the TB pages. My personal desire for this is so that I can export the feed to my blog because we most often cache while we camp so there are usually stories and pictures involved with my personal TB log (it's a Traveling Cacher Geopatch). I would really love it if you could choose to have your TB page look and act more like a blog, where images could be embedded in the text, and you could export all the content to Blogger or LiveJournal or WordPress or what-have-you. I also really like the idea of a "Dip" option as discussed in another thread. Perhaps the "Dip" option could be combined with the blog idea as a way to use a personal TB to log your caching adventures and share them with others. Thoughts?

It's not a team sport fer cryin' out loud and it's not a competition. You would really deprive yourself of a pastime because someone on the other side of the country took an action on their own cache that has no effect on you whatsoever? I wouldn't log my own cache, it just never occurred to me. Who is tracking this stuff down though, and why? When I log a find, I don't audit all the logs before me just to make sure that everything is on the level and making a list of folks I can ridicule at the next gathering. Am I missing something?

Maybe it's not about the survey data. Maybe the students are going to analyze snarky and crabby forum responses to a questionable survey and gather data about forum dynamics How meta.

Adding my bug report since it looks like folks are still getting this: 4/3 11pm PST Chrome, Vista, single tab, no add ons or scripts, logged in as Premium User Looking for caches via the Google Map, about 50% zoomed. Scroll, pause to see if there are caches, scroll, pause for caches. I was looking in the Yukon Territory in Canada, so it wasn't like a lot of caches were loading. I had to wait about 20 mins to be let back into the site. Thankfully I was just playing. If I had been trying to plan a caching trip for Sunday I wouldn't have been so good humored. Sounds like users are guilty until proven innocent, I feel bad for that poor German OP.

Hi Blue Moth! I got the error on Saturday night too. I was looking for more caches to add to my world wide wish list, and that error came up somewhere around the Northern Territory. Since I wasn't doing anything naughty, I just reveled in my super-human-ness and copied the message down for my husband since he thought it was terribly cute.

I read this WHOLE thread. I seriously didn't feel like tracking down those IE6 bugs this afternoon at work. The two quotes above are my fav of the topic, and I mostly agree with Bittsen's original view (ducks the onslaught of hard objects). Normally I wouldn't bother to post after a thread had gone so far down the rabbit hole, but I'm feeling saucy today. I believe the original goal of geocaching was having an excuse to use your newly accurate GPS gadget. Not to make people jump through crazy hoops or take crazy risks in the pursuit of some sort of smiley-based scoring system. Having said that I totally understand the evolution. People had to start getting creative in their cache placements to ensure that they didn't disappear and led to a whole other dimension of the game. It just was never the original point and I want uppity COs to remember that. (Although don't get me wrong, I love the evolution and the challenge, personally.) I would also ask the OP the same questions others have asked: why did you hide where/how you hid it? If you want folks to have to climb a tree (or SCUBA dive or venture into a radioactive ruin) then I think that's great. I also think that if you are going to make people do something other than walking/hiking and some amount of pawing around, then you need to say that on the cache page. I would be darned disappointed if I hiked for 3 miles just to find out that then I had to climb a tree, because I'm a cube-jockey and there is no way I'd be able to climb a tree. I wouldn't be pissed because the CO had placed a cache in a tree. I'd be pissed that in choosing caches to do for the day, I chose to center our day around a cache that is a 3 mile hike and was denied because the CO didn't say there would be "vertical scaling" involved. I won't try for a cache that I know darned well that I can't do and then whine about it, but if I make a day out of finding your cache and then find out you played fast and loose with the details, I'm not going to have nice things to say on your cache page. Disclaimer: I did not go and look up the OP's cache. I have no idea if it's a 3 mile hike or 500 ft from another cache to be found on the ground. I point that out because it makes a difference. If you are vague about the details about climbing a tree in a park when I can just shrug and go on to the next, then I won't bat an eye. If you already made me go 3 miles tho.... Is this making sense? I'm trying to say that you have to view your cache in the larger picture. To circle back around tho: I personally wouldn't claim a find where I didn't sign the log. I wouldn't delete a similar log on my (one and only) cache. I would have no ethical issue with, if caching in a group, one person shimming up the tree and bringing the log down for us to sign. When I "team cache" we all end up playing a role in the find one way or another, so I think it counts. I don't climb trees, but I may come back with a ladder. I wouldn't claim a DNF if I didn't choose to climb. I found it, after all. I probably wouldn't register anything on the cache page, honestly.

