DougK

I've used a Garmin Colorado and Oregon. I'm using the Garmin BaseCamp software to extract waypoint data from the GPSr. Connect your GPSr via USB cable and click the "Receive" button to bring all the GPSr data into the BaseCamp database.This program manages your database of waypoints and presents them geographically on a map, to help you find them by locality. You can scroll the map around, zooming in and out to focus on an area of waypoints. BaseCamp allows you to make lists and smart lists, which are collections of your waypoints, similar to iTunes playlists and smart playlists. Finally, copy and paste of the coordinate data into your waymarks eliminates transcribing errors. I give it a thumbs up for a free application.

Let me try to explain my philosophy about Waymarking and see if you think there's anything you might be willing to adopt. For most of us, there are three communities in Waymarking - waymark visitors, waymark posters and category creators/managers/officers. Technically, another community might be the Groundspeak people who oversee WMing and mingle with us as moderators, lackeys and such, but most of us do not operate in that realm. One way to recognize which communities you participate in, is by looking at your overall totals, waymarks visited, waymarks posted and waymarks approved (though the last one is hard to obtain). They could be balanced among all three or weighted towards one or two communities. • Some people focus on just one community. There are people who only log WM visits (and have 0 posts). We even see category officers with no posts or visits! A fair number of WMer's enjoy the finding, research, creation and posting of waymarks. These people are the high profile people here, who spend a lot of time and effort on this website. Without these active people, there wouldn't be any waymarks to approve or to visit. These people are the backbone of Waymarking. They probably write the most in these forums angling for the causes of their community. They don't create waymarks thinking everybody's going to come visit the WM (as in a geocache find). If others do log visits, then great, it is a place worth Waymarking. I believe one reason they do it for the small notoriety of being first-to-post a WM for a neat place. This is why the WM poster community wants active and timely support from the category managers. Not every geographic area is competitive or overrun with waymark posters, but I'm sure every waymarker who does postings, gets a feeling of delight when a special place is approved and knowing it was you who got the first-to-post. There is no formal first-to-visit a waymark distinction. Anyway, would it be the first visit logged or the earliest date of a visit log? I don't think it really matters. There will probably never be a race to visit a waymark, like a FTF geocache. It's not the same at all. I believe there's a first-to-publish thrill that waymark creators are seeking. So category managers who let waymarks languish for weeks and months are not giving good and timely feedback to the WM posters. It's very unsatisfying waiting a long time for an approval. I've pleaded this case with you before, listing 3 other important reasons in this thread http://portal.Groundspeak.com/forums/permalink/37642/37641/ShowThread.aspx#37641, so I won't repeat those points again here, assuming that you've already read them. • A few people are really active in all three communities at once. These folks need to balance their time. You can't spend all your time posting WMs and logging visits, and delaying categories with submissions awaiting approval. • Some people work in a couple of communities. Anyone who first posts waymarks, starts to wonder how the category management and approval process takes place. Many people who create waymarks, naturally get involved with the approval process to understand how it works. My suspicion is that categories with active posters as officers, probably have better response times than categories with less active waymarkers (posters, visitors or geocachers). I don't know how many waymark visit logs are created each day, but we can see hundreds of new waymarks being created and approved each day. It just makes sense that category managers need to be as active as the people submitting them and process the queue of submissions on a timely basis. It's their duty in the process. Oh, I just thought of another offshoot community - those whose only read these forums and don't do anyway Waymarking.

This one's done: Angel Island US Immigration Station

I think this category is too subjective and in opposition to other existing categories. I look at the Google images and (IMO) don't see "Ugly" building. Some of them are already waymarked in Great buildings of the World and other fine architecture categories. It is just two different opinions as too whether it's ugly (different, modern, whatever) to some people or a great building (or great architect) to other people. I'd prefer not to see two waymarks for a building, one in Great Buildings of the World/Architecture Prizes and another in Ugly Buildings of the World. Maybe beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but I side with the experts who would tell you it's a great building than the naysayers who would try to denigrate it.

