trainlove

For all yof you who spend a whole long time to compose an email or a log, DO NOT press send or sumbit or whatever. First copy and save a copy of your writing then send it. Since there are daily Server Application errors that last seemingly hours at a time on geocaching.com, you just might lose everything and NOT be able to recover it. And you know just how hard it is to write exactly the same thing an hour after trying to get back on geocaching.com while your thought process is completely filled with rage at the problems there.

I know of a cacher who planted his first cache within a few days of joining geocaching.com, not sure how many he had found at that point. He then preceded to plant 20 or so caches over the next few months. Most were good, only a few lame ones that are not really lame. But ALL where planted without him knowing how to get DD MM.mmm on his GPSr. according to his porfile page he only had DD Mm.mm and that is a heck of a lot of distance out in the field. Way to many cachers decided not to do any of his caches, while others had posted corrected coords in their logs. I think that the original coords are STILL on all the cache pages. I am not criticizing that cacher, but I think that a lot of prospective new cachers were turned off to this sport while trying to find his un-findable caches. I know that if I had dozens of DNF's in the first several weeks of my caching career while trying the caches in my area I might have not gotten hooked. Good thing that my zone was not that close to his zone when I started out.

Zipcode locations come from the Tiger Census database as used by the US Postal Service. They are sort of arbitrary and not the geographic center of anything physical. Now even more frustating is that the same Tiger Census database is what's used for most older mapping software. And there one can see that the database has little to do with reality. Most roads are some 100 feet off from where ALL GPSr's say they are. I have no idea why that data is so unreliable. But I know why it's so prevalent, the database is free for the asking. This is one reason that Garmin's cost more than Magellan's, Magellan goes with the free data, while Garmin has paid for some more recent and much more correct data.

If you first eneterd a password in geocaching.com that has uppercase and lowercase and spaces you may notice that you can skip the case and spaces when logging into geocaching.com, but not so with the forums. The password used when logging into the forums MUST be EXACTLY spelled out the way you first defined it in geocaching.com.

1. The problem appears with GCY1YP which should appear as 2/1/07 but does not show up untill I show all caches, it never shows up directly on the 'My Account' page, and I have now used at least 20 different computers. I'm not sure what my stats count should be since it's been a several months since I actually entered them into my own GPX file and I have not done a pocket query in a while also. Up till now I have 'trusted' the figure that shows up in my stats box and this problem here is the only reason I have some concern. I think the issue actually has to do with the fact that the cache owner wanted me to change the 'find' date on his mystery. Having read his original cache page, I followed the directions 'exactly' and posted my find on 12/10/06 but sometime in that month he changed or added to the rules or I re-read something that didn't originally make sense, and finally he contacted me to make a correction. So I think the real reason it doesn't show up on the 'My Accounts' page is that for some reason that page points to the 'original' find date while each and every other geocaching.com page and utility probably point to the 'existing' find date. 2. Wander Lust is an event multi that's hidden differently at each of the SNEG seasonal events. I always visit it but don't always log it, I only log it when I'm there, alone or with friends, and we actually find it instead of finding a large group of other finders hovering around the cache sticking out like a sore thumb. Yes Wander Lust shows up on 'My Account' in the last 30 days and will fall off that page in about 3 weeks, and each of the other finds of Wander Lust show up when I show all 'caches' over my lifetime. It will never show up twice on the 'My Account' page since the SNEG events are very 3 months and the 'My Account' page only shows the last 30 days.

As I stated above, I had cleared out everything that can be cleared out, history, cookies, cache buffer memory... And had rebooted several times in the last few days and the issue still appears. And to put that possiblity to bed: The day before yesterday, on my way to a geocaching event in Rhode Island, at a library I have been to but using a different computer than I had used many months ago, the same issue appears. Yesterday, on my way to an event in Connecticut, at a library I never visited before, the same issues appear. Today, on my way to an event in New Hampshire, at a library I use a lot, the same issues appear. Yes, that's 3 different geocaching events in 3 different states (not even the state I live in) on 3 consecutive days.