Considering that PDX cops seem to be in a "shoot first, ask questions later" frame of mind the past few... years?.... (God help us) You totally got me, hook, line, and sinker. I was afraid the bogus cops were going to shoot the bogus you with a bogus gun!

Seriously, dude? What, did you thrown them out the window on 205? At least you have good taste in cars. And if you lost your keys, how did you get home? What is the likelihood that the person who would come across them would be 1) a geocacher and 2) masochistic enough to participate on the forums? I'm not giving you crap, I really feel for you. Having a car key remade and replacing the remote is expensive. I just sense there is a story there.... is this the same day (night?) you were night caching?

Oh, they will add a "u" just about anywhere there is an "o". I'm surprised they don't spell it "fourm" It's not like in the States where we have to BUY our vowels. Would that then be Jellou Moulds? Or is that too French? Nevermind, the French wouldn't be caught dead within a kiloumetere of Jellou.

Do the Brits/Canuks also use the "u" when they are are using term to describe a form? In simpler terms... Do you guys have Jello Moulds?

WOW... mine is almost always within 10 meters. I suppose what I have read is true that some people just get crappy phones. Luck of the draw. Not trying to argue with you but is your phone really that off? Mine gets weird when in a treed area but for the most part it as accurate or more so than my GPSr My BB Storm is almost always within about 10 feet. The only time it's off is in heavy tree cover, or next to a body of water because the signal bounces off the water.

I guess I'm just a woosie cacher. If the log is a little mildewy, then that's to be expected here in the PacNW. If you can braid the logs hair? I ain't signin. I post the find and a NM. If the CO isn't fastidious enough to have used a decent container or to do maintenance, they aren't gonna bother to compare logs either.

Not always. Pretty much any web page which contains dynamic content (and even some that don't) is produced using a programming language such as perl, php, java, etc. I understand what you're getting at though. Web pages, essentially are just content structured or formatted using html, a markup language. However, that markup can also be produced using a programming language. I started working as a programmer long before the web existed. I've been a "web markup professional" for 12 years. As previously stated, HTML is not a programming language, it is a markup language. I call myself a "front-end developer" (XHTML/CSS/javascript/XML, etc) to distinguish myself from web application or database developers, and because "coder" is pejorative. Now that my cred is out of the way... Seconded. I spend a good deal of my professional life unraveling the terrible table-based, WYSIWYG-generated crud that the business owner's "son's best's friend's neighbor" did, who fancies his/herself a "web developer/coder/designer" because they can use a little FrontPage, or learned a little HTML in a college elective class before CSS. I, personally, would appreciate it if you didn't go around telling people that table-based layouts and embedded styles are an appropriate way to write markup. OTOH... go right ahead, untangling this drivel pays my mortgage. I agree with Crafty Turtle. Just because you can... I find Papyrus to be a terrible font to try to read a lot of text in. Best for logos or headers. I also think it looks cluttered. I'm with the folks who want plain text that is readable on Smartphones and other non-regular-computers. If you really need to break up your content, I would keep to the following tags with no styles: <h2> <h3> <ul><li> <strong> <em> <hr /> Sorry for the trial by fire, or death by 1000 paper cuts, or whatever metaphor you want to describe life on the forums by, but once you post a message purporting to be the authority on something (whether you intended to come across that way or not), you might as well jump into a tank of piranhas with bologna underwear.

