Indigo Parrish

I am sad and disappointed to hear that Groundspeak will no longer support Benchmarking. It's embarrassing that something that we as a community had the resources to collectively support in 2001 can no longer be supported 20+ years in the future. I've payed for Premium membership for 17 years now and would happily pay a higher tier -- Premium Gold -- if it helped modernize and extend the Benchmarking experience to be secure and compatible with the rest of the Groundspeak API stack and include Benchmarks from additional countries. Other options to consider: Form a not-for-profit collaboration with NGS to host and maintain the US Benchmark database. Start a GoFundMe for the API stack modernization cost. Make Benchmarking a Premium feature and raise the price of Premium membership to cover costs. Transition Benchmarking to a sister site ala Waymarking or Adventure Labs or Wherigo. Keep a bare-bones Benchmarking website and partner with a third party developer for paid mobile app access. I'd be prouder of this community if we collectively found a way to support Benchmarking rather than rationalize the abandonment of a multi-decade source of joy.

Thank you SO MUCH for this app. I'm really pleased that it exists at all and it appears quite functional even in its 1.0 form. My small feature request: Under "Settings" -> "Coordinates display" I'd like a "DD MM.mmm" decimal minutes option. Geocaching makes my brain think only in decimal minutes.

My biggest peeve by far is the armchair logging of unattended Virtuals where the cacher quite obviously never visited the physical location on that day. This abuse of an increasingly rare, grandfathered cache type is exactly what leads directly to their archival. It is the caching equivalent of poaching elephants for their ivory as they rapidly decline to extinction. And the biggest offenders, BY FAR, are cachers from Germany and The Netherlands. Why? Who knows. If you want to see a Rogue's Gallery of this unethical behavior, take a look at all the armchair logs on GCGFE7 : Gros Venture Slide.

Funny you should say that ... Be sure to stop by this waymark WM27K2 : Conoco Tower and U-Drop Inn - "Cars" - Shamrock, TX This beautifully restored Conoco gas station is the very one that inspired the gas station in Cars. The city of Shamrock is essentially Radiator Springs given that I-40 bypassed downtown. I also recommend these in Texas along the way : GC124D1 : Devil's Rope and Route 66 GCG71X : Cadillac Ranch -Keith (Indigo Parrish)

I use gmail to receive PQs and they've stopped working overnight. Here's a specific example : The PQ 2260937 ran fine on Oct 23, 2008 5:05 PM CDT. It was scheduled to run again this morning. The PQ page claims it ran at 11/1/2008 12:02:30 AM PDT. No email arrived at my gmail account. Note that a sister query which is very analogous ran as follows : The PQ 2260862 ran fine on Oct 23, 2008 5:05 PM CDT. It was scheduled to run again this morning. The PQ page claims it ran at 11/1/2008 12:02:30 AM PDT. This one DID arrive at my gmail account at Nov 1, 2008 2:02 AM CDT. See how similar they are? Hopefully this minimal pair will help debug the problem. -Keith (Indigo Parrish)

Yahoo maps show county boundaries and Google maps do not. I have no idea why. It's very useful if you are attempting something like the Texas County Challenges to know where the county boundaries are since the cache pages themselves do not list this information. I generally prefer Google maps over Yahoo maps except for this one key feature which appears to be a glaring omission in Google maps. I don't particularly care what map is on the page by default. But please preserve at least the link to Yahoo maps until Google supports county boundaries as well. Thanks!

I use a Pharos GPS 525+ which is a Windows Mobile 5.1 Pocket PC platform and built-in GPSr. Like others, I had to update the .NET support first. The GPSr auto-detect did not work so I manually set it to COM4 9600 baud. After that, everything worked well with the tutorial and the "But Is it Art?" cartridge

Does the wall of shame cover hiding under a pseudonym and then FTFing as themselves : A cache by SockPuppet Hidden: 6/1/2007 Size: Size: Micro (Micro) Difficulty: 2.5 out of 5 Terrain: 1.5 out of 5 (1 is easiest, 5 is hardest) This was the immediate FTF log : June 3 by RealCacher (NNNN found) I was sure scratchin' my haid lookin' fer this un, but I got a hint from Condi. Thanx, girlfriend! Then, In a private e-mail later RealCacher admits SockPuppet = RealCacher Nothing like going to elaborate lengths just to unethically pump up a high 4 digit find count! -Indigo Parrish

I think that depends on the cache. Clearly, the intent of that cache is to unlock the lock. For others, the intent is to find the cache in a very difficult situation. For example, I recently logged as a find a cache here in Austin that lay unfound for nearly a year hidden underwater in the muck of a large, popular natural swimming pool . I spent 45min diving over and over to the bottom holding my breath and digging up rocks from the muck. When I finally found the right rock it was like the Hallelujah Chorus went off. The cache hiders included a secret codeword on the outside of the rock that you had to use to verify a find log. The only hitch was that exposure to the elements meant the actual cache container in the rock could not be opened by hand. I tried as hard as I could to unscrew it, eventually cutting my hand, but I couldn't open that thing for the life of me. There were so many DNFs on that little rock in the past year it was quite a proud success to find it and verify that it still existed. I don't think the cache owners mind the logged find with no log signature. But if they do, I'll happily soldier on back, pliers and fresh log in hand, and stab a stake in its heart. I know exactly where it is now. I'm just pointing out that sometimes there are valid circumstances, legitimate gray areas, judgment calls and a larger context that may not always be seen in a terse log. -Indigo Parrish