The Rat

GC.com has continually improved its site. I have been thoroughly impressed with its user-centric approach. My recent favorite change is the addition of Unknown/Puzzle caches as a separate type. I can now generate a Pocket Query consisting entirely of U/P's. I have no more of these left unfound within 10 miles and the farthest away of the 50 closest is 61.8 miles. The $30 annual fee is the best money I've ever spent on entertainment.

:-) :-) Me, too! I wish whoever is responsible for latitude and longitude lines (some U.N. agency?) would smooth them out! Except maybe for the Prime Meridian and the Equator; you want to notice when you go over an important line like that. :-) Yeah, it would be easy to get a foot caught up in the crossed lines. Wouldn't be too bad in areas where a lot of people go by, but a latitude/longitude intersection in the middle of nowhere--well, you could be stuck there for days before anyone came by to help! Patty You guys clearly have too much time on your hands.

There was a large group cache today going for The Two Towers. We got a smidgen of rain at stage 1 and had to bolt for cover, but the weather turned out to be well-suited all in all. It was amazing how fast the coordinates appeared for the later stages. One member at stage 2 had the puzzle for the next stage completed before we even got back to the cars. It was nice to finally put faces with some of the names I've seen - WeBeDnD, boulter, and all the rest. Someone should have thought to get an event cache approved. There was a big enough crowd.

It's nice to see the forums back. There's a ton of new puzzle caches out there. It seems us geopuzzlers are beginning to have an impact.

quote:Originally posted by boulter: quote:Originally posted by The Rat:As of yesterday 23 people (excluding me and the approvers) had looked at the cache but only one person was watching it. That would be me watching it! I did that because I knew you'd be watching the audit trail and I didn't want to jack up my numbers too much checking for new logs. :-) Well, now you've got company. Three watching and 42 who've looked at it. I suspect the people watching are some of those who've solved it and just want to see who else does and how long it takes them. Interestingly, the ones who've solved and logged this one are not necessarily the same folks who usually solve the hard puzzles quickly. That's because this one doesn't require the same skill set as most of my others. C'mon, TeamJiffy, I can see you're trying hard from the audit trail, but your reputation as the leaders of the South Bay Brain Trust is dimming on this one. So how was the picnic? My new computer and router arrived yesterday, so I had to set up everything. It took more than all day, but it seems to be working.

quote:Originally posted by boulter:At the time I was working one of The Rat's caches and it occurred to me that it would be a perfect test of all these things. I hadn't finished solving it myself yet.... I asked him the standard stuff first, then I gave him this test. He got flustered pretty quickly and had trouble even with the easier parts of the puzzle. He spent about 15 minutes staring at it, looking pretty stupified the whole time. Giving up at the end of the interview, he took the puzzle with him when he left and said he would try to get back to me with a solution. I didn't hear from him again and we decided not to hire him. Later, when I discovered the solution to the puzzle, I felt kinda bad that I had done that to him. I don't know whether to feel honored or embarrassed. I know how nerve-wracking a job interview can be anyway, and I never intended to add to a candidate's misery. I hope that if the successful candidate did well on the puzzle he/she also does well on the job. Otherwise, my cache would only serve to identify people who purport to be intelligent while in fact being useless. Speaking of my puzzle caches, I have a new one out: Sleb Slob. I strongly suspect that if you had handed that unsuccessful candidate the printout from this new cache and the two of you had looked at it together, you would have solved it. You have to think about why that is so.... I made it Members Only just for the fun of seeing the audit trail. As of yesterday 23 people (excluding me and the approvers) had looked at the cache but only one person was watching it. Fizzymagic was the first to look at it after the approval, and he only looked once. That tells me he solved it as soon as he saw it and didn't need to look again. This is an amusing sidelight. I'll take it off Members Only status in a couple of weeks or so, so that kablooey and the other anti-monopolists or impecunious among you can log it.

quote:Originally posted by Lamneth:It looks like Kablooey hit 1000 yesterday, and Fizzymagic is just 1 away from the big 1000. Congratulations guys! Why, 2K !!

quote:Originally posted by nostrada:Rat, please hang in! ... Ok, Mr. Rat, you take care! Nostrada All right, I'm a little better now. My cache just got unarchived after I sent a whiney/blistering/articulate and thoughtful (depending on the reader's point of view) email to the authorities what be. It goes to show that you can get results sometimes if you have a good reason. Rules may not really be meant to be broken, but they can be bent on occasion. My other rants still apply. I'll just take my Ritalin and go lie down now.

quote:Originally posted by nostrada:Rat, please hang in! ... Ok, Mr. Rat, you take care! Nostrada All right, I'm a little better now. My cache just got unarchived after I sent a whiney/blistering/articulate and thoughtful (depending on the reader's point of view) email to the authorities what be. It goes to show that you can get results sometimes if you have a good reason. Rules may not really be meant to be broken, but they can be bent on occasion. My other rants still apply. I'll just take my Ritalin and go lie down now.