Do you do anything to protect your smart phone when geocaching? I put my Blackberry in a DryPak Do you carry phone insurance because you intend on using it more outside and if something does happen the insurance will cover it? Yes I do and yes it will Any helpful tips, tricks or techniques you use that would be helpful to others in regards to the applications or use of your smart phone while geocaching? I use CacheBerry for paperless caching. If I'm going to be out of range of data and need offline maps, I use TrekBuddy and make maps with GoogleAK. If I'm doing caches in the back country, I keep it plugged into the car charger while driving to the cache location/trail head, then I hook it up to a solar charger that's clipped to my pack. I also just ordered a AA battery charger to keep in my pack for just in case. I really really hate running out of juice. Can you tell? Which smart phone do you use for geocaching and how much? Blackberry Storm. It was $100 with my "New Every 2" Plan with Verizon

Ok, good to know there isn't some slick system for this that I'm missing. Often times bushwacking between trails up here in the PacNW just isn't an option. We're talking rain forest undergrowth and you'd need a machete. I imported the PDF map of the trails into Photoshop, and laid a screen-grab of the google map of the caches on top and resized/lined up the maps against the main road into the park. The little cache icons laid right on top of the trails, and it was pretty cool. I'm very pleased with the results: Thanks for the feedback, everyone!

What tools do you use to do that?

I use my Blackberry Storm for GPS and it works really really well for me. When I'm going to be caching in an area where I won't have a data connection, I use TrekBuddy and Googleak to make offline maps. I use Yahoo for making forest road maps because (surprisingly) GoogleMaps seems to be useless for forest roads. It's a great system for me. However, last year my family tried to find a geocache on a wilderness trail near a campground. There were two different trails that left from the same trail head, and we didn't have a trail map. Neither trail was very long so I figured we could figure it out based on GPS readings. However, with the way trails switchback, and the way my GPS was bouncing in the tree cover, we walked in circles for 2 hours and never even found GZ. I've since held up a cache-page printout to a PDF download of the trail map from the Parks dept and discovered where the cache probably is, so I can find it this year. I have also found that OSM maps sometimes have trail info, which is pretty cool. Next weekend we want to cache in another State Park that has an extensive (and dense) trail system because there are 6 caches hidden among the 24 trails in the park. Since my whole family will be on the hike (including my 2 small children) I want to KNOW which trails to take to the caches. However, I can't find any map of the trails except for another PDF version from the state park website. A PDF of a map isn't going to have any embedded coordinate info so I can't put waypoints on it and load it into my GPS (phone). Heck, the PDF map doesn't even have coordinates printed on it so I could mark the caches by hand with a Sharpie. Is there an easier way to deal with this than printing a googlemap of the caches and overlaying with the PDF map? That seems so... inaccurate. Does this ever come up for anyone else? How do you deal with it? Thanks a ton for your feedback.

I don't need no validation from no one, no how. Not in geocachin', not in 'nuthin'. I participate in the forums when I feel like I have something to say and if the negativity hasn't gotten me down yet. If it gets too mucky in here, I go outside and cache for a bit. I go caching when I get the urge and wanna find Tupperware with million dollar satellites and the weather isn't to soggy. If it gets to mucky out there, I come inside and lurk in the forums. SO there.

Juvenile for an 11-year old boy to leave behind? Yeaaaa. A good find for a female cacher in a spot of bother? Most certainly. Brownie points? Only if you leave them in a ziplock baggie to keep them from getting wet. I agree. It isn't the type of thing I'd leave for swag in and "in-town" cache, but at the end of a mile or two (or more) hike, that would be a pretty good thing include, as well as band-aids, toilet paper, hand warmers, Mylar blanket, etc.

Now that bouncer has been by to break up the bar fight and send the rowdies home (and not a moment too soon)... Does anyone have any stories about weird swag that they've removed from caches? Disembodied fingers? Used undies? Week-old pickles?...... Anyone?

Are you trying to exclude our Jewish friends? Hey - Isn't that GOOD Friday!? As a nod to our Jewish friends and liturgical folks who will be observing Good Friday, the Peace Treaty Signing Committee is pleased to remind everyone that Vodoo Doughnut also has vegan doughnuts. If you gave up doughnuts for Lent, you can have coffee. If you gave up coffee for Lent, you can have water. If you're like me, you gave up giving stuff up for Lent, so you're in the clear.

Also posted on the Naughty Thread: The Peace Treaty Signing will be held at Vodoo Donut on NW 22nd Ave in Portland, a week from Friday. All are welcome to attend. Yes, they have bacon donuts.