JanniCash

So there are people who find it important to have a high "found it" number. I find the location most important, find or DNF is secondary. This is like eating on a trip. There are people who really enjoy McD to go from a highway rest area and eat while driving, I'd rather add another hour to the trip and find something odd. But I can't see myself trying to "save" those people. Yes, I am sorry for them and would they ever ask me, I'd be glad to show them how much a nice lunch in a diner can improve your overall trip experience. But those people never ask. So what? Let them have their numbers, feel sorry for them, forget about it. Jan

I'd expect the terrain rating to be 5 if there are mine fields to be crossed. And that 5-star rating I can see no matter what language the description is written in. Everyone attempting a difficult terrain rated cache without even being able to read the description is ... well, insert your favorite insult here, I think I exceeded my accounts monthly insult allowance. Jan

What would you say if the weather wasn't so fine ? All weather is fine. There ain't no bad weather. Only "insufficient" gear. Jan

... if you show up in a hospital with a soaked sock tied with rope to your head. Jan PS: I still can't believe people took that crap "serious".

I still think that "coming first" is totally overrated here. Jan

If you make some space for me and share the popcorn I'll bring some soda. Make it Gordon Biersch and I'll pop up another batch. Jim Does home made Jerky count? Jan

VFISH1992, I think that you hit the nail on the head, I love the competition, and everyone has the same chances for that FTF. So if you want GO FOR IT, if not stop your wining. Scubasonic Precisely what I was thinking all along. What if there are some locals, who have a competition about FTF's going? Who is it to tell the top FTF-dog to "stay down" so that some half-retarded cacher-kid can get its own "real FTF" and meanwhile, his competition goes ahead and takes the lead? That's just not right. So keep at it, ignore those super moms and FTF as hard as you can! Jan

You are so polite. But in between those lines I just read that the "stupid idiot, who did this, must not have attended school past 3rd grade" (after which the gum problem usually appears). You are probably right. That idiot most probably did not ... even make it past 2nd grade with a functional brain. Jan

It's cases like these where I curse about being noble born and not able to lower myself to the status of a cache maggot. Jan

Sorry to have responded so seemingly Rambo or McGyver style. I certainly appreciate a proper set of sterile bandages over "field solutions" at any rate. Maybe this should be a separate thread, along the lines of "what if you forgot to pack your usual first aid kit?". What I do not appreciate is any kind of "generic over the counter" stuff that may cause allergic reactions by itself. Sure, in 90% of the cases it may be harmless ... but so is plain water. Jan

And you took care of much more than a few blisters with that yet? Jan

Seen nothing at all. But you please tell me how I can tell which of those "over the counter" stuff is best for the "allergic symptom" you're just talking about. Or is your MOFA talk just something "generic"? Jan

In preparation for going out there again, I just found myself preparing several new pairs of CacherGloves. They are ordinary leather palm gardening or working gloves. I find them for a few bucks at every dollar store. A children "stamp set" allows me to customize them. Every determined caching noob, who had his/her hands torn by unexpected bushwhacking, will appreciate them for the rest of the day (probably much longer). I never intended to leave a pair in each and every cache I visit. Just the ones I really think worth it. I hate unmaintained pill bottles thrown into the bushes. In that sense, maybe some folks should reconsider. Is it really that you want your "signature item" to be so cheap, that you may leave your "signature" just everywhere your visited? What exactly is the value in that? Is it really that you "sign off" on each and every cache you visited? Do you "owe" that to each and every "cache owner" for just throwing something in the bushes? Don't get me wrong. I am very, very grateful for those, who have taken the time to lead me to precious places, I would have probably never seen in my life without them. Then again, I will never bother to "log" a DNF just because GZ was nothing but a place from which you can overlook a busy gas station. That sort of cache doesn't deserve my time to find it, it doesn't deserve my time to log it and it certainly doesn't deserve any trace of myself ever having been near it. Jan