Just how many servers and/or databases are there at geocaching.com related to cache finds? Right now if I press 'my account' it gives me a number in the top corner that I'm not sure is correct. The reason I'm not sure is that right on those cache finds for the last 30 days it does not show a cache find I made 3 days ago. If I then press 'caches' to see all finds over my lifetime, that find is right there practically on the top of the list. If I click on the 'geocaches' but not the '(mine)' so as to show me the whole month, it again is right there near the top and also on the particular day that I made the find if I click that day. If I go to my cache finds and click on Puzzles, again it's right there as the last puzzle I found. If I go to the particular cache page, my log is right there as the last person to find it. But when I go back to 'my account' it does not show the find. But it does show that I picked up a geocoin from that cache on the day that I was at that cache. This is not a cookie or 'cache' memory issue as I have cleared out all and even re-booted. I have seen situations where a coin or tb log does not show up for several minutes while the stats seem to be instantly incremented. But in this cache it's been 3 days since I found that cache. I'm perplexed.......

I have not got a 'server too busy' notice in about a week but EVERY time I try to log more than a dozen geocoins the server seems awfully slow. In some cases forcing me to wait a day or so to try to finish off the lists of coins that I got at events. I usually wait a week before trying to do that, thinking that I won't run into 100 other people also logging those coins but apparently nothing I do will make it take less than an hour to log 10 coins. Too bad there is no way to pre-log everything on my PDA and upload it all at once.

Wouldn't it be great if one could download GPX on a cache search page instead of just LOC after checking click to select all? Or perhaps an option to select State/Country in a pocket query would be easier to implement. To be consistant, being able to select all the kinds of searchs that one can normally do should also be available in a pocket query

Have the filename of over 25% of all geocoin icons been changed or the location of them been moved? I maintain a web page of all geocoins that I am aware of and for some reason about 25% of them today have no icon. Perhaps, for some unfathomable reason, you might have changed those particular ones from .bmp's to .jpg's or the other way around, but I'm not going to spend any time trying to figure out if that is what happened. It's hard enough and time consuming to add 10 new ones that I see to my web page, perhaps an hour of work. So I only try this perhaps once a month. Please tell me what happened. P.S. I like your new trackable item/geocoin/travel bug page but I will not include any of the couple hundred new coins that I see there until someone I know or someone I see has any of them in their profile.

Another one that I just noticed is that there are 2 kinds of Alien Geocoins. At first glance, I thought, as I looked at MustangJoni's trackables, that it was a glitch between 'moved/discovered' and 'owned' trackables but then I noticed that he owns one of each kind of Alien. I too love the ever growing list of icons to try to log but it's a chore to maintain a list and learn of new ones mostly by searching out the profiles of prolific coin collectors. I just spent 2.5 hours and learned about 20 new coins. But part of that time was also updating the info about my finds along with the URL's to see them. I won't be posting that web page for a while so my current web page is about 2 weeks out of date.

I believe that particular icon is the one that's supposed to be for the Pumpkin Geocoins which as I still see has the same icon as the SnowWolf Geocoin. It has been incorrect for at least a couple weeks now and may one day be corrected as mentioned in other fourm coin messages.

You could go to a geocaching event, most have driving directions in addition to the coordinates of the event.

I must be going crazy. A few weeks ago I noticed the SnowWolf Icon problem after logging another Geocoin that had the Exact same icon as SnowWolf was supposed to have (not the pumpkin, and I'm not thinking of BrawnyBear Geocoins either). Today without me logging any coins for about a week I noticed that I somehow logged a coin type that I never heard about. A tiny bit of research showed me that my Personal Geocoin count has decremented by 1 and TBDJeeperMTJ Geocoins has split off of that all incompassing group. Can't wait for it to actually have a different Icon but that's a different story. I wonder if all of a sudden, tomorrow, there are going to be over a thousand new types of Geocoins and Icons that used to be Personal Geocoins. It's not a problem to me since I have only logged 17 Personal Geocoins but I wonder how many people are going to get confused about the New coins that they apparently have logged without them remembering logging it. Not to mention the coin owners who all of a sudden will own many more types of coins than they remember buying. Actually it's a slight problem to me since I try to keep an accounting of all the coins that I know about on my web page http://ray.jerome.jobs.googlepages.com/GeoCoinABC. Perhaps I'll just let my computer and my fingers rest for a month or more and let things settle down.

