Fledermaus

RE: Jerald Deal: aka "Real Deal"(Geocacher), KD7KYU(Amateur Radio), ZooKeeper/992(CB Radio) Passed away from a sudden and fatal heart attack on October 29, 2004. He is survived by his girl-friend Mary and two children, a boy of 11 years and a girl of 14 years. Home Phone: (360) 871-3573. Viewing/Services will take place on Saturday, November 6, 2004 at 2pm at: Woodlawn-Miller Funeral Home & Memorial Park, 5505 Kitsap Way, Bremerton (Top of the hill). Business Phone: (360) 377-7648.

After having a serious talk with the Illahee State Park Ranger and his two Assistants on two separate occasions, I was able to work out an arrangement that circumvented their $25.00 Park Use Tax. My plan was as follows: Since geocachers drive cars and they have to park them in the park, I pointed out the fact that even if only 5 people were to hunt for my cache in a month, that would equal what he wanted to charge me. Since he liked my proposal, He passed on the proposal to his superior during an offical state park meeting and he was given approval for a fee waiver. Even thought the cache has not had as many visitors as I would have expected by now, the point is that if you approach the Ranger of a State Park with a reasonable deal that benefits the him, the park, geocachers and you, then it's worth the trouble of formulating your sales pitch. Fortunately, I did not have to create or rehearse a written speech, for I did it off the top of my head before all three Rangers. If you're in Bremerton, please visit this cache and show your support for geocaching in Washington State Parks. If you have a chance to stop by the Ranger's Office and provided he or one of his Assistants is there, say hello and thank them for supporting the hobby of geocaching. If you want to check out the cache page, go to: Illahee State Park Tour At first glance you might think that it's a little complicated, but I assure you that each and every waypoint has been placed in an easy to access location. Once you have completed the rounds, you will be back to where you started and close to the exit of the park. FLEDERMAUS

I tried to find a way to edit the above message today, but was unable to do so. Therefore, the error I made needs to be corrected. In one of the lines there is mention GeoCaching.Com link twice. The second one should have read: NaviCache.Com and does link properly. Sorry about the confusion, if any. Thanks W7WT for pointing out the error!

For those you who are interested, I have been reworking some of my caches, hopefully all of them in the near future, to be compatible with NaviCache, so that they may be enjoyed by all cachers, no matter which site you prefer to use. Due to some limitations of NaviCache, such as in the graphics department(soon to be rectified I hope), some of my more colorful caches will be reduced in quality of their presentation, until that site has made some much needed improvements. Now you can score twice on each of my caches, building up your points on NaviCache as well, that is, if you're in it for the points rather than fun. If you have already been to one of the listings on GeoCaching.com, you may claim the same find date on GeoCaching.com. With regards to my personal webpage, as shown on my cache pages, it is temporarily down for the count, until I can find another suitable FREE website for it. If you have any recommendations for such a website, I'd like to hear about them. The FREE part is most important, since I live on a very limited budget, but I also suffer from "Scroogeaphobia", the fear of "paying too much for it". FLEDERMAUS An equal opportunity cache hunter/hider.

I live in Bremerton/Kitsap County, which is West of Seattle and in the "outback" of Puget Sound, and I have relied upon the Buxley/Brillig website for much of my information about new cache locations in my area and others. I do not understand why Groundspeak sees fit to terminate access to their system. Is there something going on behind the scenes about which us Geocachers are not being told? Whatever has to be done to solve the problem, JUST BRING BACK THE BUXLEY/BRILLIG ACCESS! That site provided a service that was lacking at GC.COM.

Here's an idea! How about Garmin stepping into the 22 Century and combine a GPS, FRS and PDA into a single package and calling it a GFP, without loosing the high performance that each can deliver? You could then hunt caches, tell others you are lost and write the story for others to read about how you got lost, whether or not you become part of the flora and fauna. Just a pipe dream, right? No, I'm not smoking "grass", just cutting it a lot with my lawn mower! Now there's a thought! Cross-breed both kinds of grass. You can cut it, smoke it and hunt for caches that aren't there. Just kidding folks, I don't even smoke cigarettes and I broke my crack pipe yesterday.