What do you need a first aid kit for? All you need is a good length of rope, a knife, a towel and an extra pair of socks. That's not exactly what I'd call a first aid kit. If you get hurt out in the woods, there is two types of "serious" injuries. Both mean you can't carry on by yourself. You either can't move on because you broke a bone, tore a muscle or some such. Nothing you find in a typical first aid kit will help with that. Or you suffer from some internal injury and will bleed to death internally ... good luck with that one. Everything I have seen in a first aid kit so far can be replaced with a rope, a knife, or a towel (they miss socks badly). The number one disinfecting substance in the field (highly ignored unfortunately) is your own urine! You ever peed on a wound or peed into your hand and rubbed it on? Well, get used to the idea, because that is what you actually should do, unless mommy is carrying Neosporin around for you. It stings a bit. If you still have a fresh T-shirt (or a fresh sock), soak it with pee and press it onto the wound. Together with rope a piece of pee soaked T-shirt or half a sock will make a formidable band aid too. If I'd be hiking in snake country, I might carry a snake bite kit. To my surprise, I haven't seen any bear bite kits or alligator bite kits around on the market lately. I always thought those are much more severe ... but then again ... Jan

Put a Cheeseburger every .1 mile from here to the Holy Grail, I still don't think the number of Cheeseburgers counts towards anything but blood pressure and cholesterol. Finding the Holy Grail is what counts. Cheeseburgers can be found without a GPS. There are caches out there that outweigh hundreds of parking lot micros just because of their location. But then again, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I just can't see much beauty in a Cheeseburger. Pity me. Jan

Terrible idea. Not nearly socialist enough! There should be a balance check on GC.com that does not allow ANY SINGLE cacher world wide to log more than 1 FTF more than any other cacher in the world. Except maybe for premium members? Jan

Right, and if we all played Backgammon instead, the ones with the best score should let others "choose" instead of rolling the dice every once in a while? You really meant to interpret the word "fair" like that? Jan

PHP timed out and yet got it into the DB ... the unpredictability of that programming language never fails to amaze me. Sorry for the double post. Jan

Folks, I missed you all for exactly these discussions. After just getting into geocaching, we found ourselves in a very similar and very time consuming activity. You drive around searching for locations that you have printed out information for, get to ground zero, look around and often sign a log ... only that this isn't about containers in the woods, but called House Hunting. We found our new home last year and found ourselves just as busy renovating and imitating Tim Taylor (spent tons of money on power tools ... harrharrharr). Most of the dust has settled and we even unpacked most of the boxes, so it's time to get back to the outdoors. About FTF's ... let me think about it. Uhm, no, I don't think I find it particularly important to be the first at a newly placed cache. It's not the cache I am after, it is the location. If I'd wanted to be first, I'd be sitting with my laptop in the car, engine running. I don't mean the OP with this, but I wonder if those, who come up with this sort of name calling (like FTF Hog), actually ever really tried to WIN fair and square, or if they think like in Kindergarten, someone who already won a game 2 times should stop playing so others can WIN too? By that logic, Michael Phelps should have gone home after winning 2 Gold Medals, right? Jan

"I figured that one of these tiny-screen thingies and new reading glasses would be more expensive than getting one with a larger screen". Jan

The non-free copies don't let you create new installs... IE, it's a player for existing installations. That works great if you're playing a installation of a free operating system because it's legal to distribute those. But it doesn't work if you want create a windows installation (since no one can legally give you an already installed one). I've been using a licensed VMware Workstation for several years for a lot of reasons (as a software engineer it's convenient to have multiple "PC's" on your laptop as well as taking snapshots with rollback capability ... among other things). I didn't try the brand new version 6 yet, but so far my attempts to run MapSource inside of a VM and connect to any Garmin unit have failed. Version 6 comes with USB2 support ... let's see ... Jan

