Pasha

Ewwwww.

Sorry I was unable to make it over there. That's an amazing load of trash. I don't remember there being that many tires down there. Did you have to load it all and take it to a dump or will the city or county get it, or ... ?

<Homer>D'oh!</Homer> Thanks for the email, too, Dick. I don't know why I've been planning on it being today for the last two weeks... it's that "reading directions" thing that's always given me trouble.

Unfortunately it looks like I'm out; my daughter's T-Ball game has been rescheduled for 1pm today. I was going to try to make the contest at least, but it's pretty much too late now. Have fun y'all.

It looks to me like it's obscured by simply zooming in to the lower-resolution image, instead of loading a new, higher-resolution image tile. The curious thing is that it's obscured at all. I agree about the White House, too; on further observation it looks edited to remove roof features, at least. Both of these are probably to keep the SAM site locations from being pinpointed.

I've wondered the same. But no, even as a Premium member, GPX files are only available singly from the individual cache pages, or via PQs. All you can get are LOCs from the Download button on the listings pages. I gather that this is because GPX files are significantly more expensive to generate in terms of processor time and memory usage.

Oh believe me, as soon as rogbarn posted the link I spent about 30 minutes there. We're going to be hitting Disneyland again either in May or in October, and I'm planning on spending some time checking out the found marks and keeping my eyes peeled for others. Great page.

I believe there's one of these at the entrance to Disneyland as well, but I'm too lazy to go look for a listing. I love Disneyland.

That's really interesting about the Capitol Building, considering that the Pentagon and White House are unobscured. "'Curiouser and curiouser,' said Alice."

If it's been sunny for a while, I'm all for the use of plastic bags wrapping the container. If it's been wet, it's about the nastiest thing on earth to have to unwrap it; something about all that wet clammy plastic really drives me nuts. Last weekend a friend and I were approaching a cache location and he said, "I got it," seeing a fairly obvious bit of plastic bag sticking out of the bushes. He grabbed it and was immediately sorry, as it was not the cache but instead a dog-bomb that had been cleaned up by the owner but missed the garbage can nearby. I found the cache while he was off looking for a bathroom to wash his hands.

I have GSAK installed on a USB "thumb drive" attached to my keychain. GSAK goes with me, regardless of computer. It's a bit slower than native hard drive installs, but not enough to overcome the advantages of having it portable.

Wait, you mean there's cachers in other countries? I thought only USians were allowed to use GPS and satellite photography. Actually, I'm confused - I thought their satellite coverage was basically worldwide... ? In all seriousness, Google has made a practice of covering every base there is to be covered. I'm sure they'll be adding worldwide mapping of similar scale and quality as what they've done for most of North America already.

A bit of an unrelated note, but may be of use to some; since Google Maps has added satellite pictures, here's a GSAK URL to show a cache location using the satellite view directly: Google Satellite View=http://maps.google.com/maps?q=&ll=%lat,%lon&spn=0.020,0.020&t=k Remove the &t=k on the end to just show the regular map view. Still working on reliable, no-third-party-app-required pushpins.

You forgot: Moved cache to better location for next finder. and SBA because I couldn't find it.

To link directly to a Lat/Lon pair, here's the format of the URL: http://maps.google.com/maps?q=&ll=47.488667,-122.557233&spn=0.020,0.020&t=k Drop the "&t=k" from the end to get the regular Google Maps. If you use GSAK, you can drop the following string into Tools/Options/HTML/Custom URLs to link directly from GSAK to the Google Maps satellite view of the area. No pushpins yet, unfortunately: Google Satellite View=http://maps.google.com/maps?q=&ll=%lat,%lon&spn=0.020,0.020&t=k

See also: Google Maps.

By "same maps," I mean, "taken by the same satellites at the same resolutions." Satellite image databases are updated constantly. The fact that the Google maps view of my local neighborhood is identical to the one I get in USAPM leads me to believe they're using the same database(s). At any rate, why quibble? The advantage of USAPM is obvious.

I love USAPhotoMaps, but I dont' get color satellite images. Are the Google images true color or are they "colorized"? You can get color images with USAPhotoMaps, you just have to know how to do it. Open the program and pan to whatever you want to look at. Zoom in as far as you can. Then press "U" or choose "Map Type/Urban" from the View menu. The caveat is that the high-res color images have to exist for the area you're looking at; it's mainly just urban areas. Even if the Urban photos don't exist for your area, you've still got the 1-meter-per-pixel black & white photos for just about everything.

Jeremy: Isilon. With some kind of sponsorship (corporate or from Isilon itself) you could probably swing a lease deal for one of these that would keep you in storage space for the foreseeable future. My company uses these and they're the only way to go for high-availability high-capacity expandable disk storage. The one downside is price, though it's significantly better than other solutions in this size range. I'm sure you've already got plans in that area, but another suggestion can't hurt.

I don't have Mapsource on this machine, so I'm not sure of the syntax, but you can add programs that run from the right-click menu via the ools/Options/Advanced/Run Program box. I put a link to USAPhotoMaps in there using this syntax: USAPhotoMaps="C:\Program Files\USAPhotoMaps\USAPhotoMaps.exe";"%gpx" Keep in mind that syntax is specific to USAPhotoMaps; what you need for Mapsource will be a bit different in terms of the command-line arguments and so forth.

As an aside, if you're enjoying Google Maps' satellite photos, you might try downloading USAPhotoMaps, which uses the exact same satellite images right on your desktop. The big advantage is that it'll read GPX files directly from GC.com or GSAK or whatever, and place markers on the photos for you.

After your diatribe about how morals are slipping in our modern age, this is how you're going to fight that slippage? Ummm, OK. This cache, previously linked here, does exactly that. The camera is in place specifically to monitor the cache.

Nahhh. I've done multis where the waypoints were 50 feet apart. The .1m distance only applies to the published waypoint's distance (and the final cache's distance) from other caches, AFAIK.

Gordo and I did their Fear This: Claustrophobia this weekend. I'm not affected by that particular fear, but it was still creepy in there. It had been raining all day so I was worried what I would do if a wall of water suddenly came rushing towards me. Once WiFi is completely ubiquitous, you'll be able to place a web-viewable camera just about anywhere - it'd be fun to put one in that particular place and watch people shiver their way towards the cache.

Well, I don't know about unintuitive. I didn't have any problems, and the support system is first rate (having the author be a regular poster here and with an excellent online FAQ and help file.) GSAK exponentially increases your filtering and mapping capabilities, and is a great tool for keeping your own database of caches and manipulating them in whatever way you want. A friend of mine has been caching for 4 years and making do with printing cache pages and tapping waypoints into his GPSr manually; one day with me (a two-month-old cacher) and my PDA and GPSr, filtered and ordered and organized via GSAK, and he's become a believer.