Has the name of a few geo coins changed for no apparent reason recently. 1. "Two Happy Hikers - Vintage Caching Geocoins" now appears to be "Two Happy Hikers Geocoins" 2. "Stars - Orion Geocoins" now appears to be "Stars Geocoins" Both of the NEW names are much less appealing than the original names. I didn't mind back when Signal Geocoins decided to come out with new ones each month and plain old Signal Geocoins disappeared, but these two seem to be single issue coins. So far it does not appear that the icons have changed but who knows. Speaking of coins, why does "Personal Geocoins" sometimes appear twice in persons profile? I mean twice in their Trackables Owned and twice in their Trackables Found sections of their profile. This also appears to be the case for "USA Geocoins" and "The Definitive Coin Series Geocoins" coins but in each of those cases there are different icons for the apparently different coins as in the "Wildlife Muggles Geocoins" and "Wildlife Muggles Finder Fox Geocoins" coins. Speaking of which, are plain old "Wildlife Muggles Geocoins" going to disappear and be replaced with the 4 kinds of those coins that exist? If that's the case then are there going to be about a thousand of new icons and names for the thousands of kinds of "Personal Geocoins". How can one try to maintain a list of ALL available/existing coins if they constantly change. Perhaps I'm exagerating about the constantly, but one never knows where this trend is going to go.

Since virtuals are grandfathered I have not actively searched out good ones to find except those that are in an area that I'll be traveling, but someone told me about an existing space based virtual. I can't remember the details other than it having coords somewhere in Europe. It was the International Space Station. To log it you had to take a long duration film/celluloid photo with star trails and the space station being another trail at some angle to the stars. And you had to post the coords and time of where and when you took the photo. Truth be told, this is really a Reverse Locationless Cache but back in the days when there were way too many cache types, the reviewers apparently got as confused as cache planters.

I think it would be a good idea for the distance (and direction I guess) to show up on ANY cache search page. For example, I did a search for Event caches in Maine and at first glance can't tell how far any of the dozen events that appeared are from home. I have to click on each and every one to see that info. I'm attempting to visit an event cache in EVERY (not that many yet) state that I have cached in. Parts of Maine are only 50 miles from home but parts are over 400 miles, the same holds true for New York. I think this inconsistancy only shows up when doing a search by country/state. I have mentioned a similar/same subject over a year ago coming at this from a different perspective. I think there is a work around such as appending &d=200 or &dist=200 to a URL but I don't think it works with country/state searches since that appears to be a Java and not HTML bit of code. consistancy, consistancy please.

Has anyone else had problems logging caches. I think the NEW web page format is somehow slowing down ALL access to the web page to a DEAD crawl, I mean over a minute to get the search for cache to come up after pressing that button and so on. I havve yet to log around 25 of the 60 cahes I visited this last weekend at the GreatNorthern Tier event and 11 from yesterday, but at this rate it will take forever. And I have to look at at least 15 of my other weekend visits (all visited by 50+ people so each and every one will force me to have to click show all logs) in order to find out which one of those was my 500'th traditional find. P.S. It's not my computer or the WiFi connection since I gave up here and ran into a local library to try their computer also. I'm hoping that during this logging I will be able to remember to refresh my stats constantly so as to be able to know which of those happened to be my 700'th overall cache find, but refresh also takes FOREVER.

How many virtual caches are there? I was just informed of one that I would have never seen since it's coords are overseas, but is of a kind where a hobby of mine can get me the required find. Also, it would be kind of interesting to see the stats of the numbers of traditional, multi, mystery... caches instead of that 290K number on the home page. But then I guess one would want to know how many are active, how many are permanently archived, how many are temporarily archived and how many are events that have passed but have not been closed out and perhaps a few other categories that I can't fathom.

One can alyways give nothing or just a short note for the bug pick up. And go through hoops after dropping off the bug to make the greatly detailed log. That is, after logging the cache and having the bug highlighted, go to your finds, click on the bug that you just dropped off and then edit the blank drop off entry. The only problem here is that you sometimes have to wait an hour for the bug drop entry on the bug page to appear, while your profile and the cache page entry happens instantly.

