M-T-P

Whew, someone is getting a little testy. FYI, there have been at least two in our area, and I just found mine 2 days ago. There might have even been (or may still be) more out there. These two were claimed in less than three hours total for each of them, so you might have just missed the others. So hold your horses little buckaroo, this Jeep is going with me to Port Aransas for a few days, but will be back in no time. Keep pushing and you'll be swimming for it! Meanwhile, back at the ranch.......

LOL! You know, I heard that exact same thing. I'll admit, I've got one in my hands right now, but only until I find a good way to complete one of its missions for June. What about that Jeep of yours? M-T-P

I wonder how many of these Jeep TBs out there are found and hoarded by their owners? Anybody have any thoughts about this?

Geo-Baby started caching at 19 months and loves travel bugs. This picture is of her putting Scooter the Skeeter TB in a cache we recently found and taking a dinosaur egg as a trade item.

Gee, I wonder what every red-blooded man would want to trade for with a cute red-headed beauty queen? Welcome back from IRAQ, BTW!

Not really. I'm not really interested in bandwidth usage and spikes, I'm interested in new users. Was there in influx of new registrations?

So, does anyone know if there were that many new users in the past couple of days because of the L&O episode? I'd be curious to see some stats. Jeremy?

Let me guess, this is the same guy that will hide money in caches in Texas if we all just send him $5?

ROTFLMAO!!!!! "Please sir, I am Nigeerian royty. I need to give u thousands of dollars, but first you must send me all of your money. Please nevermind that I can't spell Nigeerian or royty. Send me your money!"

There are GPS transmitters that basically function just like our regular GPSr to determine the Lat/Lon coordinates, but ALSO transmit those coordinates back to communication satellites or radio towers used by police and others. It is very similar to the way OnStar works.

Nice blog! I'll be sure to add you to my list of Geocaching blogs on my Adventures in Geocaching blog.

Wow! Thanks for the links to bumblebuttons! I just signed up and purchased the 3 month trial to the Geocaching Button-of-the-Month club. These look really nice!

Here is another article in USAToday from 2 years ago about how the data is already being used by police and courts from a 2002 year model car. If it were used that much in 2002, do you think there exists a late model car out there without this type of device by now... or by next year? USAToday Article from May 2003 Big brother is ALREADY watching you! And his name is Ford, GM, Honda, Toyata, etc. Just imaging what is next, incorporate this into the same RFID sensor technology like toll tags and place them along all major highways. Oh wait, wasn't there a CSI like this?

Sorry Bob. Although this thread has gone in a totally different direction than what I intended or originally asked, the whole in-car black box thing has already been going on for years. So it doesn't really do much good talking about how it will never be allowed for X reason in the US. Its there, its been there, and it is probably in YOUR car right now. USATODAY Article on Car Black Boxes from Dec 2004 Here is an excerpt: Already, drivers have had data from their own cars used to convict them. Last month, Danny Hopkins of New York was sentenced to 5 to 15 years in prison for killing Lindsay Kyle after the black box in his Cadillac CTS indicated the car was going 106 miles per hour five seconds before the crash. Investigators originally thought the car was going only 65 to 70 miles per hour. In St. Louis, Clifton McIntire of Phippsburg, Me., pleaded guilty to manslaughter last month after the black box in his GMC pickup revealed that he was going 85 miles an hour before he slammed into the back of a Toyota. Today an estimated 30 million cars contain these "black boxes" — they're actually silver — known as event data recorders (EDRs). Most record simple data such as whether airbags deployed or if passengers wore seatbelts. But most cars from General Motors and Ford, as well as some Toyotas and Hondas, track even more information, including vehicle and engine speed, and whether the driver was accelerating or braking. *** Note to moderators, can this topic be moved to the Off Topic area for the remainder of the discussion instead of being left here and locked? ***

On another thread, someone mentioned that they got out of a speeding ticket by using the GPSr to prove they weren't speeding. How does one go about getting speed information out of the track history for a specific date and time on a yellow eTrex?

New Feature Request Could you consider adding functionality to manage tracks and display them on the various map programs in addition to waypoint? But more importantly, I always forget to delete my tracks before starting on a new quest. I'd love to have a checkbox somewhere on the Send to GPS page to delete my existing tracks on all GPS Syncs. Thanks!

Sure. Get on the Clayjar GC chat page and ask there. There was one that I had to have help solving and the folks there collectively figured it out within minutes. This particular one was encoded in binary. That was the easy part. Then the decoded binary was in a another code that ended up being a modified ROT13 of even numbers only. There's nothing odd here! I now have the coordinates, but still haven't had time to go out and log the find. Which one are you looking at?

Very cool, guys! Very cool indeed!

I think this should be a third statistic. How many: Found / Hid / Stolen

If you are talking about your waist line, congratulations (I guess). If you are talking about your height, it looks like you need to either see a doctor immediately or quit measuring yourself when dressed in drag and high heels.

But for noobs, I would not recommend the p***-on-it method. It can get extremely messy if you don't know what you are aiming for. Plus, if a cache is near an electric fence....

This is just my opinion, but I used to use a paperless All-in-One solution that I quit to use my eTrex and paper again. When I started caching, I used a Palm OS-based Handspring Visor Neo and the HandyGPS attachment. Using CacheMate to keep track of the cache info and the HandyGPS attachment to navigate, this was a complete all-in-one solution. But it became too much trouble. Now, I just pick the area that I want to cache and print their cache pages on paper and set out with my trusty Garmin eTrex. No more fumbling with electronic devices that will break on the slightest impact. I think I spent more time trying to protect the electronic eggshell I was carrying around instead of looking for the caches. Also, the battery life on my paper is SO much longer than on my Handspring.

The easiest method that doesn't involve using additional 3rd party programs is this. 1) Create the PQ as described in one of the posts above and have it sent to your email without being zipped. 2) Save the GPX attachment to your desktop. 3) Use the CMConvert program that came with CacheMate to open the GPX file and accept all the defaults. 4) Then, let CMConvert create your PDB file and sync your Palm device.

One more tip. Do a search on eBay for geocache and you'll get a good glimpse of the types of things you could be facing! There are only a few that I've found so far that I haven't seen for sale on eBay.

I just logged two DNFs two days in a row for one particular cache in my area. Then, on the third day, I found it in about 15 seconds. It suddenly just jumped out at me like a sore thumb and I saw it! A good rule of thumb of urban micros is that if there is a place to stick a magnet, look there first. I'm not an expert or anything (46 finds), but every single urban micro I've looked for so far has been magnetic. After the magnetic search, look for something out of place (a sign that doesn't belong, an extra bolt in an unlikely spot, any sort of debris up against a tree trunk, a sprinkler head where other heads don't exist, rocks placed on their side, etc.) When that doesn't work, look up! Literally, look up. I've logged a DNF before when I was searching the ground all over only to return the next trip and see the cache hanging from a nearby branch. For 30cal ammo cans, cachers in our area like to put them in the middle of a cedar tree, so if I see a full growth cedar near the coords, I look there first. These tend to be propped on several of the branches about 4-5 feet up against the trunk.