lowracer

Thanks! I'll give that a shot.

how do I modify the last line of my stats banner. Right now it just asks you to view my profile but I'd like it to say something else. I can't find the instructions anywhere.

I think burying in beach sand is OK. The rule should be amended to specifically allow beach burying hides w/o the use of shovels.

So you admit to being a slacker...

Navicache will let you post moving caches. Problem is, no one uses Navicache, so very few people will try to find your cache.

Go read the logs for The Rock That Rolls. You'll find this isn't the case. People KNOW they're looking for a moving cache, so they expect that one outcome is that it will be already gone. It becomes a part of the fun, part of the challenge to be first to find it. Read the logs.

Great idea. Some have called them Moving caches or Roving caches. They're a whole lot of fun and WILDLY popular, and do not cause the demise of geocaching as we know it. Case in point, The Rock That Rolls: http://www.geocaching.com/seek/cache_detai...33-4f0bd1cbb21a Unfortunately, they are also not being approved anymore. I'll step aside as the usual crowd of experts chime in with their list of reasons why they believe these caches will cause the sky to fall.

I think if you're going to start on the road to recovery, you have to turn your life over to a higher power. Good thing for us cachers, there are a couple dozen higher powers up there. They're in orbit at 11,000 miles, signalling with a power output of 500W. That's pretty high, and pretty powerful.

I usually post XNSL. (eXchanged Nothing, Signed Log.) It saves a couple keystrokes over posting TNLNSL, and by saving two bytes per post, reduces the load on geocaching.com's overloaded servers. That being said, I do riffle through the swag to see if there's anything cool to trade. I keep a carabiner in my pocket just in case I find something cool to trade for. Usually that doesn't happen though.

I just deployed a private laser-only multicache. It's not posted on this or any other site. I'm testing it with a friend first to see if she can find it. I used a short section of PVC pipe with one of those laser holographic tips stuck in a PVC end cap. The other end is open. (It's painted to resemble an automatic pop-up lawn sprinkler) There's a card inside the pipe that shows how to hold the laser up to the pipe to project the unknown symbol. You project the symbol onto the ground at your feet. You have on the sheet a list of symbols to pick from. You plug the correct symbol number into the coordinates to find the final cache. Quite a simple concept. I'm sure it's just the beginning of many fine laser caches. It can be found in the day too.

Many of the Austin cachers prefer to discuss caching on our Yahoo! group: CentralTexasGeocachers. Here's a link: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CentralTexasGeocachers/ Stop on in and introduce yourself. We won't bite.

I've been working on the same idea. Have a cache that can only be found via laser. Some ideas I come up with: 1) Order of the Holographic Tips. Have a board or other surface with 5 of the holographic tips placed in drilled, numbered holes. You have to match the pattern of tips (usually a dollar sign, heart, alien space ship, smiley face, etc) to the numbers to form the next coords. You can only do this with a laser as a regular flashlight won't work with the tips. 2) How high is that tower? Using altimetry, measure the height of a tall electrical tower or other tall object. You could probably do this without the laser, but if you used the laser you could make use of the extra precision in the result to form the coords for the next stage. You'd need a protractor for this step as well, but a regular laser pointer should do the trick, nothing fancy. To set it up, you measure from a known landmark to the base of the unknown tower. You provide that distance in the cache instructions out in the field. Then the angle of the laser to the top of the tower lets you solve for the height using simple trigonometry. 3) Mirrors. Lots of 'em. Need i say more? If you have enough mirrors strategically placed in a forest (on fenceposts or whatever) you can use a laser pointer to bounce a beam off a lot of mirrors before it impinges on a target which is near the cache site. If you make the path length long enough, a regular flashlight won't have the oomph to go the distance with enough intensity to illuminate your target. There are about a million ways to make a laser-only cache. Google for 'Laser Experiments' to learn more.

I for one am delighted when I find religious tracts in a cache. They're very handy out in the woods. I do wish they'd print them on softer, more absorbent paper though.

