Aladin Sane

You haven't looked at my thread about this, have you? We've been tracking this for years. BTW, it means that I am in the first 1.5% of cachers. Amazing. At the time I registered, my ID number (45488) seemed so high! Now, with over 3.1 million accounts registered, it seems positively ancient. At 50947, I am not far behind you Fizzy. I must admit, I don't cache like I used to, but I do get out now and again. It certainly is a different game from what it was in the early days. I recall when I joined, there where fewer than 100 caches in my entire state. Now there are likely that many withing five miles of where I am sitting.

nevermind

The dog in my avitar is Ally. When she was hit and killed by a car two years ago, (a non geocaching accident) my cache hunting dropped off quite a bit. I now have another yellow lab named Lilly. She does cache with me, but we have never gotten back to the pace that Ally and I had enjoyed. Aladin Sane

I think my numbers record is 8, but the day I am most proud of was when I found four caches in four states (MI, IN IL, IA). This included first to finds in both Michigan, and Iowa. Aladin Sane

I also am a lurker. When I have something of value to post, I do. I often get disgusted with the ongoing rage against everything that so often is found in this forum. I am just happy that I can get my pocket queries loaded into my Pocket PC and get out and find a few caches now and then. I don't care if I can't mine the site for data, I don't care if I cant express myself with an all singing all dancing sig line, I don't care if there are lame locationless virtual micros spreading like a plague, I don't especially want to meet many of the others in the community, I just like to get out in the woods and find useless junk in a leaky container. Thanks for listening, Aladin Sane

No problem sharing my experience, I used to be in the fossil fuel R&D business (cleaner, more efficient use of coal). The Clinton administration was no fan of fossil fuel and cut all of the funding (a rather short sighted view). I then chose to get into the specialty chemical world. We will one day need to quite burning gasoline in vehicles. Once oil starts getting scarce, we will need to use the the oil to manufacture items that are difficult to make from anything else. Now I will get off my soap box and get out to find a few caches. Aladin Sane

Ok, This will be my last post, and then I will let it die. The typical fossil fuel powered generating station is between 25 and 30 percent efficeint. This is measured at the generator. When you factor in 25% loss for transmission, you are lucky to get 22.5%. While there is significant Hydroelectric power in this country, there is no viable commercial solar or wind energy being generated. BTW, Iowa has the largest wind energy farm in the world. There are over 300 wind turbines in northwest Iowa. Each cost over $1,000,000 to install, and will not generate $1,000,000 dollars of electricity in its' usefull life. If it were not for a government subsidy, they would not have been built. Don't get me wrong, I think we should be spending research dollars to develope solar and wind, but they are not ready to shoulder much of the current demand. Anyway about your hybrid car. The electrical part is there to provide greater torque for acceleration. During normal cruising, the car runs on its' ineffiecent ICE. Aladin Sane

quote:Originally posted by RJFerret:Valid point, but electric generation via solar, wind, and water are nicely pollution free. The nuclear and coal have issues comparable to gasoline and diesel. However via electric cars, efficiency is improved such that there's less! You haven't simply moved it, but made it a tiny fraction of the existing (nevermind the costs associated with trying to reduce emissions via consumers rather than at a point of origin.) Enjoy, Randy I'm afraid your wrong about an increase in efficiency moving to electric cars. Once the power is in the batter, the system is very efficient, but the power cycle of burning some fuel to generate steam, to spin a turbine, to spin a generator which sends a current through a wire from the generating station to your house is not as efficient as an internal combustion engine driving your car directly. If everyone switched to electric cars over night, the total energy demand would increase. Aladin Sane

I didn't intend to come off as harsh as I did. It was not my intent to call any of you chickens. I just wanted to tell you that it was not really that difficult to retrieve the cache. I hope you do have a good time meeting some of the other local cachers. Aladin Sane

Jolly et al, Here is a link to a little more info on this product. nav I'm not nearly as excited about it having read this. It looks like you still need to download maps from the net. I may have to look into the maps on CD. Does anyone have the map CDs? How do you like them? Aladin Sane [This message was edited by Aladin Sane on October 15, 2003 at 01:59 PM.]

Guys, I think you are making this a little bigger production than it needs to be. I was the first finder of this cache. I had my then seven year old daughter stand at the top of the cliff with my cell phone with instructions to call Mommy if she heard a splash. I went over the side with a rope, but soon found I didn't really need the rope. It just added to the comfort factor. Have a good time, Aladin Sane

Point well taken Andy, but here in the midwest, we don't have that many wild rivers to block up behind dams, so we are a little more dependant on fossil fuel or nuclear.

I get a kick out of people who claim electic cars are polution free. You have simply relocated the point of emission from your tailpipe to a smokestack at your local electrical power gereration station. Where do you think the electrical power in all those outlets comes from? Aladin Sane

No, it is not possible. MapSend for Magellin, MapSource for Garmin.

quote: Circuit City has the units on sale for about $160... plus the GPS license users fee. What license fee are you talking about? Aladin Sane

When I save my files to the computer, I simply change the file name as I point to the directory the file is to be saved in. I travel quite a bit, and I generate a new GPX file for whatever city I am heading to. I then name the file "whatever the city is".gpx. Aladin Sane

My avitar is a picture of my dog Ally. Ally was recently hit by a car and killed. My cache hunting has dropped way off since I lost my hunting partner. Here is a picture of Ally at a local cache. Aladin Sane

I once found that I was without my GPS when I got back to my truck after a hunt. I had to back track all the way to the cache location, since that was the last place knew I had it. It took much longer to find the gps than it had the cache container. The unit had fallen out of my pocket while I was skidding down a steep hill below the cache. I'm very glad I found it, nobody has logged a visit to that cache since I was there 2/8/03. I'm not sure my wife would have approved the capital expenditure for a new gps. She thinks I'm crazy to begin with, Go figure. Aladin Sane

Here is my list. Iowa 60 Wisconsin 23 Michigan 18 Oklahoma 6 Maryland 4 Louisiana 3 Oregon 3 Ohio 3 Illinois 2 New York 1 Indiana 1 Aladin Sane

quote:Because when you walk with a GPS it measures your distance from a specific point... If you twist and turn it doesn't tell you how far you actually went... It's more of an "as the crow flies" measurement. I'm sorry Fly46, but I think you are mistaken about how the trip odometer on a GPS works. You are correct, that the distance indicated between the unit and the destination is the "crow flys" distance. The distance on the trip odometer indicates the actual "along the route" distance travelled by the unit since the odometer was reset. I have always wondered, if you walk along swinging the unit back and forth, if it logs the actual distance the unit has traveled in space, or just the route distance. I suppose there is some minimum displacement that must take place before a distance is calculated and added to the total. Aladin Sane

I saw a Meridian Gold package at Sam's Club the other day. It includes the GPS, power and data cable, a 64 meg data card and Mapsend Streets and Destinations. All of this for $300. I thought that was a pretty good price.

I spent two years in Valpo before moving home to Iowa. We found Valpo to be a pleasent little town. I hope you enjoy it. I had been out of the state for 17 years, and never thought I would return to live in Iowa. Then, as my daughter approached school age, the draw of family made me look back home. I wanted my daughter to see her grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins more than once or twice a year. Good luck with the relocation Aladin Sane

I got two in one day. They were in Iowa and Michigan, seperated by about 250 miles.

Ok, you are all aware that Jeff Gorodon is Gay! Not that there is anything wrong with that!!

I follow the same path as RK. Once I got GPXView on my pocket PC, I quite using anything else. It makes everything so simple. Aladin Sane