Doctroid

I'm still a little irritated and a lot baffled over GC28PQ5, a golden ammo can in a hedgerow, D1.5. There are 93 finds as of right now, and 1 DNF. Mine. Last April, so, no, no backdated DNFs rolling in after mine. I spent 20 minutes or so searching the very small area where it could have been and came up with nothing. And then I went on a little further to GC1Y0G3, a black regular size cache in the same hedgerow, and found it within seconds of arriving at GZ. But then, ISAG.

I have a 1392 day slump. Between my first find and my second.

My GSAK-computed centroid location is over 86 kilometres from my specified home location (which is within a kilometre of my actual home location). My back-of-the-envelope center-of-farthest-north-south-east-west rectangle location is about 180 miles from my home. Hmm, now that I've figured out that location, I have to fight the urge to go hide a cache there. Of course you only need one find a long way from home to mess up the rectangle. The centroid of all my finds would be closer (but I don't run Windows, hence no GSAK) but I do have a bunch of finds in Virginia due to my going there for work.

No rule says a finder has to use the coordinates to find the cache, or has to solve the puzzle to find a puzzle cache. For that matter there are no rules regarding FTF. If you as CO want to acknowledge a find, whether FTF or FTSP* or FTFAFFMAWS,** it's up to you. I'd say they were indeed FTF, but you can disagree. *First To Solve the Puzzle **First To Find After the First Full Moon After the Winter Solstice

Maybe there should be? (Don't look at me; I don't have that level of programming skill.) Actually there is: http://www.benchmarking.com/ Doesn't look like much fun, though!

And the hoops they make you jump through to log a benchmark is one of the best reasons not to as far as I'm concerned. I'm sure some people enjoy spending 20 minutes describing each benchmark in meticulous detail, and I'm happy someone's doing it, but I'm not much interested in logging much more than "I found it, here are my coords, here are a couple pictures, oh and maybe here's something I thought was interesting about the find" myself. Some Waymarking categories definitely have hoops I find annoying (war memorials wanting photos where you can read every word AND the description to contain a transcription of the entire memorial as well annoyed me enough to caused me to temporarily stop Waymarking at all). But the Benchmark category doesn't seem to be one of those. YMMV. I've logged a few benchmarks at Waymarking myself, and decided it was more trouble than I wanted to go through. Especially after a moderator (or whatever term they use there is) wrote to me to complain my description wasn't detailed enough.

And the hoops they make you jump through to log a benchmark is one of the best reasons not to as far as I'm concerned. I'm sure some people enjoy spending 20 minutes describing each benchmark in meticulous detail, and I'm happy someone's doing it, but I'm not much interested in logging much more than "I found it, here are my coords, here are a couple pictures, oh and maybe here's something I thought was interesting about the find" myself.

That is a list of Geocachers who have found and logged benchmarks on Gc.com and/or the NGS. Not all of them, though. I'm not listed.

Where are they logging them, and what database are they using?

Sorry, but it doesn't say anything to me. What does it say to you? Who are these 795 geocachers?

Good idea, you should post it on the feedback site, all my bug reports used up my votes. Someone did that. It got 213 votes. Groundspeak said, "Naah, don't think we'll bother." http://feedback.geocaching.com/forums/75775-geocaching-com/suggestions/1580345-move-the-find-a-benchmark-back-to-left-side-of-m?ref=title

Worst parking lot EVAR.

There's no way that I'm aware of. I created a Bookmark List that holds all the caches I've DNFed and actually want to look for again. There are some that in my estimation aren't worth the return trip. --Larry Of course you can make a pocket query from that bookmark list. You also can get a listing of your DNFs, but turning that into a bookmark list appears to require going through it manually. And of course the listing covers all your DNF logs, including on caches you found on another try. And ones that are archived.

I'd like to see more recycling... that is, I've seen more than enough badly-maintained caches with soggy swag and moldy logbooks sitting in great locations. Caches like those ought to be archived, and the locations recycled. If the original cache was a particularly popular or memorable one in its day, I think it's appropriate (though not necessary) for the new cache to be explicitly a tribute to the old.

I concern myself with numbers little enough that this isn't really relevant to me — but the discussion over in the Geocaching vs. Waymarking thread indicates there are a lot of people who'd me more interested in Waymarking if they got smileys for it. If Groundspeak wanted to promote benchmarking they could recognize them as the one form of virtual cache currently permitted and give smiley credits for benchmarks. I'm guessing that would make a big uptick in the benchmarking numbers. On the other hand, if Groundspeak wanted to promote benchmarking, they wouldn't relegate it to the smallest, most un-findable corner of their user interface, would they?

SOME people would. (NTTAWWT)

I like finding hidden things. I like solving puzzles. I appreciate creativity. I find there's more of all three in geocaching — especially non-virtual caching — than in Waymarking. I do like finding benchmarks. They're often hidden, if not intentionally; finding the location from the description often amounts to solving a puzzle, again not an intentional one; and... well, no, not much creativity to appreciate, but two out of three's not bad. I log benchmarks on the geocaching site. I've logged some on Waymarking but there's a lot more fuss and bother in what they want you to log for benchmarks than there is here. Which is fine if your aim is to meticulously document all known benchmarks, but I'm not so much interested in that as in just saying, hey, found it!

Did I do it right?

OK, I can't resist posting this even though it was taken not in the course of geocaching but of another hobby beginning with "ge". This is the gravestone of my great great great great grandmother Jane Aldrich (not that you can read it probably), in White Store, NY. It was evening when I took the picture but nowhere near as dark as it looks from the photo, and I didn't notice the spiders until I had the film processed and saw the picture. Just posting a link for the protection of the arachnophobic.

Nice work! Good site design. "Confession of a Lazy Cacher" = best found log EVAR. Recently. Though I will point out you can get smartphone mapping apps that can use downloadable topo maps. I look forward to more.

But for others it does, and for those people using DNFs in any other way does convey wrong information. No. "DNF" means "Did not find", which is accurate. Any additional meaning one assigns to that is mere inference, and it's folly to infer when you could read the log and know. Yes. You're assuming. And that's exactly what it does mean. The question is what does "looking for it" entail, and that will vary from one cacher to another and from one situation to another. Does it start when you arrive at GZ? When you're 100 yards away? When you get out of your car and start hiking? When you start looking for a place to park? When you tell your GPSr to start navigating to the cache site? "deliberately misleading"? Quite an accusation. And indeed, I do use the distinction for something of value to me, when deciding what to log: DNF means I did not find it (for any of a number of reasons including problems with getting to GZ in the first place for reasons that may be relevant to other cachers, as in the example being discussed here) while note means I'm saying something about the cache without asserting anything about finding or failing to find it. But again, since not everyone uses DNF and note the same way I do, it's best not to make assumptions but to read the logs.

Besides that, as a fan of Calvin and Hobbes, I'm offended when people portray Calvin as the type who would piss on something he doesn't like — an act utterly outside anything Calvin would do. Such people brand themselves as not only crude but ignorant of the source material. My offense doesn't usually rise to the level where I feel I need to act upon it, but I generally do mentally file such people as ones to ignore.

Crap, I was looking at May. So how about those blank logs, eh?

It's a good thing power trails are not a required activity, isn't it? Power trails make no sense whatsoever to me, either, and I don't think you'd have any trouble finding lots of other geocachers who feel likewise. Yet I don't see that power trails harm us in any significant way. We can ignore them.

Locking pool??? (ibtl) Wow, that's a lot of llama spit.