I also don't understand the problem here. My geocoin currently is in 'my possession' and I will not place it ANYWHERE. The people who I let see it and actually hold it for a minute or so ALL discover it. And the few times when people accidently 'grab it' and 'drop it off' will just cause me to eventually grab it back. Discovering the coin from my possession or from someone elses possession or from an event is exactly the same. If someone actually logs my coin and I don't remember showing it to him will get an email from me asking how he got the number. I only log coins that I actually touch and examine the great beauty of, and think it's despicable for others to do otherwise.

I ran a pocket query yesterday for All My Found caches. I ran it about an hour after finishing logging the cache finds for that day and the previous day. When I imported it into GSAK it did not have any of those several caches. This forced me to have to look up the zip code for the areas that I was during those 2 days and making a pocket query for those areas. I do know that because of multiple servers at Groundspeak the following occur: 1. Apparently found caches will not show up in a pocket query for at least a half an hour after posting, but could be much longer for all I know. 2. Passwords are case sensitive only for forums, not for geocaching. Not usually a problem unless you want to see someones postings from within geocaching.com without first going into the forums. And returning to geocaching.com from the forums can sometimes log you out. 3. Posting a travel bug or geocoin find sometimes takes 30 minutes to show up on that bug's page. 4. Posting a cache find will instantaneously showup on the cache page. Why isn't #3 just like this? 5. Hints that have a HTML special character like & will upon de-coding turn into something like & amp; and if you then re-en-code it it will be comething like & a mp;&am p; and so on... exponentially as long as you encrypt and decrypt the hint. This could crash a server if one continuously does so, and I have mentioned a simple fix for this in the past. One only really needs to de-crypt a hint ONCE, and never need to en-crypt it ever since one can go back one page. 6. A Needs Maintenance posting does not count as a find. So one who makes a Needs Maintenance post also has to make a Find post at the same time. There should probably be a bold note underneath the log box for a needs maintenance posting stating that f you actually found the cache you have to post a Find log after you post the Needs Maintenance log. 7. Not sure about this, but having found more than 500 caches I wonder what All My Found caches pocket query finds. The 500'th most recent finds, or the 500 first finds, or the 500 closest to home finds or actually ALL finds or... 8. can't think of any more. Actually probably have not encountered any more but am sure that they exist.

The 'discovered it' feature for geocoins is great but I think the icon for it when you look at your profile should be something other than a smily face. In the lines of the other icons like the up arrow, the down arrow and the up&down arrow, how about an arrow that circles the TB symbol and with a handle below it, it could look like a magnifying glass. Discovered it, right.

I'm being a little fussy here but I think it would be good for the little direction icons to either have an angle (perhaps rounded by 5's like 5, 10 , 15... degrees) or just double the resolution by having NNE, ENE, ESE, SSE, SSW, WSW and NNW. When looking at search pages over about 80 which is about 40 miles the current arrows don't help in mental filtering. Just today, my planns on taking a trip of 60 miles were put on hold and I had to go visit my niece in the hospital about 50 miles in a different direction. I had wanted to get several caches that would show up on some search pages 60-80 but just couldnt do it quickly.

The way I do this when I have the time and know I'm going to travel along a route is to do a pocket query for 500 traditional caches of difficulty 3 or less centered on a point midway between home and where I'm going (mostly for short trips of 80 miles or less) and then in GSAK export them into Magellan Mapsend Topo for use on my laptop. I'm one of those guys who never puts a cache on my GPS unless I'm planning on going there right away. I have known many people who have been burned by not having the latest info such as updated coords, the difficulty level, even the type of cache (a really hard 5 part multi when a traditional was expected), and caches that are temporarily or permanently shut down. My method is not the best, and is very time consuming. So much so that during a recent trip of 50 miles to the Quabbin Reservoir I just know that there were hundreds of easy caches less than a tenth of a mile from me as I was driving by. I could have beaten my rather small record of 14 caches in a day if I spent the time doing that programming beforehand, especially in these days of rather high gas prices.