Or you could join the crowd using the what is probably the most common format used today, especially at the Waymarking and geocaching site. The second popular format is MM DD SS, which was popular when I was younger. The third form, which you like, is most useful for doing coordinate math. I think most modern GPS devices and software can be adjusted to display any of the three formats. It's just a display thing! So, unless you do a lot of coordinate math calculations, you ought to consider setting the default display format of your GPSr to degrees and minutes. And/or set the display format of your coordinate database program to degrees and minutes, as well. Personally, I pull all coordinates off my GPSr into a database, managed by Garmin BaseCamp. From there, I copy and paste coordinates directly into Waymarking web pages in order to minimize, misreading, mistyping, transposing digits or otherwise mangling a decent coordinate.

If I need to add just a private message, I flip the State menu to some other state as I save the private message. Then go right back into edit, flip the State back to what it should be and save again. You can see that your private message "stuck" in the second edit. Downside is two edits, but it's guaranteed.

I think the essence of gargoyles is that they act as a conveyance for water away from a roof or somewhere. The waymarks you show look like they would fit in Figurative Public Sculptures or Epic Beings and Creatures.

… and what should the members tab do (besides giving a error)? Show people currently logged into the forums, perhaps? There's been little customization of the new forums for Waymarking. For example, clicking on a Waymarking handle in a thread, takes you to their geocaching profile, not what I would hope for. Clearly, the new Waymarking forums were grafted onto the geocaching forums and we lost a little of our identity.

Story number 2: Recently, I was looking for a Veterans cemetery in my area. I pulled up the list for California and sorted in alphabetical order, so I could compare what had been waymarked with other lists of known possibilities. What stood out was that the same cemetery had been waymarked twice, with coordinates over three miles apart. This wouldn't have triggered the proximity detector for the reviewer at approval time. After looking at the website for the actual cemetery, comparing that with the info from the two waymarks, it became apparent which one was more accurate. The coordinates for one matched the given address for the cemetery, and Google Maps and Street View showed it to be there. The errant one was on a different road from the specified address and appeared, from Maps and Street View, to be in the middle of farm country. What was worse was that a waymarker had visited the correct cemetery and posted three pictures to the wrong waymark. I guess they didn't check their coordinates or street address either. So I supplied my findings to the category head officer and suggested that the off-base entry be declined, otherwise they would have a duplicate in their category that would be misleading to others. The officer chose to decline the off-base entry, which happened to be the first submission of the two. Both of these waymarks were over five years old.

A while back I inherited the Coordinate Palindrome category and reworked the description. I had done an extensive personal study of palindromes and there were two types being submitted - 1. A full palindrome between the latitude and longitude, where the digits of the latitude influenced the longitude and vice versa, and 2. What I called a dual palindrome, one where the longitude and latitude were palindromes within themselves. I had determined that the first kind occurred 360 times in the quadrant for a given longitude and latitude. I felt this frequency was high enough to limit the category to just that type. The second type occurred way more frequently, by an order of magnitude, and I felt that made them too mundane. The category was trending in the direction of full palindromes and I felt it was better to target that type. I knew I'd create an uproar if I tossed the dual palindromes, so I created a category variable Dual/Full Palindrome. I edited every submission in the category and set the variable appropriately, grandfathering the duals in, but let it be known in the description that no new dual palindromes would be accepted. Now the point is that during this study of every submission, I found two very old submissions that had no photographs! Well, it's very easy to construct a coordinate palindrome in your area and file it with no pictures, so I felt these did not even qualify, as a waymark in general, without pictures. So I sent both submitters a note asking them to post some pictures with their waymark or have it re-evaluated and declined. I waited three months and then sent a similar note again. I waited three months again and when I got no response or pictures, I declined both waymarks. I still run across waymarks, mostly from the early days, with no pictures. I'd consider these to be armchair waymarks and wonder how they ever got approved. Some even have visit photos now, but there's no default photo from the original poster. Were standards different in the beginning, because I don't think these look like good waymarks at all.

