GeoElmo6000

My goal for 2020 is to create a geocaching topic in the forums which will rally the entire geocaching community into peace and harmony throughout the ages. And find some geocaches too.

If the puzzle container stops working, is the cache done? Is it something you are able to and are willing to fix? Those are the questions I'd be asking myself before using it as a cache container. From your description it sounds like a maintenance nightmare.

You could get him there if you work really hard at it.

If you win an event, just go for it and have fun! I used to never even attend events, but then I went to one and realized how nice geocachers are. Now events make up 40% of my "hidden caches" and I've made a lot of friends hosting and attending. Each year I host two ice cream socials (besides other events), and even though I schedule those for one hour, they last more than two hours, just standing around a parking lot geo-chatting. It's amazing how much traction you get when you throw out some simple questions like "what's your favorite cache you've ever done?"; then you just sit back and let everyone excitedly tell everyone their stories. Easy peasy.

Great point! Just $40! Not sure if you know, but I slipped a puzzle cache into that film: I hid a mystery cache location in my GIFF film

I have/had a Garmin eTrex H (see my profile pic) that I'm not sure works anymore, but it was such a pain in the neck to program. The only connection to a computer was a proprietary Garmin-to-serial connection and I don't have a computer with a serial port anymore; I tried a USB adapter for the serial port but it didn't work well for me. I would always program it by hand, which involved using up, down, and enter buttons. I enjoyed the receiver but not programming waypoints. I don't want to buy a more modern GPS receiver because I don't want to spend the money on one when I can use the phone instead. I think the phone is so convenient and easy for finding caches. Anywhere I go I can just search for nearby caches. Often times on a road trip I'll drop my wife and kids off at a rest stop bathroom while I get gas, but when they come out I'm gone because there's a cache on the other side of the parking lot. For family vacations outside the country, I don't pay for roaming data. I create a list of caches on geocaching.com that I might want to find, like every traditional below a certain terrain rating, plus every virtual and certain highly recommended caches, and download them onto my phone in Cachly. During each trip I went on airplane mode the entire trip and had no issue finding caches with it; the phone still receives GPS signals on airplane mode. At certain places I would connect via WiFi to do list updates or remove found caches from my list. When I'm on a family vacation, being the only cacher in the family, I generally geocache in place, meaning I only find caches where we're going as a family that aren't going to interrupt the family trip (though they do accommodate detours I request for certain caches I really want to find). My verdict is that I prefer the phone for finding geocaches. The only thing I miss about the eTrex is the long battery life for long geocaching days, such as my six hour trip finding the 32 stage multi in Central Park. I generally will use my eTrex for hiding geocaches, at least to double check the coordinates against the phone. The last couple times I got out the eTrex and put batteries in, it said the batteries were dead, and I haven't investigated whether the batteries were at fault or the eTrex.

I put my request in. Hopefully I do better in this lottery than all the other GC HQ lotteries!

Those films that are selected for the film festival cannot be published until after the film festival is over; this year it was November 18th as the film festival ended on the 17th. Those whose films were not selected can publish them whenever they want. Last year my film wasn't selected but I chose to publish mine after my GIFF event, as some of the attendees were in my film, and I wanted them to have a grand reveal on the big screen, and they enjoyed that.

Auto-generated logs. "Hi, this is cache number [insert number here] for me! Thank you for hiding this! It was fun finding it!"

The winners were announced on the blog: https://www.geocaching.com/blog/2019/11/and-the-giff-2019-award-winners-are/

The one I keep in my wallet has 76,000 miles. Does that count?

I use lists and PQs the following way: 1) Create a list of caches based on a common theme (interesting caches someplace I'll be visiting is my main list type) 2) Create a PQ from that list so I can see the list on a map on the website (under PQ I use the preview map feature associated with the PQ). I never actually run the PQ since I just use an app to find caches these days and don't need to download anything. 3) Update the list as needed (adding / deleting), which automatically updates the map associated with the PQ preview Typically when I go to a destination I'll skip 99% of boring caches for two or three caches that look interesting, especially if I'm time limited. On a recent trip I used project-gc to find caches that filled in Jasmer boxes and some high favorite point caches. I only found a couple of the Jasmer caches (amazing how a T1 can change to a T4 over 18 years).