Kosher? Not a chance in H**L! I call it CHEATING! If you already know where it is and arranged for it's existance, what's the challenge? You might as well go out and claim your own caches while you're at it too! BTW, Geocaching in Kitsap County has come a long ways since my beginnings, when there were about five caches in all and probably about that same number of cachers. Now, there are so many cache in this county that I don't even want to try counting them. I hope all of you in King, Pierce and other surrounding counties come to Kitsap County and partake of all the caches(my guess being 120 or more) we have waiting for you.

Apparently, there is an increasing use of PDAs in the geocaching community, whereby he or she is a "Paperless Cacher". Furthormore, a lot of cache pages are being written with graphics and/or color. A friend of mine, who is in the learning process of HTML, was told that his/her cache page was somehwat incompatible with PDAs. How many of you PDA users out there are "Turned Off" by cache pages that use lots of graphics and/or color and why?

Since I do not use a PDA and have no knowledge of them, will someone please tell me what I should and shouldn't do to make cache pages compatible with the average PDA user? Keep in mind that we live in a world of Color and not B&W. For the present, most of my cache pages involve graphics and color. It appears to me that there are a lot people out there that can't stand to see colorful pages, not to mention graphics, whether they are animated or not. I have been around since before the age of computers and have seen them grow up from little toys to expensive and complicated machines. The early computers couldn't do color or sound, but now that's childs play for the cheapest of them. Much like the early days of computers, PDAs are limited in their capabilites, from what I have determined. So, aren't they now in the infancy phase of their developement? Perhaps, PDAs will growup and be capable of doing what you now see on your home computer screen? If all cache pages are to be written with the PDA in mind, then they would be, for the most part, plain and colorless! I live in a world of color and will continue to develope my skills in those fields, as they pertain to my cache pages.

What would you do? Q1. If you are out caching and you come across a cache that has been obviously marked with "Parallel Sticks", should you replace them as found or remove them and make the cache blend in better with the environment as best as possible? Q2. What would you do if you had been out checking on one of your own caches a few days earlier, knowing that it was then well camouflaged and without "Parallel Sticks", and discovered that a subsequent cacher left it completely exposed or had marked it with "Parallel Sticks"? I have encountered many cases where a cacher, even those with high numbers after their name, seem to have no regard for keeping a cache well camouflaged and/or leave them exposed to potential lose by muggles. Since I am not a "People Person" with great diplomatic skills, I would tend to be rather critical in my words. Therefore, I don't respond to such incidences. However, maybe I should, but some might take what I say to being "Hit over the head with a 2x4". This is because I seldom use frills, bells and whistles in my comments. Afterall, I being the owner of a cache, have reasonable expectations that a fellow geocacher, who finds one of my caches, will take care of it as if it were their own. But on the other hand, cows can fly if you use a large enough catapult too. I have found that having a lot of easy caches, those that require very little thinking, are not my forte. For of late, most of my newer caches require a bit more brainware, thus making them more challenging and hopefully a positive learning experience. One of my rules is simply this: If it doesn't look like a cache, it probably is!

The listing link does not work! Is this a cache that has not been approved yet? If I have gas monies at that time, I will be there.

The first cache machine run was the "Bremerton Cache Machine". Will there ever be a return to Bremerton in the future? The number of caches has dramatically increased since the original visit, to include a larger variety of cache types. Perhaps the Howe Farm and Schold Farm can be included, since they offer several caches at each location with just one stop.

At one time, I was considering changing my username, but would like to know what the consequences are for doing so, in particular, the affect on caches pages and my statistics. Can anyone shed some light on this subject?

We have Decals! We have Bumper Stickers! We have lots of other stuff! I agree! We need Antenna Balls! GREEN balls, Not Blue ones, with WHITE letters! Then I can say that I really do have the "B---S" to geocache!

For those of you who appreciate colorful personal webpages and graphic intensive cache pages, you may want to visit one or both of these links: My Webpage Preview of my next cache I wonder how many complaints I'll get about the furture cache page? Useful suggestions will be greatly appreciated. Not so useful ones will be ignored! I Love Washington and our shade of GREEN, because we have trees, trees and more trees, more than you can shake a branch at. You can keep your sandy deserts and asphault jungles. I have moss on my North side and webs between my toes! Greetings to all my fellow geocachers in the Pacific Northwest State of Washington!

