Otter and Lemur

I take my GPS and so forth along every single time I fly, and I fly a lot. And every single time, when I get to my destination and unpack, I find a form letter inside my suitcase, cheerfully informing me that my bag had been opened and searched by the TSA. And I know why -- the GPS, camera, etc. in my backpack, inside the suitcase, shows up as a sufficiently suspicious item that they want to look at it. It doesn't bother me and they always put everything back the way they found it. -- Lemur

The complete works of Warren Zevon.

I once submitted two caches back to back and found that the first one had been approved while I was finishing typing in the data for the second one. -- Lemur

Signal is a he?

In every cache I visit, I leave: 3 plastic ninjas 1 high-bounce glow-in-the-dark ball 1 pencil sharpener 1 signature pencil Kids love ninjas and high-bounce balls. I put every cache I visit on a watchlist and I often see the next finder picking up the ball or ninjas. Yes, I buy them in *mass* quantities from http://www.oriental.com, but it doesn't mean that they're not good items. -- Lemur

Try Cheaper Than Dirt. http://www.cheaperthandirt.com/ctd/product...EDCTH90U5SW2CRF http://tinyurl.com/dxjkk

I attended an event cache in southern Vermont close to a month ago. There was a BIG basket of travel bugs. The cache organizers took and logged the handful of bugs that were left at the end, but after doing so, five bugs were still "left" in the cache. No one's logged picking htem up and they certainly didn't get left in the restaurant -- we looked carefully around as we were leaving. Some folks, even those who attend event caches, just can't be bothered to log having bugs. We can only hope that one day they'll drop them off in some caches and people will log them when they find them. -- Lemur

Excellent question. I travel *widely*. If I'm in, say, Bend, Oregon, and there're two caches with bugs I can get to, I'll stop by, take the bugs, leave more than adequate trade bait, and take them back to Vermont -- unless of course they have goals that going to Vermont would frustrate. Most bug owners are tickled pink to see serious miles put on their bugs. -- Lemur

At the risk of getting massively dope-slapped, could we get the coordinates and/or turn that into a virtual?

I believe this is what gets called a travel bug prison -- a place a bug gets stuck for a long time because a cache owner wants to always have bugs in the cache so people who take the time to hunt the cache always find one there. Believe me, I understand what you're talking about. Nonetheless, I think there's a lot to be said for the argument that travel bug hotels should *not* be incredibly hard to get to. If they are, they defeat the purpose of the cache, namely, to keep bugs moving and reaching their goals. Your cache, by its very purpose, acts contrary to that. -- Lemur

I've run (i.e., been the cache owner) five event caches (four regular, one CITO). I've never posted "finds" for them. Recently, I was told "why not? You were there, same as anyone else who attended." I've never really worried about raw count (I avoid most virtuals except for those in my immediate neck of the woods, and I don't much go for locationless caches) but I'm curious about general practice. Would you, if you organized an event cache at, say, a local park, post an "attended" find log for it when it was over? -- Lemur

For what it's worth, several of our bugs sent out with goals achieved them and made it home safely.

What an awesome idea! I'm going to use that if you don't mind. You're welcome to. It's important to be a *frequent* checker of email, though, if you're going to do this. To make it easy on myself, I put the coordinates, and the actual reply message, on a secret web page (that's not linked in anywhere) so if I'm on the road, for business, and get an email, I can quickly bring up the secret web page, copy and paste the message and coordinates into a response, and *presto*. Takes about a second. My wife can back me up if she sees a request before I do, too. I just wish I'd thought of this sooner. The whole take-one-only-if-you-leave-one was a *bad* idea. As another poster said, I simply have to be prepared to restock the cache periodically -- fortunately, I travel a lot and am always bringing bugs home. They generally move on quickly thereafter.

