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tiber

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Everything posted by tiber

  1. Well, two things. In your specific example, it would be covered under bumper-to-bumper warrenty. But there's also the concept of expected wear-and-tear. I should expect that a ruggedized product which is waterproof (well, sorta, their gasket design sucks) also has been tested to take reasonable impact. I expect it to be able to be dropped on a rock or pavement. Garmin and Lowrance certainly understand the concept of durability in a hostile environment.
  2. ...and eat them? I suppose this is a demographic question I'm phrasing wrong. If this camp is broken up, have the people returned to the site or does it seem people generally move on? Anyone else call the cops on a homeless camp? So far the one officer I've talked to said they can't really do anything about it if they keep to themselves. (It may be a fairmount park issue -- I'm not even sure of the jurisdiction aside of it being publically accessible land).
  3. Yep, I'll paste my e-mail with them down here... Their reply: There's no spellcheck here, there's no offer to pay for shipping, they seem unconcerned about my safety and about how their product performs. I try calling them and after getting busy busy busy over and over again I finally get through to a rep who says they won't pay for shipping and they can't just sell me a screen. He doesn't know how long it will take but guesses it will take about two weeks round trip. I told him that for $100 I need a warrenty and he said it would be warrentied against defects in the workmanship, but that they can't be held liable for the performance of the screen. In other words, if I drop it next week, it's another $100. I'm going to try calling them a second time and speaking with management. Yes, $100 is less then the price of a new GPS, but it's also awfully expensive to be paying yearly for repairs. I'm hell on equipment, and without a warrenty, it's not really worth my time. I expect the equipment to keep up with me, not to have to baby the thing.
  4. I'm sort of interested as to how folks would feel about this situation. After finding Medicinal Herb, I decided to check out this spot I would like to place a cache. The first couple of times I checked up on it, the area was full of litter. I was worried that the ground was not being maintained by anyone and didn't want to place a cache that would probably end up muggled by a lawnmower. There was, however, a path to the spot which people had mountainbiked on, or so it looked like. You could probably hike there. Today, however, was something completely different. Going into the cache area, the grass was mowed by the state. This exposed the fact that the wall to keep you off the highway was littered in grafitti and there was a lot more trash then I originally thought. There was also a new addition to the trail: Three homeless men had decided to setup a tent almost 20ft from where I wanted to put my cache. Oh, fantastic. To add "bad" to "weird", one of those homeless men saw me and was trying to wake up the other two. I didn't take the tarps to be tents until a head poked out and just about scared me to death. The guy didn't look like he was in teriffic condition. I hopped back on my (road) bike and booked out of there with no regard to safety. This is a pimo cache site. It's in philly, it requires about a quarter mile walk through an out of the way area near the highway, and you get an excellent view of the art museum. The bad side is that it apparently is also a place homeless people camp out, although this is a recent addition. How does everyone feel if I were to place a cache here? What are the appropriate precautions to take? Or is this all something you nonphilly residents are OK with? How do you philly residents, who are usually used to dealing with the homeless, feel about the whole idea?
  5. I contest you are far from correct and drastically underinformed. Microsoft has muddled in FireWire and USB connectivity: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/885222 While that knowedgebase article covers FireWire, the hotplug drivers have overlap. If we mess with one, we probably have messed with the other. The real question is: Does uninstalling correctly restore the drivers? Professional SysAdmins (Me being one of them) avoid SP2 to the tune of less then one quarter of XP installs actually needing and using SP2. http://www.tomshardware.com/column/20050414/index.html Please take the time to read the TSBs and Knowledgebase articles on Microsoft.com and other sources before going "OMFG!!!1! ANOTHER PATCH FROM MS! I NEEDS TO INSTALLS IT!"
  6. If it's out of warrenty, you're pretty much screwed. If it's in warrenty, you're pretty much screwed since I was told that the warrenty only covers "defects in workmanship". My Meridian Color is going to cost me $100 (at least) to fix, as quoted to me by Magellan. If the LCD is intact, and it's a color screen, I might be interested in buying it from you.
  7. Instead of making a path, whicih is useful for sanity checking the route, why not consider putting your dest in as a waypoint and all the caches in as waypoints? The route is OK, but the GPS can route automatically. If you're worried about being off course, make it do the word for you. Slam that GOTO button twice while you're on a Street route and it'll reroute you. So, to get somewhere, go fire up the GPS and toss it in your car. Hit GOTO and choose "Street Course" (something like that) and select USER WAYPOINT. Choose your destination, and it will route for you. You do NOT need to make a predefined route. Secondly, the software was pretty much written how you expect it to be written to reduce screen clutter. Try clicking on that waypoint and choosing "set start point". Now right click on the other waypoint (on the waypoints list) and choose "set end point". It will make a route for you. It's a LOT better to make the GPS do it, however, since it uses less memory. Storing the street route you made uses memory. Might as well make the route dynamic and put more cahces in your GPS.