Tally up another vote for a light colored shirt - In Texas even in April the sun will bake you to a crisp in a dark shirt. Add another vote for an adult shirt without Signal the frog on it. Also, what is the material that the shirt is made from? 100% Cotton? Thanks, -mark.

I see this mentioning of insurmountable problems with moving caches here on the boards pretty frequently. It's often quoted as fact that moving caches will cause the end of geocaching as we know it. As a data point to consider, GCCF79 "The Rock That Rolls" http://www.geocaching.com/seek/cache_details.aspx?wp=GCCF79, was nominated for the "Funniest Cache," voted as both the "Most Innovative Cache," and the "Cacher's Choice - Favorite Cache Overall" in Austin for 2003. It's a moving cache that has had none of the problems that people claim will plague moving caches. Moving caches can be done and they in practice and in fact do not have the problems that people claim will cause the sky to fall. I can't say that all moving caches will be as well received and problem free as The Rock That Rolls, but to unconditionally condemn all moving caches as having insurmountable problems is wrong. I have two moving caches of my own (listed on a much less frequently visited and admittedly vastly inferior competing site), and they also have had none of the problems commonly attributed to moving caches. Perhaps it's an Austin thing, but I doubt it. Properly done, a moving cache can not only work well, but be a heck of a lot of fun to boot. -mark.

Geocaches (mine) Thanks for that page, Jeremy. Somebody buy that man a Krugerrand! -mark.

Please give us cache HIDERS an option to put a brief list of our Hidden Caches on the very first tab. This is the information most important to a cache HIDER, not a cache FINDER. I could care less what my last fifteen FINDS were. I almost never look at that information, and here it is, in my face everytime I go to my cache page now. What is important to me as a HIDER is what I have HIDDEN and when it was last found / not found / noted / needs archived, etc. Please make this information available again: My hidden caches (show archived) You have hidden 46 cache(s) so far. 3/9/2004 Escape from Eastridge Canyon (Texas) (Last: 3/13/2004) 7 day(s) ago. 2/2/2004 School Daze Match Game (Texas) (Last: 3/7/2004) 13 day(s) ago. 1/28/2004 puppy dog tails (Texas) (Last: 3/7/2004) 13 day(s) ago. 1/28/2004 everything nice (Texas) (Last: 3/7/2004) 13 day(s) ago. ...and so on. I'd also like to see status icons representing the last half dozen logs for each cache and a way to sort this list based on the last logged date. This is my hider dashboard. I really miss it. The new page format seems to be geared squarely at FINDERS not HIDERS. Please remember that HIDERS are the core of the sport. We HIDERS were here first. If there are no HIDERS, there can be no FINDERS. Thanks. -mark

I like the changes. The new screens seem to be geared more for the finders of caches though. As a cache hider, I want to echo the request for a compact listing of all the caches I currently have active. One cache per line, with the last found date and the number of days ago it was found. I would like these in a tabular format where I can sort them by either the Waypoint ID or the number of days ago it was logged or found. The current format (which is hard to find, buried on a back page) mixes in all my archived caches including archived events from last year, and it takes up three pages. The previous listing of my 23 active caches would fit on half a page. Suggested Example (pardon my formatting): TYPE - WPT ID - Description - Last Logged - Log Type? - Logged by virt - GCXX1 - My First Cache - 03 Days Ago - found - geocacher_name mult - GCXX2 - My 2nd Cache - 03 Days Ago - DNF - geocacher_name trad - GCXX3 - My 3rd Cache - 13 Days Ago - needs archived - geocacher_name cito - GCXX4 - My 4th Cache - 73 Days Ago - posted note - geocacher_name This is nothing less than a Dashboard for the placer of the cache to get a quick survey of which caches may need maintenance, which ones have perhaps outlived their usefulness, which ones are really hopping, etc. Thanks for the good work. Keep it up! -mark aka lowracer

