VeryLost

Obviously I'm hardly an expert in anti-terrorism techniques, but I have to question the wisdom of this "blow it up" approach to dealing with suspicious packages. Someone reports a suspicious box. The bomb squad shows up, attaches some small charges to it, and detonates. What if the box really is a terrorist device, and inside it has a couple of pounds of shock sensitive high explosives? The nice little controlled bang from the bomb squad is suddenly a very serious explosion. Or worse, instead of being loaded with explosives, it has several bottles of some nasty virus in aerosol form. The bomb squad does their thing, and suddenly these safely contained germs are efficiently distributed all over the neighborhood.

Yeah, that can happen when you're unable to comprehend the distinction between the 'sport' and a web board.

Hmm. Intriguing idea. I often cache alone, and without filing a 'flight plan', because I don't really know where I'm going to end up. And I am just a wee bit accident prone. This would probably be a good thing for me to consider as well.

I expect it depends a lot on the cache in question, but there are plenty of caches for which you're quite right. I found several like this on Saturday. It was too flipping cold for me to be enthused about anything except getting back in the car after finding the caches, but there are at least two areas I now plan to go back to when warmer weather comes.

Question - had it been a traditional ammo can, would you still have turned around at that drift?

His 'rudeness', such as it is, was in response to your own, when you wrote "I have no idea what his problem was". The implication of your wording is that the reviewer was at fault in some way. Had you written "I have no idea what the problem was", the effect would have been quite different.

In what way are the parks forcibly taking your money through gate fees? Do rangers come to your house and take you at gunpoint to the park? Hardly. You need only pay the gate fee if you voluntarily choose to enter the park.

I agree that it's probably not a GC problem. My impression is that all email is getting flakier lately, probably due to the sheer volume of spam overloading email servers. As an experiment, you might try setting up an identical notification that goes to an altogether different email service, just to see if it arrives faster. If you'd like a free email account, send me a message with your current email address and I'll send you a gmail invite. There are other free services you could try as well, though I suspect that Google has the best hardware to accounts ratio, and thus should suffer least from spam volume.

You're very naughty. But occasionally amusing

General rule of thumb - it seems cache owners like entertaining, or at least detailed, log files. I have just one cache hidden, and I get a kick out of reading a nice log entry. TNLNSL or other similarly short notes, though commonplace, aren't as much fun to read. Oh, and welcome to your new obsession

You forgot to mention the mutual respect and, dare I say it, love for one another.

Private message sent with some potentially helpful information.

I put every cache I find on my watch list, so I know when it is found next. I have a certain feeling of responsibility for each cache I find, to ensure it can be found again. When the next cacher logs it, I am released of the responsibility. My over-active sense of responsibility annoys me, but I've learned to live with it.

Let's see... I have one cache and... one person watching it. So that's, um 1 over 1, carry the seven, to the square root of pi, um... "1"

In these parts (for values of "these parts" equal to my house and yard) we don't hunt raccoons. We hand feed them marshmallows on the back deck. Every now and again a mama raccoon brings her kits to meet 'Uncle VeryLost, the Marshmallow Guy'. Peanut butter sandwiches are very popular, too.

The cachers in my area very rudely insist on holding events and informal gatherings at ungodly times, like, nine am on a Saturday, when decent people (i.e. me) are still sound asleep. Does that count? But I get even with them. I go out after midnight and grab FTFs on newly published caches

Generous is an understatement. You need to include terms such as "Zoinks!", "Wowie!", and "great googly moogly!" If I found anything like that in a cache I would be dismayed - it would cause a moral conflict in my tiny little brain. On the one hand, that kind of change can buy some pretty nice toys (and believe me, I have a long list of toys I want), but on the other hand I would feel duty bound to redistribute the money in the form of new caches and exceptional trade-up swag.

A "crash" of cachers. As in "crash of rhinos". Meaning no disrespect towards rhinos, you understand

If you mean that part of the cache information is written using characters from the Tolkien novels, odds are that you could simply treat it as a substitution cipher. That is, each character in the encrypted text directly equates to a character in the English language, and you simply have to deduce what the equivalences are. Start by figuring out which symbol appears the most often - it is likely the letter E. This is a pretty common and simple form of encryption, made a bit more complicated by the fact that it's using shapes that aren't familiar to you.

I don't keep a diary, per se. The online logs are more than adequate for tracking purposes, and memorable caches, well, I'll remember those However, I do keep a list of cachers I've met on the trail, which cache and what day I met them. Mostly I do this because I'm awful about remembering names, and I find the sense of community in my local geocaching area to be one aspect of the activity that I enjoy (rather to my surprise - I'm not typically social). So I keep track of who I meet, and what they're up to with caching ("Oh, she placed her first cache - I'm definitely going to have to go find it!").

As a programmer who tinkers in AI related applications sometimes, I'm familiar with the Traveling Salesman problem, and I understand what you're looking for. What I can't do, unfortunately, is give you any useful information about how to solve the problem. Surely there must be mapping software somewhere that lets you plot a whole bunch of points (caches), then calculates the optimum route to hit them all. However, I suspect that a commercial application that could do it might be priced a bit high for the average hobbyist.

I don't think so, or at least if they are, exceptions occur all the time. The DeLorme challenge (in Illinois, at least - I never checked other states) requires that you complete the 1-find-per-page minimum, then contact the listing owner for the final coordinates.

I agree. A couple of times not I've seen discussion of some cache or other that piqued my interest enough to go look at the listing, and it was very obvious from the logs that it was a liars cache. The recurring stories about how groups of people prepare for elaborate cache assaults and travel long distances, only to be angry when they discover the truth baffle me. Would you put that much effort into going to a cache and not look at the previous logs? I wouldn't!

I wasn't aware of the date placed option. That sounds like the best approach, and it will certainly be a LOT easier than anything I had come up with. Thanks! Well, my thinking is that if I'm driving that far, I sure the heck am going to do more than one per region. After all, why not see more of what there is to see in each area? Besides, I'm a numbers freak

Does anyone have any suggestions as to how to go about building a series of PQs to download every cache listing for a specific state? I'm thinking of the DeLorme and similar challenges here, where it would be really handy to set out on an epic road trip with a notebook, and a GSAK database of everything in the state. Then as you reach new target areas, use the GSAK center and filter features to load the GPSr with all the local caches. The GSAK stuff I can manage, but since PQs are based on radius, you would either have a lot of overlap, or lots of missing cache listing. The gaps wouldn't really matter of course, so long as you had enough caches to fulfill the challenge region, but I'm something of a completist The alternate plan is to drive around residential communities as I reach each area looking for unsecured WiFi points, and manually download GPX files as I need them.