Teasel

quote:Originally posted by The Good Shepherds:Ooo... have they forgot to turn the censorship filter on for the new forum? Dunno, let's give it a try... Geolutins Lovelock Navicache

Shurely shome mistaake? I'm sure there were more replies than this yesterday? Anyway, what I was about to ask was whether the pub are taking bookings for lunch?

You've been great ambassadors for the sport and have put in many, many hours of work beyond the call of duty, and I'd like to add my thanks to the chorus of voices above. I guess at times your role must have been a bit like herding cats. Keep having fun finding those caches (that's what it's all about, after all) and if you decide to step back into the fray, you'll certainly have my support!

Given the choice of R&J talking to T&J or to R&J, I know which I'd prefer!

Yes, it's in one of those Ortlieb map cases. We trawled the Brecon gear shops for 'waterproof' map cases and, unfortunately, the Ortlieb was the only one which passed the "fill with air, squeeze hard and hold" test. It does rely on the finder being very careful to close it properly. However, with only one find in the last four months, this has not been a problem!

Just placed my first order, for a logbook and a couple of cache stickers. Total price buying from Finger would have been £17.26. Price from GeocacheUK was £10.07 Nice one Mark!

...and thanks for all the hard work you put into geocaching behind the scenes. It's amazing you ever get the time to actually find any caches, let alone 400 of them!

Due to inaccuracies in the conversion routine provided by the Ordnance Survey, none of the grid references on either GC.com or G:UK are accurate to within 5m. Using them to program your GPS would double the uncertainty and potentially give you four times the area to search. Most pages on G:UK therefore provide only 6 figure grid references. The references I added to the GC.com pages are 10 digits, but this does not mean that they are the same quality as the original cache coordinates in WGS format. Summary: use OS maps to get close (they are the best in the world!), but use the original WGS coords for the last 10m.

quote:Originally posted by The Targett Family:What do you ssay Teasel? The question of storing extra data about geocaches has been raised before. I would like to add a feature to G:UK to allow people to give marks out of 10 for caches they've visited. Others could then search/sort on these scores. Also, the cacher stats could then reflect total/average quality of caches placed/hidden etc. I've asked GC.com whether they mind other sites holding extra data about GC.com caches but received no response. As for extra attributes such as dog-friendliness, I have no interest in spending time developing prototype code which will be thrown away when GC.com implement the feature themselves.

quote:Originally posted by jeremyp:As a non IE6 user, I have a problem with viewing forums when people have posted a long URL. Basically, the browser stretches the HTML table sideways to fit the whole URL in on one line since it is effectively one word. My plea is for people to make use of the UBB URL code for placing URLs in their posts. This is simplicity in itself. In the post screen there is an instant UBB button with URL written on it. Just press that button and follow the prompts. You have to admit that http://www.streetmap.co.uk/streetmap.dll?grid2map?X=401622&Y=281036&zoom=3&arrow=Y looks better than http://www.streetmap.co.uk/streetmap.dll?grid2map?X=401622 &Y=281036&zoom=3&arrow=Y The text can be anything you like e.g. http://www.streetmap.co.uk/streetmap.dll?grid2map?X=401622&Y=281036&zoom=3&arrow=Y. ------- jeremyp The second ten million caches were the worst too. http://www.jeremyp.net/geocaching The problem is that, as soon as someone replies to the message, this happens and you're back to square one!

quote:Originally posted by lathama:Very Quiet, infact so quiet that i didnt go out! Which cache in the UK holds the record for the longest time undiscovered???? Now that would be one quiet cache!!!!! Well, the oldest virgin cache is this one, which has gone over two years without being found! (Though it does look like a candidate for archival). this cache is notable on the grounds that nobody's even attempted it in 18 months! From the logs so far, there were 208 finds this weekend, compared with 312 the week before. So it looks like it was a bit quiet.

I'm a bit more paranoid and would only eat it if I could prove that the wrapper was still airtight (by squeezing it). So bags of sweets are great, but individual chocolate bars I'd only take if I was not going to get back to the car without an immediate dose of sugar!

