FullOn

Love my Mac! Wouldn't EVER trade it. I've been using them since 1984 and Apple IIe, II+ before them. Of course before them was the TI90, Commordore 64 and Atari 800 . I've worked on plenty of PCs, and still do, but the Mac is too comfortable to let go. Plus now that its practically a UNIX box, it never crashes!

quote:Hey Marky-If you're one and I'm one, who's the other Mac user? That would be me. Actually I use 3 differnt Macs (OS X, OS 9.2 and OS 8.6) along with 2 or 3 PCs, but my OS X dualie is my main machine. I only use the PCs to convert Access databases into something usable.

Oooops, wrong thread.

Coronakid just started geocaching a couple of months ago. Unless maybe he's related to Jeremy!

1. How did you find out/start geocaching? Found a link about GPS software from a Macintosh site which took me to the MacGPSPro site which brought me to geocaching.com. 2. Who/what got you started geocaching? The idea of a treasure hunt in my own backyard really caught my fancy and has fueled my obsession ever since. 3. How often you do it? On average 4 to 5 times a week. 4. How long have you been doing it? 1 year, 2 months and 23 days. 5. Spending amounts: a. Price of GPS $170 b. Placing a cache About 20 bucks for a regular sized one, about 10 bucks for a small one. c. other equipment and prices (lights, ropes, etc) $300 bucks in geoswag, bags, camelpaks, GMRS radios. About $2000 in gas.

If you don't like that idea… I've got some left handed screwdrivers I'm trying to market!

RobAGD - Sorry that you couldn't find the parking for the Sycamore Canyon Park Cache. It's actually right on the main street that goes, by the park, but if you're just following the needle on the GPS you'll end up in a neighborhood and have a difficult time getting to the cache. I understand what you're saying about parking coords and how they would be helpful, but for myself, I kind of feel that's part of the hunt. Especially with a park where there's only one or two ways to get to it, parking should be fairly obvious. I find that MapQuest helps out a lot in these areas. I'll often access it and utilize the Arial Photo to plot what course I will take to a cache. Overall it sounds like you had some pretty good adventures on your hunts. I've found all the caches you mentioned and they are all well worth it. How did these compare with caches hidden in your neck of the woods as far as terrain and method of hiding go?

I finally got back over the forums here and found this thread, so I'm checking in. Hi. Let me just quickly give a plug for our Southern California Geocachers web site. We're kind of a companion site for geocaching.com and we've got some forum threads about group caching, get-togethers, etc… Anyway, enough of that… Some kind of a summertime Big Bear thing sounds great. We always spend Easter week up there, so I'll be up there in a few weeks. I did several of the caches last year just to the north of Big Bear in the old mining town area (can't remember what it's called - starts with an H…) that were enjoyable. I'm looking forward to doing many more this year. There are quite a few popping up around there. As far as get-togethers go, there is a picnic happening on March 22 in Irvine that is an entire Southern California regional event. In the IE, Uneakone and Happy1 hosted a picnic last year that was a lot of fun. Hopefully they'll decide to do it again as we have added so many new IE cachers. Just in the year and couple of months that I've been caching there has been a huge explosion of cachers out in the Riverside and Corona areas.

Wipeout, I'm all for PHP-Nuke/geocaching blocks too. I've just started a Southern California Geocachers site that uses the PHP-Nuke engine. I've got one block that I hard code info into that just links back to the geocaching site. It's just a convienent place to see the upcoming events caches and it doesn't change that fast, so it's manageable. I'd like to have a 50 most recently placed caches block on the site that would update itself. Another block that would be nice is a scrolling block showing recent forum postings for certain topics on this site. There are a couple of ways to do this, but not without violating geocaching.com's rules about use, so I'm holding off. Obviously you wouldn't want to violate any copyright laws, so getting permission from the people that own this site is certainly the way to go. Duplicating information that is contained here would of course fall into the category of use that WarmFuzzy is talking about, plus it could be considered direct competition for geocaching.com. Your site certainly seems to fall into the same category that our site is - a companion site to geocaching.com.

Hi all. I just wanted to post a quick note letting everyone know that there is a new geocaching site up for the Southern California area. It is designed to compliment geocaching.com and be a place where SoCal cachers can exhange ideas, news items and stories about geocaching in the SoCal region. We're just getting started, but I wanted to invite you all to come check it out. If anyone has anything to add to the site, please let me know. We're always looking for fellow SoCal geocachers opinions, experiences and stories! You can find the site at: http://www.scgeocachers.org Thanks!

Thanks for the link Charlie. As soon as we settle on a logo, I'll post a graphic along with some html code for embedding on the site. That'll make linking easier. Thanks everyone for checking out the site. I've had some real nice feedback so far. -Rich

Thanks Martin. Too many hours looking at line of PHP code. It is indeed http://www.scgeocachers.org. I can't even remember what URL I applied for. Sorry for the confusion.

If you can't connect with the regular URL, try this one: http://server945.gisol.com/~fullon/ -You'll have to paste it, for some reason the UBB Code is not working on this browser.

If anyone can get to it using the URL, please let me know. Thanks!

I'll see if someone has already written a module for it. In the meantime, the forums are up.

Absolutely! We can handle that in a number of ways. I'm still trying to get used to the way that this program works. I like the overall idea of how it contructs a site, but the administration and implementation of some of the stuff is kind of goofy. Plus there's almost no consise information on this stuff. I'm working on setting up the forums as we speak. Until I get something up and running we can use that.