Great to see all the old cacher photos. I made a puzzle cache out of the old photos of the Central Texas area cachers. It's the largest cache in Austin at 24 gallons: GCHK9F - School Daze Match Game by lowracer

As in the case I started the thread with, it is possible for someone to grab some cache numbers by reporting a cache, then marking it so it doesn't appear in the approval queue (as for example when planning a very complex puzzle cache that could take weeks to set up), and in the mean time, reporting other new caches more quickly. So you could have what I'll call a temporal inversion of the cache ID. So for example I report three caches, GCX001, GCX002, GCX003, put them on the back burner while I set them up, plan out the puzzles, work up some complex HTML, whatever. Meantime, I drop some tupperware full o'swag out in the forest under a pile of rocks and report that as GCX004. Maybe it's two or three months go by before I can finish X001-X003, and report them as active, get them approved. So you'd be out in the field then thinking that X001 was placed earlier, try for an FTF on X004, and miss the FTF on X001. Another possibility is that someone tries to report GCR001, which happens to be a lame virtual where a container could easily be placed, it gets the thumbs-down, is archived (rightly so), and then a year later the placer decides to re-use the ID for another cache, a tupperware under a pile o'rocks, emails his local approver, who unarchives the cache, meanwhile the world has moved on and all the IDs are in the GCZxxx range. Again, temporal inversion. I guess what I'm saying is that in general they are in chronological order but specific cases can be out of sync, so you can't always assume that they are in time order. I think as a revenue stream for Groundspeak, you can't go wrong with vanity waypoint IDs. Five bucks a pop adds up pretty quick. I don't think the programming would be too difficult; I imagine something like this code already exists for the travel bugs, where for example they can block out ranges of travel bug IDs for sale to folks wanting to mint Geocoins by the thousands.

I have a cache GCHB0Y, "...and puppydog tails," a theme cache for items that boys would like to find. I also have a companion cache GCHK9A "...and everything nice," for (you guessed it) trading items that girls would like to find. The GCHB0Y ID was assigned randomly for a "School Daze" cache that is still in work and hasn't been queued for approval yet, but I thought the ID was appropriate for the 'boys theme' cache so I moved it to that one and requested a new ID for the "School Daze" cache. It would be great if premium members could request specific waypoint IDs that are not randomly generated. As long as the ID wasn't obscene or already taken, we could request and receive waypoint IDs that were customized. For instance for the 'girls cache,' it would be good to have GCHGRL, or something like that. Maybe charge $3-$5 per Vanity ID on top of the premium membership? In the ham radio hobby, you can get a special station callsign from the FCC, and these are called "Vanity Callsigns." Perhaps a new feature request could be called "Vanity Waypoint IDs." -mark.

Has anyone else experienced their list of "Travel Bugs that you found" shrinking? I have found dozens, and now my list shows that I found three. Am I missing something, or is this a bug? Thanks, -mark.

Can someone clarify for a relative newbie here (only been caching 2 years), what exactly is a "seed cache?" I'm thinking maybe it's a cache that contains packets of (for example) wildflower seeds, but that doesn't seem to fit this discussion.

I have also been having my geocaching.com emails blocked since 26 Dec. I'm a roadrunner customer as well. And yes, legitimate spam is still getting through. I've got more Paris Hilton videos here than I can shake a stick at...

DPM hasn't made it to Austin. I've never seen such language used in Texas. For a lame cache, I'll usually provide a couple of constructive suggestions in the online log on what could improve the cache rather than just writing "This cache sucked." Often on a bad cache I'll just write XNSL. (eXchanged Nothing, Signed Log). I used SQ when I want outta there fast, like it's in a mosquito-infested swamp or there are alligators heading my way. For a really good cache I'll come up with something creative and funny to write to give the cache owner a chuckle. If the cache hider has provided an obvious and comfy place to sit while signing the paper logbook, and there are no clouds of bugs biting or gators growling, I'll write something more substantial in the paper log. Otherwise it gets rubber-stamped LOWRACER in big red block letters.