Slider & Smurf

Wow ... received the coin in the mail today, that was fast! An instant favourite - thanks for such a thoughtful gesture.

Email sent - Slider & I have 30yrs between us. Thanks for such a generous gesture of support.

Hi everyone, Seeking an unactivated Signal December 2006 (Canada) geocoin - just missed the boat through the store. We don't have any to swap, so willing to negotiate for cold hard cash ... Thanks!

Yeah ... but I suspect most of the locals have cleaned the place out already - and I don't mind a bit of a hike if required!!

Just discovered this thread - hello from another Eastside team!! We moved here from Australia in January, but unfortunately haven't been able to get to any of the events held since. Hope to meet up with a few locals out and about, now the weather is improving and the daylight lengthens ... Cheers!!

I'm currently orphaned while Slider is back in Australia ... I've not been able to get to any of the events since we arrived, so it would be great to meet up with some WA cachers!! Located in Bellevue/Redmond, but happy to travel a little for cache density

OziExplorer plus some local maps would do everything you needed apart from the auto-routing ... there's not much available in that department apart from the Garmin proprietary offerings. You might have a bit more luck posting your question to the local Australian forum ... this site doesn't get much traffic. Try posting to geocaching.com.au.

Wow ... didn't think anyone would notice, we've only been here for a couple of months!! Thanks for the mention, everyone.

They're not English litres - just litres. Fluid unit of choice for the UK, Australia ... anywhere using metric measures rather than imperial. As an aside, my folks are paying about AU$1.10 a litre at home in Melbourne, Australia - that's about AU$4.16 a gallon. Run that through the currency converter, it's about US$3.22 a gallon... and that's not even the high octane stuff!!

Can't help with your specific problem ... but maybe try the 'GPS Units and Software' forum under 'Geocaching related topics'. GSAK's author is a regular poster, and there are usually a couple of GSAK related threads there. Lots of good advice to be had

Just sent in my answers - good luck with your paper!

This seems to be written from the point of view of a professional photographer, ie. someone who will be attempting to make a living from the photographs taken. Lots of places tend to 'swoop' on anyone with a tripod, as they seem to think it defines a professional from a happy-snapper... I suspect the majority of cachers would not fall into the 'professional photographer' category.

Managed to squeeze in a couple of caches on a work trip to New Zealand a couple of years ago - this one was taken in the Christchurch Botanic Gardens, and is easily my favourite geocaching photo: Not far from where we used to live - overlooking McLaren Vale, one of the premier wine producing regions in South Australia: The Cape Otway Lighthouse, on the southern coast of Victoria (also Australia): So far from home ... But looking forward to new sights around Seattle and Washington in the next couple of years!

Sounds interesting ... we've got a Sony Clie (PalmOS) with onboard 802.11b. Would love to attend if the timing is right.

We've got a Sony TH55 PDA - it's a PalmOS machine with built-in Wifi, so you can sniff out a network if it's in range and log your finds on the move! A stretch screen like the Palm brand T3/T5 models, a fair bit of onboard memory, and also has a VGA camera - pretty grainy for family portraits, but adequate for most caching purposes. There are a couple on Ebay available for ~$300 at the moment. We tend to use PQs and GSAK to produce HTML pages of the caches we're looking for, but the wap.geocaching.com site Jeremy mentioned looks interesting - especially the zip code lookup. That'll give us a backup for any changes since we ran the GSAK output. Now, if only there was a way to filter out the ones you've already done!! There seems to be much more potential for wifi caching here compared to our previous digs in Australia - maybe you could create a cache that required you to find the MAC address as the decrypt to the final location?

The US National Parks Service has banned geocaching - which doesn't necessarily apply to Parks Services in other countries. if you're looking to place a cache in a specific Australian park, try asking at the Australian forums, http://geocaching.com.au/forum/. The cachers there will be able to give you a more accurate response for local conditions.

Not of Japanese descent ... but some good caching friends of ours have just returned from a holiday to Japan to visit a relative. They met with a couple of Japanese cachers, and asked a very similar question - the response was that the website makes it very difficult to display japanese characters (kanji?), which is discouraging many from really getting into the game. Maybe GS should look at improving how the website manages non-English characters and languages?