quote:Originally posted by Ron Streeter:. I checked Dan Miller's statistics page yesterday and it wouldn't *come up*. Stat page web host is dead. All of our operations will cease completely on 8/15/2003. InsideCorner is where Dan had his stats info stored. If, for some reason, Dan doesn't get the data up and running somewhere else, maybe it's time for those computer geeks who have given us some other great programs to consider a *mining operation* on Jeremy's database to provide a new view of the statistics. After all, how will we know which of the bay area cachers hits 2,000 first!? Boy, things are falling apart. Is this due to Groundspeak trying to monopolize the data and features, or to the inability of Dan to keep up with things? I guess I squeezed in just under the wire - I hit spot number 100 in California last weekend, one of my few remaining goals in this sport. Or was it #10 or 50? No one can verify that can they? I tell you, there are more and more reasons to quit this timesink of a hobby. Caches aren't getting approved; the ones that are seem to be just copies of the ones that were there before and went missing or got archived. Today one of my caches was involuntarily archived because I had changed it to virtual to avoid security problems. Why would anybody think that made any difference? It's gotten to be political. Geocaching is proliferating like mad among the general public now, but that makes it less appealing to "old-timers" (like me - one year exactly) who enjoy doing something a little different. It reminds me of computer gaming. 8 or 10 years ago games were written by and for intelligent adults (geeky, maybe, but adults) because only such people had computers and could master operating system commands, etc. Games had interesting story lines, witty dialogue, and no graphics. They usually required skill or intelligence of some kind to master. Now they're just videos of violence (fights, crashes) or scantily clad women (or pubescent fantasies of what women should look like) and all the programming is in making the graphics look more shocking. Preteens with the IQ of a rock can master them because they require only hand-eye coordination. It's time to go back to cryptanalysis. Even that is being dumbed down by all the automatic solvers being posted online. Sigh.

quote:Originally posted by beckerbuns: discussions in the IRC channel (irc.slashnet.org #geocache) So how does one access this IRC channel? I tried pasting this URL into my browser (with and without the #geocache) and got a Connection Refused message. Is this because of my security settings? Is there some registration required?

quote:Originally posted by tatoeba: http://www.Legendeo.org a geocaching mystery You found it first. You will be the one. The Vox must be stopped. Read the parchment, gather a team of mighty companions and save our Time. I gave you one Soumak. Don't loose it or give it to anyone under any circumstances. 7 soumaks and the Time no more will be. Emeos. Sorry, tatoeba, I cannot recommend any cache that has the dreaded "lose - loose" misuse. The Word Police are unforgiving, even to those whose name is Japanese ("For example").

I just read the announcement regarding cookies from Jeremy, and the FAQs on loug out problems, and I declare both to be mistaken at best. I am constantly logged out several times during a single session, even with cookies on (they always are) and the Remember Me box checked. My firewall is not an issue. If it were blocking cookies, I wouldn't be logged back in without going to the log in page (which also happens). I just sent this email: Grrr, I don't know what you changed, but I keep getting logged out, or treated as though I were logged out, even after logging in and after clicking Remember me. This hppens even in the same session. I just tried to email someone who had contacted me using the geocaching.com E-mail a User page. Since he had not left his e-mail address, I replied the same way. I had already logged in twice during this session. The message in the upper right showed me as logged in. I typed my nice long message in the window, clicked send, and the page reverted to the login page, telling me I had to log in to email a user. The indicator then said I was not logged in. I immediately clicked the back arrow to see if I could retireve my message before it got dumped from the buffer, but it was gone. It also showed me as logged in again, even though I had not done so the third time. This really, really makes me mad. I lost at least 20 minutes of work because of this, and this is just one of many such problems. My browser is set to save cookies. It doesn't happen just with email - although that's the worst due to the losing of the text. It happens also with My Cache Page, the Forums (not so often there), the filtered caches search screen, etc. It sometimes goes a week with no problem, then I'll have to log in three or four times in a single session, sometimes as little as two or three minutes apart. Why? Is it going to be fixed? I know of a lot of other users having the same problem. This must be due to the recent improvements, because it never happened before. --- This new problem has more than undone all the good the new changes have done. It must be fixed.

Only two posts in four days - including a weekend. Where is everybody? I'm guessing there are a bunch of folks traveling. The weather has been hot, but not that hot. There should be a lot of cache finding going on out there. Let's hear from the newer geocachers - how did you get interested in this hobby? What are your most & least favorite caches - and why?

Happy Birthday, Joani. Thanks to Marky for organizing another event cache. I enjoyed talking to some people I knew only by their geocaching NOM, and some I knew already, but hadn't had a chance to chat with so much before now.