  8. My big complaint about magellan units is that they are fragile. The garmins are a lot better built. The one guy I cache with -- LawnGnomeHitman -- has dropped his a bunch and even taken (broke?) the antenna off. It still works great with all the parts shoved back in there. I took a spill biking and my Meridian Colors screen is shattered. Magellan wants $100 to repair it with no hope of warrenty, I told them I'll take a $160 garmin with warrenty, thanks. For your problem, this issue was addressed on the front page of Magellangps.com awhile back. It's a known issue with WinXP SP2. Either roll SP2 back out of the system or install the following: http://www.magellangps.com/en/support/products/msupdate.asp Also, you may be bitten by the "USB compat" problem in your BIOS. Make sure your BIOS is set to "USB2" and not "auto" or "compatible with USB1".
  9. Crumhenge is probably haunted. Or at least, I've added my own ghost story to the mythos. http://www.knarrnia.com/archives/000801.html http://www.geocaching.com/seek/cache_detai...86-3e5bc4fe2bab
  10. This is a nasty topic up here in PA. On one hand, I believe most snakes are "protected". On the other hand, I'm pretty sure the WCO is going to be OK with you shooting snakes that end up in your tent, pants, shoes, or whatever. My grandfather owned a farm in upstate PA and it had a swamp behind it. We used to constantly get snakes. Snakes in the yard. Snakes on the porch. Snakes in the basement (wet cellars are fun with a capitol SNAKE). Basically, if you found one, back up. It shouldn't follow you. If it does, shoot it (got into the habit at an early age to carry a .22 cal rifle). If you step on one and it hasn't bit you yet, check the eyes. Slitted eyes (not round pupils)? Shoot it. And, of course to this day, I carry a snakebite kit. AND I'M VERY SURE NOT TO STEP ON SNAKES.
  11. OK, I don't even understand why this is even a debate. The rules clearly state that there are no religious caches (or political, etc). The spirit of the thing is that no caches are allowed to prostylize any particular stance. That being said, this is not an issue of "it offends me" (go get a can of suck-it-up) but an issue of ministry. The moment you allow religion or politics into a sport other then in the most general sense (South Carolina?), everyone starts dividing the sport up into factions. The easiest way to deal with it is to abolish it entirely. Again: This is not an issue of offense, it's an issue of hegemony. The same applies to the "trashed caches" idea. It is inappropriate to trash a cache, but we cannot put people on trial for intent, only action. If someone trashes a cache, that's inappropriate, but that is also why a cache cannot be religious or polotically themed. If the intent of a cache is to be a neutrally biased object, then that's OK. If the intent is religion or politics, that's not OK. If the neutrally biased cache collects some religious items, then the intent of the cache is still without bias. It just happens to have some religious items. The moment anyone is persecuted because they trashed a cache is OK with me, but the moment they are persecuted for trashing a cache because you assume it's due to religion is inappropriate. To step over that line means that anyone carrying a gun is to be prosecuted for murder -- even if they are a cop or hunter. Why is this point important? If your religious or politically themed cache were approved (not even going to happen, this is the sake of argument) and destroyed, the problem is not with religion but with the maturity of the cacher. The stance that "kittens offend me so we can't have kitten caches" is both stupid and childish. It does not apply and is seperate from the argument and issue. The same concepts hold true for cachers who remove religious items from caches. (Fair disclosure, I am one of them). If I come across a cache someone has put 10 Shahadah tracts in (even if this is not done in the spirit of Zakaah as in this was an issue of ministry, not an issue of practicing religion -- If you don't look these up don't even try to argue with me), I will trade up 10 items from my pack to remove these items. This is fair and legal under the rules of "trade up" as most people judge "trade up" to imply "money". I can promise you that my items are more expensive then those tracts are. What I do with those is my own personal discretion. You placed them there in hopes someone would look at them and remove them, right? Why are you offended that you failed to convert me? Look up hegemony and read about it. I hope that people who do quickly understand why politically and religiously themed caches are denied. The issue is not about rights, the issue is about community.
  12. Yeah, it's tough. To add injury to insult, my fiancee comes home. "Hi Honey, wow, that scrape looks bad, aw, lemme kiss it". Except by "kiss" she means, "rub burning like the fires of hell itself hot alcohol all over". Anyway, I'll even settle for the other Magellan color screens. All the units take the same connector, from the schematics I've been checking out. Magellan wants $100 to repair it. That's half of what I got it on ebay for. But thanks for the condolences.
