Dave from Glanton

Congratulation! (Just spotted this post , so apologies for not saying it earlier)

I set a couple myself up on the border ridge - a few miles north of Moss Trooper's "Reivers Revenge". My The Hills Are Alive With The Sound Of Music and Walking On The Ridge are closer to roads, but personally I think the that the best way to vist them is by way of a very scenic, but fairly strenuous 14 mile hike. That route also takes in Ekendi's Trimontium View.

True, I guess, but I think it is important for people venturing to more remote locations to have a map and compass and ot know how to use them properly, rather than relying 100% on GPS. If your luck is bad enough for you to get lost, then it could be bad enough to have your GPSr break or run flat. Maps and compasses are much more resilient. When you read some of the stories of people who get into trouble on the hills and end up calling on Mountain Rescue (often through their own ill-preparedness) then maybe a grounding in basic navigation skills isn't such a bad thing.

You have my sympathies. I used to suffer like hell with hayfever - sneezing sessions of 12-15 hours in the height of summer. I used to swear by Triludan until they took them off the market a few years back, and have since been taking Chlorphenaramine which works a treat, coupled with Beconase - hardly even a sniffle, even in the height of summer. Dave's money saving tip of the day: see if you can get your GP to prescribe them, and get an NHS prepayment certificate - works out cheaper than getting branded drugs over the counter.

Probably going to be busy that day, but if things change you'll be the first to know. I'm looking forward to huning Eckendi's as I must have walked past that spot when I placed my 2 caches in that area.

Congratulation!

Nice one. I guess that quite a lot of footage got edited to within an inch of its life, but it made a good advert for the sport.

Congratulations Dan

well done - quite a milestone

Yes....most of them yours

I was talking to Moss Trooper at the North East Get Together yesterday, and he described a humungous geopuzzle which he'd devised. It involved finding loads of things, solving clues, *lots* of travel.....all to lead you to a a cache, which you'd then log as a single find. On the way home it got me to thinking that insome ways it could be nice for cache setters to rate their caches with a number of points scored for a find. Say 1 point for a straight-forward 1 star cache, up to 10 points for a 5 star complex multi. Probably a nightmare for the moderators and site admins though....

A really good day out. Nice to meet the faces behind the names. Thanks to G-Force for organising it all.

I left a tiny (.5") rubber duck in Carve Her Name With Pride, and it got picked up by Longfram Kev who was FTF. I got it as a freebie from Virgin Atlantic, along with a lot of other do-dahs, some of which were cache-friendly in size.

http://www.mapquest.com/maps/latlong.adp

(Pedant mode = ON) Geordies come from Tyneside, not Northumberland (Pedant mode = OFF)

I found my first cache kind of by accident, and hadn't done much surfing around the GC.com website. At that first cache, and the next few that I visted, most of the names that I saw in the log books were fairly mundane, hence I signed the log with a suitably mundane moniker. In hindsight, I wish I'd gone for something a bit more creative, I haven't gotten around to changing it for fear that it'd wipe out any finds already logged by me.

I thought it'd been quiet for the past couple of weeks

I've had a few problems with USB/serial converters. My latest laptop came without a serial cable, so I had to get a converter so I could work with some serial-only hardware and it was very flaky. It did work from time to time, but was pretty intermittent. So my advice would be to avoid converters (unless you can get a cast iron guarantee that the seller will give you a refund if it doesn't work for you)

I intentionally didn't name the hosting company that I currently use, bu seeing as this is turning into a bit of a plug-fest I'll say that I'm using WebFusion (now part of Pipex) and am happy with their service. These guys do provide a lot of features and services - a less fully-featured service is provided by their sister company 123-reg (see previous post from Pharisee)

Just my £0.02-worth... In my experience, cheap can very often mean unreliable. In my early days of doing websites, I had my fingers burned on more than once by using cheaper host. A couple of years ago I shifted all my business to a bigger but more expensive hosting company, and I have to say that I've noticed the difference. You get what you pay for I guess. If you just want somethig for a hobby homepage then cheaper hosting may be OK, but if resilience and reliability (and the ability to contact somebody by phone 24x7 - that is waaaaaay better than email support) then be prepared to shell out a few quid more. Also, usenet (try alt.internet.providers.uk) can provide a good source of opinions.

Try this.... <html> <head> <bgsound src="MySound.wav" loop="1"> </head> <body> <p>Stuff to go here</p> </body> </html>

I had an idea for a cache which I'd like to place, but to get the most out of the idea I think it'd work best if I could specify a particular theme for the objects in the cache. Obviously when I place the cache I can load it with objects of my choice, but to keep the theme I'd have to specify that if anyone does a swap at the cache then the object they leave should be in keeping with the theme. Is there any sort of etiquette for this, or is it generally considered bad form to place that sort of restriction on people visiting the cache?

I second that - that was the unit which got me into caching. I've tried GPS units with integrated mapping but personally, I still prefer to read paper for a map. I think its a bit like the reading text from computer screen versus reading text from a printed page debate - there's just something about reading a paper map which scores over looking at a screen.

I too had wondered if there was enough to say about the basic of GC-ing to fill 200-odd pages (the GC brouchre just about covers it in a couple of sides of A4). I never got around to checking out my local bookstores to what the book actually has in it. Somehow, if I get any spare time, rather than spending it in a nice air-conditioned shopping mall, I prefer to spend it out in a field somewhere looking under rocks for tupperware boxes.

Thanks for the prompt replies, people. Based on your info, I've updated the co-ordimnates for the caches which I have placed, so they now use the (correct) WSG84 datum.