Most of the popular ones have been posted, just search YouTube for GIFF 2019 finalist films. Here's mine if you'd like to see it:

In my opinion the sixteen film creators won. But if you're talking about the Signal Award and the People's Choice Award winners, they haven't yet been announced. It looks like they're getting ready as they updated the finalist page with the award categories. It'll probably be announced on social media but you can check this link as well: http://www.geocachingfilmfestival.com/giff-2019

Large print: "Get ready for a three week challenge of geocaching two times per week to earn one special souvenir!" Fine print: "Go geocaching six different days during the time period, that's good enough for the souvenir."

My goal for 2019 is to find caches. Mission accomplished! It's interesting to me, looking at my stats, to see that I'm in line to continue the reversal of my decreasing find rate over time trend. From 2011 - 2016 I found less caches each subsequent year, and 2017 - 2018 I found more each subsequent year. If I find 5 more this year I'll continue that trend. After hitting my 366 day calendar goal a few years ago, I started caching very casually, and most of my caches are found on trips away from home. At home, I have so many things I need to do that I don't really get to go geocaching anymore, but during a trip if there's a choice between sitting in my hotel room at night or going to find caches, I'll go geocaching. So, the more trips I go on, the more caches I find. I don't mind paying the $30 premium fee even in my casual gameplay, as I find the benefits are great. And next year my premium membership is paid for by having a film in this year's GIFF. I hope you like it, it's called "The Geocaching Express 6000 GPS Receiver".

It's up to me to create the puzzles I want to create, and it's up to the geocacher to choose to solve the puzzles I create or not to. There's nothing wrong with the puzzles I create; in fact, for the people who choose to solve my puzzles to completion, I have received excellent feedback from that light bulb turning on or that connection being made. Many people in my area choose to ignore my puzzles, and that's their choice and I'm fine with that. As far as time to create a puzzle, to create the seven puzzles I mentioned it took me a year of writing, testing, rewriting, doing more testing, adding story to enrich the experience, and so forth. I released one at a time, and since the final puzzle relied on the six previous puzzles, I had to have the entire series planned out before the first was published.

I love creating puzzles and in my area not a lot of people solve my puzzles. I make them difficult but I try to give a good a-ha moment when they are solved as a reward. I wrapped a seven part puzzle series I did in 2016 in a fun story, in which a group of geocachers realized at an event that they didn't really know each other well outside of geocaching, and each decided to make a puzzle cache about something they enjoyed outside of geocaching. And I used my daughter's beanie boo stuffed animals as the geocachers in the club. I hoped to raise interest in the puzzles, which could be pretty difficult, by putting the story and the photos and the characters around the puzzles, including hints in the dialog and such. I've only had 5 people who finished the series since it was released but that doesn't bother me. If you are interested, here's the final puzzle that brings the series together: https://coord.info/GC62D9P To me the joy is in the creation of the puzzle, and even though I get few Found It logs, those logs are usually a high quality writeup.

When I was pursuing my "Finds for Each Day of the Year" grid, I printed out the grid from my statistics page and taped it next to my work monitor. When a day was getting close I'd write it on a calendar or add it to my list of weekend things to do. Filling in that calendar was my geocaching lowlight - the time I found geocaching to be work and not fun. When I finished I took some time off from the game.

I did. In actuality there were two questions asked. The first is from the thread title: "Who was FTF on Dave Ulmer's first stash?". I answered that question: Mike Teague. Later there's a second question: "Who is Don?". "Don was the first finder, or guinea pig finder". We still have guinea pig finders, and they aren't considered FTF, as they generally have more knowledge or advanced information than the general geocaching community. Maybe the thread title should be "Who is Don from Dave Ulmer's video?"

Mike Teague, May 6th, 2000. I did a puzzle about the FTF of the FTH. https://coord.info/GC5MDXC

TMNTs are heroes in a half shell and have turtle power; Signal gets his power through an antenna that's part of his head. That's how you can tell them apart.

I generally don't enjoy Earthcaches after once finding 13 in one day and having an earth science overdose. But I made it to the Paterson Great Falls National Historical Park to find the Earthcache there. I took this photo using a two second timer, I think it turned out nice.

My family is 10 (highly supportive) and 0 (ABSOLUTELY refuses to participate). They do nice things like let me talk about the hobby to them and others, support my geocaching YouTube channel, and help me host my big GIFF event in a movie theater each year (they attend and run the entry table while I'm greeting everyone). So, they're awesome and supportive. But they do not enjoy finding geocaches.

The woman who runs the blog is awesome. Without even knowing me personally, she has helped me dry run and troubleshoot puzzles that I was creating, and I even featured her as a character in one of my puzzles as a thank you. I highly recommend this blog for really interesting geocaching puzzle caches from around the world.