  13. I have a personal blog over at http://www.knarrnia.com which has my personal musings in it. If you google it for geocaching you get all my posts about caching. Brilliant, huh? Caution: profanity, nekkedness, and god knows what else is in the archives. It's at times spiritual, at times fun, and at times it's quiet and dark. Basically, just like life for a twentysomething college dropout trying to pay for the rest of his education. The most recent entry for instance, deals with me getting sideswiped on my bike in philadelphia and having my Meridian Color screen shatter. (Ticket is still out to Meridian to fix). Others of them talk about caches I sincerely enjoyed, things like that.
  14. Does anyone have a Magellan Meridian Color they've retired or doesn't work right anymore? I was recently caching on my bike and got hit by another bike running a red light and my screen is now shattered. This is actually quite a disappointment since I only bought the thing off e-bay last week. It really make me wonder how durable they really are in the wild. Anyway, if you've got a dead unit or bad firmware flash that won't boot, I'm looking to buy. If you want the full story and don't mind excessive profanity, the full story is at http://www.knarrnia.com/archives/001386.html
  15. Here's one I know works from playing far too much paintball... The ammocans with a good seal (check them out before buying them, broken gaskets or crushed cans are no good) can have silicon gel put on the seal to "build it up". This will make it harder to shut the lid at the bonus of making a very good seal that has kept the rain out many times. Leave a tube in there and ask people who find it to reapply. The same could work for vaseline in a pinch, but it doesn't make as good a seal so it requires the seal be in reasonable condition in the first place. Again, leave a small bottle of it in the cache to reseal the cache with. Thirdly, you may put a piece of cellophane over the cache lid and put the vaseline/gel between the mouth and the film. This also works remarkably well if you're not too sure about your lid, but it is fragile.
  16. tiber

    Members Only!

    No, they don't need a new domain. I humbly suggest either a Big IP load balancer or a Foundry unit. Both are pretty easy to use, although BigIP sometimes screws up persistant connections. Both are cheaper then Cisco for most applications.
  17. Best adult toy items? Mindgames. Seriously, like the ones you can purchase from ThinkGeek.com but they're the cheap dollar store knockoffs. Nothing like a rubix cube to keep you distracted while tripping over logs into Prickerbush Gulch. It's even fun explaining to the medics how exactally you inhaled it on your way down the rockslide.
  18. I placed my first cache the other day. So far I've been paranoid about it and I checked it every time I went by until it had a few logs saying it was there. Nowadays I check on it about once a week simply because it's convenient and due to the difficulty and muggle-factor of the area. While it seems overkill, it's got two college campuses full of students who walk by it each day and if a geocachers ninja skills arn't so hot, it could easilly be observed and subsequently muggled *knocking on wood*. So far though, it seems to be harder then I thought...
  19. Well, a bunch, depending on what your definition of weird is... The other day me and LawnGnome ran across a cat skeleton bleached white. Bones are normally kind of a tan color, so it was a bit odd, but it could have been someone's pet. *shrug* I've run across homeless camps in the woods. The tents made from garbagebags and waterjugs are a sure sign someone's living there. The other day we were searching for (cache to be inserted later then LawnGnome gets me the co-ords) and we were caught in the park after sunset. We had run across this man before with a shovel and a bag and we decided to pass on talking to him. We were more interested in caching. He looked like he was out with his dog, using the shovel to walk with, and I assumed the bag was filled with dog litter as the park has litter prohibitions. So we're merilly caching away racking up the caches and it's time to hit this rock slide. We're there, poking around in the rocks, with our flashlights, then the mans dog come rocketing out of the rocks and scares LawnGnome crapless. Poor guy musta jumped 10 feet straight up. The part that scared me, however, was that same shady guy was following the dog, with the shovel, and another full plastic bag of something. We're talking garbage bags here, and he's clearly working hard to carry these and put them somewhere. "I'm burying my dog", he said as he passed us by. Yeah, whatever. We made for the car ASAP. The rest of it was actually my log at Crumbhenge. My site has the original log, an annotated one was posted to GC.com and I posted my original writeup on here on my site. No-one else has reported any mysterious activity, but the ghosts that followed me home haunt me today...
  20. Follow the procedures outlined here: http://www.magellangps.com/en/support/prod...an_ColorStd.asp However, you will need to contact meridian directly about getting the older firmware since they've been touchy about people hosting their firmware off site. As far as "downgrading" goes, I suggest you try flashing the current firmware again... What problem are you having which might compel you to downgrade?
  21. It was very likely me or LawnGnome, I don't think LawnGnomeHitman actually logged that one. The cache is most likely archived at this point. The cache itself kept falling to muggles who no doubt didn't appriciate newcomers to their neighborhood. The background of it is that I used to work for Chester Police Department. Chester is one of the not-so-hot towns outside of Philadelphia. It hosts Weidner college, but it's night-and-day between on campus and off campus. http://www.geocaching.com/seek/cache_detai...cf-1cf9531f52aa Is that it? Feel free to send me a note or IM me if this looks familiar. Josh
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