First off, let me congratulate Uber-cacher Kevin for his triumph in conquering the White Mountains and KFWB's challenge. I am truly envious. I would love to give something like this a try one of these days, but first I realy have to get out from behind this dadgum computer!!!! Secondly, the Southern California Site is now alive! You can find it at www.socalgeocachers.org. I have had to reinstall the thing several times and so far, there isn't any content, but I'm working on it. I'm also working on getting the forums up and running. If anyone is so inclined, please feel free to submit some content for the new site. You may have trouble accessing the site in the next day or two. For some reason, the DNS servers are really slow to pick this up. I still can't log into the site using the standard URL. If you get a message that the server or site can't be found, try it again in a few hours. Hopefully in the next day or so, the DNS servers will have propigated the URL. If anyone has any questions/comments, please let me know.

Well, we could always go with: GUILT - Grown-Up Idiots Looking for Tupperware Seriously, I'm fine with what everyone else likes. If there is a strong preference for SCAG/SCGA over SCG or any other name that someone throws out, I'm all for it. -Rich

I've got my first submission for logos, so I've set up a temporary web page at http://www.sinisterpumpkin.com/SCG.html for viewing them. To protect the innocent, I won't post who has submitted what until after we choose one. BTW - If anyone has an idea for a logo, but you think your artistic skills are lacking, just send a rough sketch of the idea to me and I'll be happy to clean it up for you. I'd like to get as many opinions as possible on the logos, so tell your geocaching friends who don't visit the forums about this. Martin: I found out that 1Dollar hosting doesn't support MySQL databases, but I found a company that does - Global Internet Solutions. They also have unlimited email accounts (myname@scgeocachers.org) plus a bunch of other stuff. They are also fairly reasonable on their rates. GeoBoltz: The only problem I have with SCAG or SCGA is that I don't know if we want to build an association so much as just a community site. I wrestled with the whole Association/Organization thing and it just seems a bit too formal for me personally which is why I intentionally left it out of the name. This is just a hobby (OK, an obsession) for me. I don't need to have a governing board, etc. Just my $.02.

OK. I decided to go ahead and start working on the web site when I can. Not sure how long it will take with the schedule how it is right now, but I'm going to do it. I've made an executive decision to call the "organization" Southern California Geocachers (SCG) - unless someone else has got a name they like better. In the spirit of community, not to mention the fact that I'm just plain lazy, I'm calling for logo submissions. I'll kick in a few and anyone else who wants to, feel free. You can email them to me and I'll post them all on the web and we can vote for our favorite. If you don't have my email address, just send me an email through geocaching.com and I'll send it to you. I'd post it here, but I don't feel like getting even more spam than I already do! As far as the site itself goes, I like the PHP-Nuke driven site that MIGO has. If I can figure out how to configure my server, I'll give it a try. If worse comes to worse, we can always get 1$ hosting to host it, they're hosting my Sinister Pumpkin site and it's up most of the time. I'm not sure if they do MySQL which is required for the PHP-Nuke. If anyone knows of any other hosting solutions, let me know. In the meantime, send me the logos. I'd like to get them all in by the end of next week or shortly thereafter. I will be out of town and away from my email this weekend, but I'll reply back late Monday or Tuesday. Oh, by the way. The one thing that I will ask is that these logos either be produced at a fairly large size for the final piece if they are rasterized (Photoshop et al) or better yet draw them in a vector based program (Illustrator). That way they can be repurposed for lots of stuff - T-shirts, stickers, airplane banners, etc… Thanks! P.S. It's not worth it to get yourself shot for a cache. Pass on the one on Pendleton till it gets moved. It may be our land, but they have machine guns!

I was planning on setting up the server to do some low-bandwidth hosting. Our company website, maybe some client stuff and a hidden corner for me! It's going to be pulling double duty as a file server and web server, but with dual G4's it shouldn't be a problem. We're a pretty small company anyway.

I don't bother with a container. I just drive down the road and throw the contents out the window. I'm also working on a new locationless cache. It's the police car/paintball cache. When you see a police car (driving or parked, preferably driving) you lean out the window and mark it with a paintball gun, that way other cachers will know that you already found that one! If I can get that approved, I'll submit the Policeman/Paintball locationless!

Webfoot - WHY DON'T YOU MIND YOUR OWN BUSINESS!!!!! Just kidding . I appreciate the offer. If I do this thing, I'm going to need all the help I can get. It turns out that we just got a new client here at work that is going to keep me hopping for the next few weeks, but I'll try to get a couple of designs together. What kind of HTML experience do you have Webfoot. Do you know how to hand code, XML, database driven, etc...? It looks like your stuff was created on a PC, right? Are you using FrontPage?

I heard it on the way in to work this morning. Interesting story. Not geocaching related really, but a good use for GPS receivers just the same. They did mention the growing popularity of them in the story.

I'm in the process of setting up a brand new Mac OS X server here at work. We're on a T1 getting about 512K up & down. I'm not sure what the performance for hosting at this speed would be like. I do have some experience in setting up websites. A modest example that I haven't updated since October. Which leads to the big problem, TIME. With my work, I'm busy for weeks on end and then suddenly have nothing to do for weeks. As far as content, I was thinking along the lines of what Husqui had mentioned. A few links to articles, a forum area, tips & rules for caching in some areas and links back to the geocaching website (does anyone use any other sites besides Buxley's?). I figure it would take a couple of weeks to set things up initially (which a couple of weeks ago would have been perfect - hitting another busy period here) and then maybe a few hours a week to update as long as we can get some people to contribute content. Martin - thanks for the offer. If we go ahead with this, I'll probably take you up on some of it. And if your brother has any other ideas, for sure let me know. Maybe I'll take a few minutes and put together an idea or two for interface design. Nobody cares what I think.