Having traveled widely and seen the don't-take-one-if-you-don't-leave-one rule in force at many travel bug hotels, when I started my own hotel I put the same rule in place. This led to a lot of ill will, most of it directed at me, and in the end, I had to admit I was the one in the wrong. People didn't like the idea of their bugs sitting in my travel bug hotel not moving because *I* wanted to keep my cache stocked with bugs for trading. And they're right -- their bugs should keep moving. So I dropped that rule and now you can come take them *all* if you can help them toward their goal. Since I do travel widely, I often bring home bugs and wind up restocking said travel bug hotel -- and they generally move on again in fairly short order. The only rule that remains on said hotel now is that you have to email us (the wife and I) to get the actual proper coordinates for the travel bug hotel and state that you understand how to log a bug in and out. If you can do that, it demonstrates that you can read instructions and write a simple message, and if you can, I'm more than happy to send you the coordinates. Since I'm one of those obssessive geeks who checks his email seven thousand times a day, people rarely have to wait for very long, usually only an hour or two, before I reply with the coordinates. (The cache is listed as a mystery cache so people don't make the mistake of visiting the posted coordinates.) I can recall only one occasion where I didn't make with the coordinates, and that was when a message came in from someone who, from their message, appeared to be a nine-year-old AOL user: "HEY MAN SEND ME DA CORDINAETS FOR UR CACH3!!11! WTF" I replied asking if he understood how to log travel bugs in and out of the site and got something like this back: "WUT DO U M3AN?!!!? WTF I KNOW HOW 2 TAEK A BUG OUT OF A CAHCE!11!! U VISIT DA CACH3 AND TEH BUG IS THEIR RIGHT?!!!!?!? OMG LOL" So, that user never got sent the coordinates. Since that rule went into effect, not one bug has disappeared from the hotel, unlogged and unaccounted for. Yet, dozens of bugs move through the hotel, so it seems to be working. My only regret is that I didn't think of this solution in the beginning. Would have saved a lot of ill will -- but I was too bent on doing things the way I'd seen other travel bug hotels do 'em. -- Lemur

I apologize if "strange" was the wrong word. No offense was meant. It's just interesting to me from a human-interface design perspective. No matter how reasonable a GUI may be from one person's view, the next person may find it completely confusing. Based on what you and some others have told me recently, I'm thinking that "mark bug missing" needs to be easier to find for bug owners and cache owners, but furthermore, the "are you sure" really needs to be more obvious. -- Lemur

I'd agree with that. It's very strange, but I've been politely sending mail to folks who've had these ghost bugs in their caches and told them how to clean up, should they desire to do so. I often get back responses saying "sure, thanks, glad to do it, all set." Then I glance at the cache page later and the bug is still listed there. I write back and they say "hmmm, don't know what happened." One guy had me checking and rechecking *for* him until we finally worked out that he was clicking on the bug, clicking the "go" button next to "mark bug missing", and then just going on his merry way, never saying "yes" when it asked him "are you sure?" I truly don't know how you design an interface that no one can misunderstand, and I'll be honest, I don't know how people look right at a "are you sure y/n" prompt and just go on to some other page without answering it, but there you have it. People are strange. The reason I posted here in the first place was because I'm going to Omaha, NE next week, and out of the 20 or so bugs listed as being in caches within 15 miles of the Old Market section of town, about 18 of them are missing and long gone. There're logs recently from other recent visitors saying things like "what IS it with Omaha caches? None of these bugs are actually here!" I often see ghost bugs in caches, but can't recall seeing it to quite this degree in a concentrated area before. I guess the fact that I post about these things demonstrates that for me, one of my favorite aspects of geocaching is helping travel bugs reach their goals. Sometimes I get a teeeeeeeny bit frustrated when they disappear or "stay" in caches long after they've actually been taken. -- Lemur

Thank you for the link to the previous discussion, but as my comment beginning this thread said, I am well aware of the option to go to a bug's page and use the drop-down menu to 'mark bug missing'. My point is that bug owners don't know that that option is IN the menu. And if you try to help out, by sending them instructions, you often get back a lot of confusion. I tried saying "to mark your bug missing, and thereby keep it from forever showing up in the listing for that cache that it's actually no longer in, go to your bug's page, click on the drop-down menu (which will say 'recalculate distance' when you first get to the page), choose 'mark bug missing', then click 'go'." That usually fried people's brains. They couldn't comprehend why they needed to do something relating to recalculating distance when all they wanted to do was mark a bug dead. It didn't intuitively click for people, given that some options relating to bug maintenance were buttons and three other things were stuck in a drop-down menu. It's mildly frustrating to know that if you're going to a medium-sized city, like, say, Omaha, Nebraska, 9/10 of the bugs listed as being in caches are not, in fact, there. If it were easier for owners to mark their bugs missing we might have fewer such situations.