Since you've asked so politely ... We've dipped our toes in the water in a couple of discussion threads in the last week or two. We did a lot of 'background reading' to get a feel for the character of both the discussion groups, and we quickly identified a 'hard core' group of regulars that frequent each forum. Without trying to turn this into a nationalistic argument - these forum regulars are invariably from the USA. That in itself can be intimidating - regardless of whether you speak English or not, as even the English-speakers can be 'divided by a common language'. There have been some apalling comments in the last few days at forum newbies from other countries - in some cases, simply because they come from another country. This doesn't encourage an influx of new blood. The "Self-appointed Powers That Be" are also intimidating (IMHO) by regularly denigrating all facets of the game that don't match their own interpretations. The mob mentality demonstrated by some people as a result is disturbing . On the whole, there is a lot of good discussion and most of it appears genuinely welcoming - it's just spoiled by a few fanatics that seem blind to any other interpretation of the game other than their own. Whilst the site may be hosted in the US, and Groundspeak a US company - with caches in more than 200 countries, there are bound to be a few differences in culture and opinion. HOWEVER ... the opinion of one country's players should not automatically override all others - a fact sometimes lost when posting emotive responses. We've also been guilty of not counting to ten before hitting enter on occasion ... before anyone else has to mention it

Perhaps - is the that EMU that was referred to a couple of times?

I'm in Europe (if you call the UK Europe). I had no difficulty whatever in paying my membership fee. Frankly, I think this is just an excuse. Your call, but Gernot90 was specifically talking about his situation inside the EU. AFAIK, the UK hasn't yet joined the EU, so perhaps you're not facing the same hurdles. A couple of posters mentioned they'd be up for bank fees equivalent to the membership fee if they tried to join ... would you have thought twice if you'd have to pony up another 20-30 quid to the banks? We spent 12 months living in the UK in 1999-2000, and we certainly would have. Edit - currency conversion!

One of the events we attended last year had a game based on Scrabble - the event was held over a long weekend, so this might not work for a day event. A series of waypoints are scattered over a wide area, the coordinates marked and made available to players on a sheet. Each waypoint has a film cannister containing paper squares with letters on them. Players can chose which waypoints they find, and they remove a square of paper from each cannister. When they think they're done (or they've had enough), the teams return to the start point and their "time taken" is recorded. Now the scrabble board comes into play. Team with the shortest "time taken" gets first go at the board with the tokens they've collected, and makes a word. Team with the next shortest "time taken" then gets to make a word, and so on. As an added twist, this game was done at night at our event - so everyone was wandering around with torches trying to find the little film cannisters, so you had to be very accurate!!! The game was well accepted by those attending the event - YMMV.

Without the membership fees, certainly geocaching.com would look something less than it does now - but geocaching itself would still exist, perhaps just spread amongst some of the competing sites. I don't think Gernot90 or any of the other European members participating in this forum are against supporting the website - their comments indicate it's very difficult to do so because of prohibitive costs in Europe. If I was a Groundspeak staff member, I'd be researching how the company could encourage more of these guys to join up - sounds like there's an untapped market there, surely a company would be interested in increasing its revenue base to help fund future expansion. Maybe then, the local opposition to MOCs (which prompted this cache in the first place!!) would gradually decrease. If the company truly wants to promote themselves as supporting players in more than 200 countries (as highlighted on the gc.com front page), then they would do well to provide better support to some of the other 199 countries or so. Maybe Groundspeak hasn't quite reached that point in it's business plan yet. I'm personally glad to see a few more international players on the forum here ... I think it's dramatically improved the breadth of discussion. Without a broad geographic representation of players on the forum discussing the future direction of the sport/hobby, you're only catering to a small and vocal minority ... and ultimately discriminating against the remainder, as their voices aren't heard with the same effect.

Or participate in the forum discussions? (I won't even try to respond in French, it was too long ago!!)

It's not relevant whether Gernot90 speaks perfect English or not - if he's posting a cache in Germany, is it not reasonable to post the description in the local language, so locals would understand it? The gc.com front page says there are caches in more than 200 countries now - and I betcha a lot of players don't even have English as a second language. Each to their own. I don't see my responses as 'defending his plant' so much - Slider & I are premium members, so we wouldn't be eligible to log his cache either. The argument is moot - the cache, as posted, meets all the gc.com guidelines. Jeremy has also endorsed its existence, if only on a trial for the time being. There was a principle argued here last week that caches should be within the gc.com guidelines, and these guidelines were not open to negotiation. This cache meets the guidelines, and yet some participants are arguing that this fact now doesn't matter - it shouldn't have been allowed because it prevents some people in Berlin from being able to log a find. That's what I'm trying to get my head around. Please don't make assumptions as to how much of the post I understood ... you're not the only one here who speaks German. As to the fact he logged his laughter at the resulting kerfuffle ... why does it matter to you what his response is? I thought some of these responses were pretty funny too - my opinion, and I'm entitled to it.

The local caching community generally agreed against posting MOCs. Then someone came along and posted a MOC - despite the local community opinion ... nothing against the gc.com guidelines there. Then Gernot90 posted a traditional cache with a caveat on the logging requirements in response ... nothing against the guidelines there either. And it's in German because they reside in Germany ... you're not suggesting all foreign caches be listed in English, are you? Wouldn't that be discriminating against the foreign cachers that don't speak English?