brad.32

Go Sulu Edited to add the link to Sulu, the lemming: http://www.geocaching.com/track/details.aspx?ID=59850 By the time he gets to South Africa it will be winter there and time to migrate north again.

The cache owners could put the ball number designation temporarily as part of the cache description. Anything in a cache can and probably will be taken. These pages would link to your web page describing the game and yours would have a list of the numbered caches. Some issues 1. Cue balls are fairly big and heavy 2. Can someone buy just a cue ball? 3. How are you going to attach an instruction tag to the cue balls?

For most of my bugs, I have planned on the availability of copies of the hitchhiker (the object attached to the tag), so when bug gets lost, I can just attach a new instruction tag to another one and send it off (to the last holder), but don't send the copy tag. There is enough info on the instruction tag that the metal tag is redundant. Sadly, this method can support multiple replacements.

If you're thinking of the students making and releasing their own bugs, which would be better because the kids would be more attached to the bug and its progress, an event would work. The kids would bring their bugs and the people who came to the event would take them. That's essentially how my recent bug launch went at EELBOY's event. Most of the racer bugs were mailed in and I just brought them, then the attendees took them. A downside of the kids being attached to the bugs is that some of them will get lost during their missions and the kids will be disappointed, but that could happen if they are not their personal bugs too.

Avenue A is a company that handles "customer" information. Many web sites write cookies on your computer to store information about your visits. Avenue A uses a web beacon and cookie system to record information on their server about your visits to their client's web sites. I use Spybot too and it found an Avenue A cookie on my computer along with a number of other "spying ones". Spybot didn't report that Avenue A installed anything, other than a cookie. If you allow cookies in your browser, then these things happen. If you don't like cookies, then disable them.

In the time it took me to write my above post, a lot of what I think clearpath was writing about occurred, hmmm.

It's like spam. Some of it is amusing to read, but gets old, sometimes quick, and you learn to mentally, or through other software, filter it out and would rather not have to deal with it. What you can't filter out becomes fluff that you weed through and ignore sometimes to the point of ignoring the forums for weeks at a time. It goes back to the issue of what is an on- or off-topic discussion/post.

Your profile shows you own four and are holding three of those. They should show up in your list of owned TBs and should be listed in the drop-down list at the bottom of the cache logging page. Because you own them, they are not ones you have found.

Instead of the graveyard, a missing bug can now be moved to an unknown, nonphysical, location by the owner ("Mark bug missing"). If it is resurrected, it shouldn't accumulate distance from there.

Joani makes replacement silver-colored tags (with instruction tags) for the bugs she resurrects. I don't know her handle on here, try contacting Marky.

That's a funny one. I printed it out and had it at work. No one understood it. Muggles.

honeychile: This subject comes up monthly if not weekly. I think the most recent time was http://forums.Groundspeak.com/GC/index.php?showtopic=62631 were everybody posted the same links to their favorite type of instruction tag or other threads where this was discussed before. Could there be a pinned thread in the TB forum for the subject of instruction tags for posting the links to and comments about instruction tags? Putting this info in the TB FAQ would be good too, but people may not read that. A pinned thread would be ever present and in the place people look for that info.

The voting for the most creative racer finished over the weekend. The overwhelming winner was bazzle's Sunday Drive (http://www.geocaching.com/track/details.aspx?ID=62493). Congratulations! I hope Sunday Drive and the others that still haven't been placed once yet get moving soon before too many racers make it to Texas and beyond.

In addition to the links bons has, you might look through the following thread, and the threads linked into it for information on other tags that other people have used: http://forums.Groundspeak.com/GC/index.php?showtopic=59108 Those tags are not generated through the GC site either. ... other TB information can be found by doing a search of the TB forum.

If you consider it binary (- 0 and l 1) then the message can be written as a series of octal, for example, numbers: 5161763054367051141063141

Spring training is in March, right? The race will just be getting started then.

It's ... a secret Contact me if you want a hint.

Solved it

"Clue no. 2, January 12, 2004: The text in clue No. 1 is from Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot." It might be: "Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves." ... then again, maybe not.

the first was a prototype.

Woo hoo. Two forum pages.

I've said it before. People do not necessarily follow what the instruction tags say The first weekly update of the map has been made. Three racers in Florida already, except for the small problem that bons and ~del Mar~ pointed out: they skipped Texas. The voting for the most creative: Sunday Drive in the lead with 46% of the vote, followed by Minnesota Gumby with 21%.

Yes, that was a slip. I have some candidates for 't' because "the" is the most common WORD, and begins with 't'. Word freq, in decreasing order: the, of, and, a, in, to, is, etc Letter freq: e, t, a, o, i, n, s, h, etc

I did the frequency breakdown using blocks of dashes and bars of varying length. Have some candidates for 't' (the most common letter in written English). A couple more weeks of this and I'll have it figured out and ready to be after that virtual planetocache. Caching on other planets would be planetocaching, or aerocaching on Mars, since it's not on earth (geo). BTW: There are two coordinate systems approved for use (by the International Astronomical Union) on Mars: planetographic and planetocentric. Planetocentric is also called aerocentric for Mars (because of the Greek: Ares?). Latitude in planetocentric comes from the angle between a point on the surface through the center of the planet to the equator. Planetographic is based on the local perpendicular to the surface and the equator (vertex not usually at the center). USGS and others have switched to using planetocentric. For both longitude 0.0 is at a crater named Airy-0.

The clue you quoted has one period and two commas within it, plus a period at the end. The lengths of the phrases are 297, 78, 96, and 339 dashes and bars (i.e., not counting the punctuation). The only common factor of those numbers is 3, which isn't enough to specify very many letters (only 8), so apparently the sequences that make up the letters (and space) are variable lengths. No? ... doesn't mean I've figured it out though. The next step is to figure out the frequency different sequences. Most common is 'e', etc. I haven't started doing that.