I have to agree. I take the time to set the date visited to the date of the my pictures. I do this for correctness and I'd hope to see the statistics match.

I don't want to be too negative here, but I think category officer need to do a better job of checking that a waymark is at the specified coordinates. This can be done with either maps or street view, to make sure the object is at least near the bubble on the map. To me, coordinates and photos, along with research, are the essence of Waymarking. If the coordinates are off, problems arise when people attempt a visit or the waymark gets filed by someone else later with the correct coordinates. I believe the proper response to this situation has been mentioned that the one with correct coordinates, even if later, should be accepted and the one with incorrect coordinates reviewed and declined, because it is inaccurate. I bring this up because I've been working offline with sbcamper, trying to figure out why 75% of his waymarks are a quarter mile off. First, he says he's taking coordinates where he takes the picture, and he often is using a telephoto lens. But he still ends up with coordinates that are 0.2-0.3 miles away and not even in a line of sight view of the waymark. Something else is wrong. At least 4 of 5, that were approved today are wrong. (Dog park on a golf course, burger king at a residence, petrosomatoglyph in a lake…) In particular, officers reviewing waymarks from the California-Oregon area for this waymarker, should pay a little more attention. Declining and asking for better coordinates is doing a favor to Waymarking in general and particularly this waymarker.

… but he'll probably never log it, so he can keep his stats where they are.

Very nicely done! I'd say BruceS is only missing QXZ.

Were you able to attach photos to it from your phone using the Upload photos page?

Off topic: What you're doing is drive-by Waymarking - someone who posts visits with no photo, and a comment like "Seen it when when I drove by." You asked to be put on my waymark list of 1,000+ visits about a month ago. Now, a month later, you're at 1500 visits - all (most that I looked at) with no photos. Where're the photos for your 1500 visits? Stop and get your camera out to do some real Waymarking.

My suspicion is that these constructions will lead you to a Lego store or a LegoLand Theme park, where they're clustered. Excluding these, how many will you find?

That is an amazing stack of icons, of what amounts to a catalog of the contents of the museum! At least for waymarkable items. Thanks for pointing out that search.

I've waymarked ten painted utility boxes by the same artist, Vanessa Stafford. When I go to the painted utility boxes and do a search for her name: <Painted Utility boxes by Vanessa Stafford> I only get 8 of the ten waymarks. The two that do not show up are the two most recently filed, WMDQBR and WMDPRN. The same is true for another artist, Arturo Thomae. <Painted Utiltiy boxes by Arturo Thomae> This query produces no results, but should result in waymarks, WMDQQD and WMDQBK, again waymarks recently filed. This happens on multiple computers and different browsers at my house. Is there a Waymarking search problem that doesn't show recently filed waymarks? This appears to be the same problem discussed in <Missing WM in search.>

If you are using Garmin Communicator from Safari on a Macintosh, then Garmin has identified a conflict between the Plug-in and the Flip4Mac Quicktime enhancement. Their solution is to use the Garmin Communicator in FireFox, which does not encounter the problem or remove Flip4Mac if you want to use the plug-in from Safari. No word on time to fix. I've verified that the Plug-in works from FireFox on the Mac. HTH

It looks like the major dependency for Wherigo Builder is the .Net framework. What's so magic about this framework that it can't be replaced by Foundation/AppKit in Cocoa? Both my son and I are intrigued by Wherigo and eager to put some ideas we have into cartridges. But we only use Macintosh. With the tremendous success of the iPhone applications and many new first time developers, it's clear that the Cocoa development platform is viable, easy to use and can produce applications for handheld devices. An interesting application might be a Wherigo Player for the iPhone 3G to expand the Wherigo audience by millions! Anybody working on that? We have a Colorado and an Oregon GPS and have both enjoyed the Wherigo experience on them, but we're withering over the lack of support for developement on the Macintosh. If Wherigo Builder is considered an Alpha product still, can't we get some alpha level work done on a Macintosh version. With the creative reputation of the Macintosh community, I'm sure you won't be disappointed by expanding your developer base. Please help us.