agreed... I was simply trying to explain that it could happen in response to the previous "can't happen". I certainly don't have the coding skills to disassemble a firmware image. But I know that some do. It only takes the right person with the right reason... likely not even $$$. Most "crack" makers do it for joy not money. Someone with the right skills AND a grudge against Garmin may be willing to spend the time it takes. The more Garmin messes with its customers, the more likely "that" person exists. This is precisely what happens in the gaming software world these days all the time. Look for any game title that is out there more than 3 months and you find the no-cd cracks all over the place. There is a big misunderstanding between marketing people and the users. Many users of no-cd cracks aren't using them to illegally copy or share the software. The problem is that the copy protection mechanisms make it impossible to create a personal backup (which you are legally entitled to). So in case of loss or damage of the medium, the user can only try to get a replacement from the software vendor, which often is just as expensive as simply purchasing another copy of the software. So in order to protect the install CD's, they just don't want to use them all the time. Oh - yeah - and "I heard" the games load faster that way too I actually did use the second unlock code for City Select to solve a very similar problem. After I lost my VistaC, I bought a GPSMAP 60CSx and continued to use the software that way. Under the new policy I would have to purchase a new copy of the mapping software as well. All in all this whole policy change makes it much less of an issue to change vendors. If one can't save any investments by sticking to the same vendor on future purchases, one doesn't have to shop by vendor. This of course are sales losses they can't measure, so this will not backlash on those marketing specialists, who probably have a big party celebrating the estimated increase in mapping license revenue right now. Jan

The one on my scooter. Just today I came back from a business trip Philadelphia->Toronto->Philadelphia (that was 1,000+ miles). The little foam pads I placed into the GPS mount to stop the bobbing worked perfect. Jan

Yes, mountainous regions will require smaller tiles due to the far denser contour lines. There still is a 2025 map segment limit on current Garmin GPSr's however. So the goal should be to make the tiles as large as possible. Why not start with 30'x30' and split into 30'x15', 15'x15' or combinations of that where it really leads to problems? BTW, I had done one test with 60'x60'. cGPSmapper 0093 did compile it, but it wasn't able to import the segment into the preview. Aside from that, my system only has 1GB of RAM and started paging quite heavily half way into the compile, so that size really doesn't work well. Jan

The problem is getting the data, accurate and reasonably up to date. I have actually started doing some work on that and created the first 20 map segments containing a 2.5 x 2 degree area of Pennsylvania. I intend to expand that area bit by bit. The maps currently contain contour lines generated from the Seamless USGS 1/3 Arc Second raster DEM combined with the NHD High Resolution Subbasin Hydrography information. So it contains elevation contours plus streams, rivers, lakes, dams, shorelines and pipelines, with names where the NHD data has them. I did not add any roads, trails or other features to those maps (yet), because the only data that would make sense to add to this would be the Tiger Line data from the US Census Bureau. This data has traditionally been available in a proprietary (but well documented) format. However, the Census Bureau plans to publish the data in shapefile format by Fall 2007. So I am basically waiting for that instead of contributing needless to global warming (by wasting brazillions of CPU cycles). Now indeed, as someone else said, if people want to work together on a distributed project, we would have to agree on common definitions. The NHD data for example contains cleartext feature types like "SwampMarsh", "Lake", "River" etc. When creating Garmin compatible maps, these have to be converted into numeric object type codes. And of course, there are some object types missing, so a 1:1 translation isn't possible. I expect the same to be true for the Tiger shapefile data when it will be released this Fall. I started generating those map segments as 30x30 minute tiles, which would result in about 5300 tiles for the entire US. One out of the 20 segments I've done so far currently hits a compile time limit on MapCenter, and the site administrator has not responded to my request to increase the timeout yet. It does however compile just fine on my system and I have all 20 segments available in MapSource and on my 60CSx. They are transparent maps with a draw priority set so that they display on top of CitySelect. This means that on the 60CSx, I actually can see a combination of CitySelect with my custom TOPO maps drawn over it and can use the map setup menu to enable/disable either of them as needed. Jan