I was unable to get on the website except sporadically this weekend due to Server Too Busy errors. It took hours (literally) to do what usually takes minutes. This isn't the first time this has happened and it seems to be getting worse on weekends. I guess it is a sign of the growing popularity of geocaching, but it is a pain. I know I'm not alone in this, but I haven't seen anything in the forums. Jeremy, are you in need of another server? A mirror site? Greater bandwidth? Is this being fixed? I'm just looking for a sign that relief is in sight. BTW, thanks for the lead on Utopia. It has some nice features, including the ignore list, but it also has its limitations (e.g., can't handle GPXSpinner gpx files, difficulty level not shown). What we really need is one really good application that does everything instead of half a dozen different aps that do different things.

quote:Originally posted by boulter: Did you guys use the Fast Forward or should I plan on doing the road block? I did the first waypoint this weekend and planning to move on to the next soon as this cache is creeping up on my closest caches. Jeff We both did the Roadblock and both of us got the same numbers, one of which turned out to be wrong. We aren't sure if the instructions are wrong, or we both missed something - there may be a challenge of some kind. GeoROCKS warned me one of my coordinates was off, so I went back to the FF and checked it that way. PhilippeGPS checked his set through the Internet, and the numbers we came up with that way meshed, although at that point we weren't working together. We discovered this later, after we had each found the next Pit Stop without difficulty. The FF is the sure thing - if it's there. Sometimes it disappears.

PhilippeGPS and I found Amazing Race today, so it is still out there. I'd post the URL, but I can't get onto the website to look it up due to Server Too Busy errors. Jeremy needs another server or greater bandwidth. It is a challenge, and I think underrated in difficulty level, but it takes you to some wonderful spots, most of which I hadn't been to before. I suggest doing it with at least one other geocacher. Two sets of eyes are definitely useful

You've all heard the old saying, Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than open your mouth and remove all doubt. After posting my clueless inquiry about the "event cache" on Montebello Road (3X, like a real klutz) I read TeamJiffy's log and realized it was that Magellan Treasure Hunt thing. A week or so ago my wife had seen an article and told me about it, but I hadn't heard anything before. I checked out the website mentioned in the article but after an hour I had learned only about subsidaries of a French defense contractor but nothing about the so-called treasure hunt. The link on the front of their website about the treasure hunt only takes you to a general About the Company kind of page. The history of the company and its financial connections was interesting reading, but after an hour I gave up with a DNF. Then I read in the Forum that Pepper had found the cache, so I figured that was it. I didn't realized there was more than one of these things. After reading the forum posts from yesterday I went back to the Magellan website and finally realized I had to click on the log in page to find out anything about this. I did that, and then got the story on the treasure hunt. Considering I had already registered with Magellan as a geocacher with my real email address when I bought my SporTrak Pro, you'd think they would have at least sent out an informational email to their own customer base when they started this so-called promotion. Then when I read the hints and logs for this latest hide, I couldn't believe how poorly executed it was. Posting four worthless hints then the coordinates just led to a mass dash up a windy, dangerous road with no parking at top except for the winery - and on a weekday. As one of the logs said, it's enough to make you want to switch back to Garmin. Clueless I may be, but this is one I'm glad I missed, even though I probably could have had the FTF if I'd been able to navigate their website.

Sorry about the repeats - my browser help showing a window that said my post wasn't going through, then it wouldn't let me delete the last two. I'll only clicked post now on this one once, even if it crashes as unsuccessful.

quote:Originally posted by georgeandmary:We knew our chances were very slim. We tried anyway. The one funny part was that our maps never showed a connection to montebello road so we didn't actually know which way to get to the cache area. I don't get what this is all about. I live about as close to Montebello Road as any cacher around. Was there an event cache there today? I had originally scheduled a leave day for work today, but I figured my wife would just rope me into some honeydew list thing, so I hid out at work. If I'd known there was an event cache, I'd have gone. But I don't see one on my Nearest To list.

quote:Originally posted by georgeandmary:We knew our chances were very slim. We tried anyway. The one funny part was that our maps never showed a connection to montebello road so we didn't actually know which way to get to the cache area. I don't get what this is all about. I live about as close to Montebello Road as any cacher around. Was there an event cache there today? I had originally scheduled a leave day for work today, but I figured my wife would just rope me into some honeydew list thing, so I hid out at work. If I'd known there was an event cache, I'd have gone. But I don't see one on my Nearest To list.

quote:Originally posted by georgeandmary:We knew our chances were very slim. We tried anyway. The one funny part was that our maps never showed a connection to montebello road so we didn't actually know which way to get to the cache area. I don't get what this is all about. I live about as close to Montebello Road as any cacher around. Was there an event cache there today? I had originally scheduled a leave day for work today, but I figured my wife would just rope me into some honeydew list thing, so I hid out at work. If I'd known there was an event cache, I'd have gone. But I don't see one on my Nearest To list.

As long as we're doing wish lists, could we have a check box to permanently exclude unfound caches that we just don't want to bother with? Some people just don't like puzzle caches, caches by a particular hider, ivy patches, etc. Rather than try to have a filter option on every conceivable variable shown, why not just let the user click a box on those he doesn't want and it won't show up on his Nearest To list any more. I'm sick of having to page through those to get to the stuff I'm really interested in.

quote:Originally posted by boulter: Why was placed in the middle of a company's private property anyway? Even though we weren't approached by security when we tried it, we thought we would be any minute. Jeff It seemed like a good idea at the time. ... Maybe half of the caches in the South Bay are on private property and almost all of those are without the knowledge or permission of the property owner. Urban Assault, anyone? I have one other, but the head of security there knows about it and has okayed it. Anyway, the cache page is working again, and I've logged a note there, so there is no need to clog this board over this. Feel free to log comments on the cache page.