A suggestion: change "Mark Bug Missing" from the second entry in the drop-down menu on a bug's page to a button. It seems non-intuitive to a lot of the people I've talked to to have "Mark Bug Missing" be hidden below "Recalculate Distance". Since most people never "recalculate distance", they don't know about the other two options lurking down below. Since people don't know how to mark a bug missing, bugs often stay listed in caches months if not years after they got muggled.

I know bug owners can mark a bug missing -- I made reference to it in my post. And I *have* sent notes to bug owners and cache owners attempting to explain how to mark a bug missing. Generally they write back, EXTREMELY confused, because the method of doing so isn't sufficiently intuitive. A bug owner who edits his own bug with an eye toward marking it missing has to know that "mark bug missing" is lurking in a drop-down menu below "recalculate distance". When you're a bug owner and you don't even know that you CAN mark your bug missing, and you go to the bug page and look around for "mark bug missing", you generally don't think to look in a drop-down menu that currently lists "recalculate distance". It's sad that folks won't open the menu to see if it's there, but it's true. I've had plenty of people write back and say "I don't SEE an option for 'mark bug missing'." Cache owners get the same screen and the same ability to mark bugs missing, but since they're not expecting to be able to clean up missing bugs, they never even go looking for it. I think the user interface could be made a little less obfuscatory. Unfortunately, no matter how easy it is for the user to use there will always be people who don't see a need to mark a long-gone bug missing and there's nothing we can do about that.

A source of some irritation to me: I visit a cache's page and see that it allegedly contains a TB. However, there are several consecutive entries going "no sign of the TB". Idly, I click on the TB and see that it was logged into said cache nine months earlier. I go back to the cache and see dozens of finds since that date. Many reference "no sign of the TB." The conclusion: the bug got picked up, either by a muggle or by someone who didn't know how to log the bug or thought it would make a nice souvenir. Nothing new there. But here's the rub: both the bug owner and the cache owner are active, current cachers, and neither knows that you can edit a bug and mark it "missing". I've even seen a few cache owners add notes to their cache pages saying "The BUG IS GONE!" in hopes people will stop asking them about it. I know cache owners haven't always had the ability to 'evict' missing bugs from their caches, but it seems that a tiny handful of people seem to know that it's there now. I wish that bug owners had a button instead of the current drop-down menu -- if they don't want to 'recalculate distance' or 'move bug to last location', they may never notice the third option, 'mark bug missing'. It'd also be nice if there was some way to make cache owners more aware that they can boot long-absent bugs. -- Lemur

Ah, thank Heavens there was a rational reason for that. It was really confusing.

Our profile shows that we've found 378 caches. When we use the "List caches you own or have found" link we get 375. Including, of course, temporarily inactive caches *and* permanently archived caches. We've verified that caches we found a year or so ago that have been permanently archived *do* show up in that list. The list of 375 even includes a few caches we found, then later on adopted. Any idea why the three-cache difference? It's obviously not the most important thing to worry about, but I'm just curious.

Dumb question time: When using GSAK to export waypoints to a Garmin MPS file, I am allowed to choose symbols for "traditional micro cache" and also "micro cache". Anyone know the difference? Is a "traditional micro" a normal cache that happens to use a micro container and a "micro cache" *any* cache that might happen to use a micro container?

No, they didn't. The fact that travel bugs were in the cache was never mentioned at any point as a reason to ask me to take the cache. In fact, the police, the LAAPD and LAPD, had already asked me to take the cache with me before the FBI showed up, and it was the FBI who actually found the travel bugs vaguely amusing in a "hey, that's sort of neat" kind of way. I'm actually completely at a loss as to where you got the idea that the travel bugs contributed to the police request to archive the cache. -- Lemur

The legendary Happy & Skippy have the Mickey TB -- you can contact them if you want it. (I mailed it, and two others, to them.) Thank you for your kind words. -- Lemur