Brilliant! Anything which simultaneously benefits both geocaching.com and GeocacheUK has got to be good news! Is the goal to provide a full online ordering service? With credit cards? Or is it going to be a bit more adhoc? Either way, it's a great step forward!

quote:Originally posted by The Northumbrian: quote:Originally posted by Freak Enterprises:I had this posted in the log for my cache : "Third time lucky. We've invested in a GPS and wow what a difference. We found it within 10 minutes of reaching the site." I won't name names, but it gave us a good laugh! Martin I'v heard about these GPS things, they seem to be a big help when your out caching, Think I might get one also Nige Hey, don't be too hard on the guy! Anyone with a 1:25000 OS map and a compass should be able to get to within 25m or so of most places. There was some discussion on the general forums a while back about how to make GPS-only caches, and the only two good methods they came up with were putting it in the middle of a very large, flat, dense forest with no paths and no surrounding hills, or requiring a datum change as part of a multicache! There's an ammo box hidden in the middle of Kinder Scout (big upland peat bog), 800m pacing on a bearing from the nearest path, (no clues, no GPS allowed!), which most people seem to find on their first attempt (even people like me who are known to be heard muttering "never eat shredded wheat" when trying to distinguish east and west)

quote:Originally posted by The Hornet:But in England - 12 and about 250 miles round trip in a day. You're too modest! I've got you down as having done 17 London caches in a day last July. Yours, BB

Here's a list of the top 50 trips in terms of numbers of caches found. (I get a mention right down there near the bottom for the standard "Bracknell Cache Grab"!) My greatest distance travelled was Buxton - Winchester, for the cachers meet in January. No chance of getting up early enough to drive down in time, so I came down the night before and pitched the tent in the local campsite. Don't know if that technically counts, as it's more than one day, but I think it should if only out of sympathy for the amount it rained that night!

Well done on reaching your first ton! And I note that it was done without the last minute flurry of locationless caches that some of us stooped to Thanks for all the hard work on G:UK too!

We've taken our son on most of our geocaching trips 'up north', but at 5 mths he's not old enough to help us find the caches yet! So '0' for us. Just wanted to say that I agree completely with what Nia said above, even though I do understand why the rules are more strict. I'd be a bit concerned if there was enough alcohol present to cause medical harm to a small child if drunk but see nothing wrong with small quantities. When thinking of ideas for caches, we came up with a multicache with 'adult' and 'child' parts. So the child part would have teddies, crayons, glitter etc, whereas the adult part would have penknives, whisky miniatures, copies of the highway code, CAMRA ale guides etc. Visitors would be encouraged to bring something suitable for both halves. But I guess it's a no-go...

I know that Mark has recently purchased a large number of Groundspeak travel bugs, and is selling them off at very reasonable rates. If you want a not-for-profit alternative to Groundspeak, you could try geoluREMOVETHIStins. I understand they give you a tracking number free of charge, and it's up to you what you print it on. I have forced this posting through the censorship which is present in these forums, only because I think people should be informed about the choices they have. As far as the work I've done for G:UK goes, for as long as I am allowed access to GC.com data, I will not be using, or reporting on, any of the other caching / TB sites. [This message was edited by Teasel on March 01, 2003 at 07:38 AM.]

Another option for visiting cards / travel bug name tags is Fantastic Plastic by Avery. This is a film you print on with an inkjet, then bake in the oven. The film shrinks into a 2mm thick plastic sheet, making the print waterproof in the process...

I know that Mark has recently purchased a large number of Groundspeak travel bugs, and is selling them off at very reasonable rates. If you want an alternative to Groundspeak, you could try geolutins. I understand they give you a tracking number free of charge, and it's up to you what you print it on. As a name tag for my bugs, I use Avery "Fantastic Plastic" which is a film you print on with an inkjet, then bake in the oven. The film shrinks into a 2mm thick plastic sheet, making the print waterproof in the process...

quote:Originally posted by Travers:I wouldn't leave sweets, not only because critters may find them attractive, but also because of the fact that they are liable to go soggy...and no, I wouldn't eat anything that was left in a cache...I would drink something though if it was in a can! From the number of caches I've found with a sticky mess at the bottom, I'd have to agree with you... ...however, at 2am after a very long day's caching, finding an airtight bag of wine gums in D&P's "Egg on your face" was a godsend!

quote:Originally posted by Freak Enterprises:Slightly off topic but I'd like to see a report of caches with the highest not found to found ratio. wouldn't these be the caches that people have found most difficult? In that case, and at the risk of falling foul of the cache advertising rules, I nominate Grin-ning from 'ere to 'ere! Currently we only store 'found it' logs, though this may soon change, and allow this sort of report to be written.

... and thanks! I'll add a link to Macromedia from the map page. Not sure what all that stuff they made me put in the html was for, if not to make sure that the correct runtime was installed! But if people can see their maps, that's all that matters

quote:Originally posted by SimonG:Your job title is Real Statistician? Does that mean you have colleagues who are Imaginary Statisticians? Presumably when they get together on the same project, they can do complex statistics