How about an ICON that allows a cacher to search for Night Caches Only? You could use a Cresent Moon or a Bat as the symbol. I cannot take credit for the symbol suggestion, since that was suggested by another cacher. Also, if I wanted to find a certain type of cache within a specific area, I would like to use more than one search parameter, like the Zipcode and Keyword or Area Code and Style et cetera. If all the caches carried an ID letter, such as Ni for night, Mu for Multi, Mi for Micro et cetera somewhere within the coding, then each could be cross-referenced with the Zipcode routine. Maybe it already exists. but needs to be implemented. The "Type of Cache" or "Style of Cache" Search Window could be placed under the State and Country selections, either on the Front page and/or the Hide & Seek page. I came up with this idea when I was faced with the need for searching out Night Cache within the Pierce and King County areas. I didn't want to read all the listing for each county of that one type or cache symbol, and then select it from out of hundreds presented.

I am about to launch a new "Count Batula" TB that would preferably like to visit Night Caches and those involving Caves and/or dark and foreboding places. Is there a way to search for caches of that type within a specified area, without having to read everything within an area code, zipcode et cetera? I want to limit it's travel to the Puget Sound Region, ie the counties of Snohomish, King, Pierce, Mason and Kitsap. Perhaps at a later date, it would be released it to a wider area. Comments and suggestions would be appreciated! Fledermaus

On rare occasions, I can't log in either, but that's when I try to use the NN v4.7 browser. However, most of the time that I log in to GC.COM with the IE v5.0 browser on an older P1 machine. Can someone tell me what's up with that too? Does it have something to do with "Cookies"? If that, how do you change the settings?

I wonder if CrimsonWrath is just being nice because he lives close by and that I know where his caches are, except for two of them, one of which is a real puzzler, that drive me crazy! As far as the BatFlap Background is concerned, it's being used for all of my cache now, past and present. Instead of building a bird house, build a bat house, but I promise not to come and visit. BTW, Type "O+" is my favorite. Do you remember the C64 computer? That's about where PDAs are right now. At least when I'm done with a cache, I can start a campfire and get warm from the glow of burning cache pages. However, color pages don't burn better or create more heat than B&W pages.

Is this cache page too glitzy for you guys that want it in plain B&W text? Fahrenheit-451! @ KRL-CB I expect to get some static about the FONT and/or the image at the top of the page, but I really don't care. This world would be a sad place if colors went away. I was over visiting a friend a little while ago and mentioned some of the comments regarding my most recent post. He only had one bit of advice. "Your first mistake was going onto the forums to begin with." I can see some wisdom in that statement and I may spend less time here, of what little there has been in the past, listening to people gripe about this and that. There are some people out there that seem to have nothing netter to do than to gripe about something. This goes for the real world as well. From time to time, say something nice and be helpful, rather that criticize. My motto at the bottom of this post says it all!

Another command that doesn't work: ROWSPAN I wonder if they deleted COLSPAN as well? What harm do these commands cause to the system? None That I can figure out. Don't bother trying to have a large central image with smaller images surrounding it. I tried and everything got screwed up. Does anyone in the GC.COM system really care or listen to things like this? I wonder if I should just create my cache pages elsewhere and just create a link from GC.COM to an offsite location? ===================================================== OOOPPPSSS!!! CORRECTION: The ROWSPAN command does work, if I type it correctly. I hate typos!!! ===================================================== Try the following, if you dare to go against the tradionalists who like everthing in B&W, which is boring as HEck! Believe it or not, I'm not trying to win an award. I like lots of stuff on my Vanilla Icecream. <table width="600" align="center" bgcolor="#000000" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"> <tr> <td><img src="dock-1.jpg" width="110" height="75" border="1" alt="image-1." /></td> <td rowspan="3"><img src="gun-1.jpg" width="372" height="230" border="2" alt="image-0." /></td> <td><img src="road-1.jpg" width="110" height="75" border="1" alt="image-2." /></td> </tr> <tr> <td><img src="dock-2.jpg" width="110" height="75" border="1" alt="image-3." /></td> <td><img src="road-2.jpg" width="110" height="75" border="1" alt="image-4." /></td> </tr> <tr> <td><img src="dock-3.jpg" width="110" height="75" border="1" alt="image-5." /></td> <td><img src="road-3.jpg" width="110" height="75" border="1" alt="image-6." /></td> </tr> </table> <table width="600" align="center" bgcolor="#000000" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"> <tr> <td> <img src="dedicate.jpg" width="144" height="90" border="1" alt="image-7." /> <img src="picnic.jpg" width="144" height="90" border="1" alt="image-8." /> <img src="pathway.jpg" width="144" height="90" border="1" alt="image-9." /> <img src="dense.jpg" width="144" height="90" border="1" alt="image-10." /> </td> </tr> </table> ===================================================== Having read a few of the foregoing comments, consider this: I am one of the few, apparently, that hasn't gone paperless. To furthor show how backward or archaic I am, I don't even have a PDA and don't plan on buying one in the near future, that should be obvious some of you. Yes, I do have a pet dinosaur and it's a Pentium 1/233Mhz and it works online nicely. Maybe I'll learn some day, but right now I.D.G.A.S.! As for skipping caches that are graphic intensive and don't work on your PDA, be my guest, for all you are doing is cutting your own throat! Someday, when your PDA grows up and becomes a real computer, it might support them. In the mean time, make the best of what you have! I grow weary "banging my head against some dadgum buggers wall". FINI/30/73s/NNNN/ENDIT

More functions that don't work! 1. Why does the GC.COM system change .GIF files to .JPG files anyway? What's the point? 2. During the conversion process a GIF file, with a Transparent Background, defaults to White, thus making it useless, especially when placed on top of a Non-White background of a Table. 3. Animated GIF files become useless too, even more so when they have a Transparent Background, unless you already have them on the system before whatever changes took place, or "Hyperlink" to another webpage or website, hopefully your own.

Over the last couple of years I have dedicated myself to improving the caching situation over here in Kitsap County. In my beginnings of caching, there were only about 5 or 6 caches around here and W7WT became my mentor. The very first cache I found was his, and I did it without a GPS, because I didn't own one then. With help from W7WT, plus my own self interest, I decided to start Geocaching, which has become rather addictive. It has become a passion with me and I have taken a personal interest in improving this area. To the best of my knowledge, there are over 130 caches over here now, but I'm not about to try and count them. I'll leave that job up to you and then you can let me know the tally. The reason for this message is simply this. Things can always be improved, no matter how good you might think it is already. Therefore, I want to hear some comments and suggestions from geocachers inside and outside of Kitsap County. Unfortunately, creating a Geocaching Shuttle Service is not on my agenda, but I will accept outside financing and fuel contributions. I've offered my services as a Geocaching Guide for this area, at the cost of being a Class A Heckler, but I refuse to be your Sherpa and carry your provisions. Complaints are also welcome, but keep your crude comments to a dull roar, since children might be reading them. If I am your focus of attention, I welcome it. Afterall, I can be a real PIA sometimes! Local Geocachers are also welcome to express their comments regarding their plans for the future of Geocaching in Kitsap County. FLEDERMAUS

Within one of my caches I used the HSPACE="#" command, in order to add horizontal separation of an image from the adjacent text. The command seems to be ignored by GC.COM, which butts the text right up to the edge of the image. That doesn't seem to be the right way to do things. I haven't tried the VSPACE command yet, but I would suspect that the same thing would happen vertically. I also noticed that the MouseOver function doesn't see be be permitted either. I tried to use it, where the placement of the mouse pointer over an image would cause the image to shift to another. What other functions, other than SCRIPT and/or JAVA, are not allowed on GC.COM? Lots of neat things can be done with those functions, but I suspect that there might be some issue regarding viruses and hackers. A copy of this was sent to Moun10Bike, but I hope that others within the GC.COM might have some answers, or anyone else for that matter, who has tried various functions and failed.

RE: "ENCHANTED FOREST" / GCJAAM / Washington State / 98383 I have been playing with different ideas for a cache page design and decided to use a technique commonly called "Client-Side Image-Mapping". Has anyone out there used this format for a cache page? If so, can you give me an example. The design does have a few minor flaws. You cannot save or capture information found within the image(when moving the mouse pointer over it) nor is the hyperlink function valid or necessary. If there is a way to capture the information and move it into NotePad or some other editor, I'd like to know and so would a couple of others who have inquired about it. If there is a way to disable the hyperlink funtion(href="..." within the Image-Mapping format), but still retain the display within the Activity/Status Bar, I would like to know. Any suggestions to improve this cache page will be greatfully appreciated! Fledermaus