Jamie Z

Man, I thought this new macro would turn the geocaching world upside down. Perhaps it better belongs in "general" for discussion where it's not hidden amongst the geeks. Jamie

Hm... with the little information you've provided, it's hard to even make a guess. Can you tell us where you got the information? Is it from map? From your property deed? Do you know the approximate location? Like the city or state? Based on the cartesian roots, I'd have to guess that's it's some variant of UTM. Jamie

Just in case folks think it's a commercial posting, it's not. BoT created the page several years ago. I have several submissions on there. If I remember right, he created the page to help himself learn page design. Good stuff... Jamie

Wasn't sure if this should go in the general forums or the software forum... although I think it's more a topic of general interest, it does relate to software, and I think the topic is less likely to be dragged through the mud tucked away amongst the geeks. In this post, Lil Devil stated a feeling that has been stated before. Essentially, that so-called good caches tend to have longer logs than so-called lame caches, which tend to have logs of only a few words, or often not even words but abbreviations. His comment sparked an idea, and I went to the GSAK forums to ask Clyde if he would consider adding a feature to GSAK which would sort caches by their average log length. I suggested that only Found It and Didn't Find It logs be counted, since Notes and other logs generally aren't associated with hunting for the cache. Well, not surprisingly, Clyde responded quickly and advised me that this was already possible. At least the tools were there to do it, although I don't have the knowledge. Clyde suggested that a macro could be written to perform this task. Then, he made another post a few hours later with just such a macro! Holy cow! So... here it is. Now you can sort caches by the average length of its logs. Try it on your local caches to see if there is a correlation. Clyde warns: If you want, go into View-->Add/Delete Columns and check User Sort. Now you can even see the results and see how many caches in your area have log which average more than 500 characters. Do any average more than 1000? What about those less-than-100-character caches? You can find the macro here: http://gsak.net/board/index.php?act=Attach...st&id=20343 Just save that web page as a text file and open it from GSAK with Macro-->Run Thanks Clyde.

If the cacher did indeed find the final container, despite not solving the puzzle, then I agree that it's a find. However, the OP indicates that the cache wasn't actually found. Jamie

The best thing to do is email the guy first. Perhaps there is an explanation. You never know. Could be that he logged the wrong cache. Could be that he logged the right cache, but got it mixed up with another one he found the same day. You never know. If in fact the cacher did not find your cache, I would delete the log. But again, very good idea to email the cacher to let him know you are deleting it and why. No reason to get into a pissing match, but you shouldn't leave fraudulent logs on the cache. In fact, it's your duty as a cache owner. (It says so in the guidelines) Jamie

I recommend doing a full reset. I don't have my Explorist in front of me right now, so I'm not sure of the key strokes. I think it's under Setup, you can do Full Restart or something similar. That should fix it. Jamie

The 60 series is a good choice, and the Quest is too. I own a Quest. Think of the 60-series as 2/3 trail, 1/3 auto. The Quest is 1/3 trail, 2/3 auto. The voice prompts of the Quest make it really nice in the car, but it simply isn't as rugged as the 60, although it is water resistant to the same standard. The 60 fits better into your hand and is rubber coated. It lacks voice prompting in the car, though. Either will work. Jamie

As Mopar once said, "Just because it's fun doesn't make it geocaching." Yes, web-camming can be fun. I've done it a few times myself, but geocaching is about finding a container. Since webcams typically don't have a container, they were disallowed on the geocaching site and moved to a more appropriate location. Jamie

Back when I was a Meridian owner, I purchased a neoprene cover for it. This one: After my Meridian was stolen and I purchased a different model GPS, I no longer needed the case and gave it to an un-named local cacher, who promptly lost it and GPS it was holding in a lake. I've purchased another Meridian and was hoping to get another case, but the one above, sold by TheGPSStore, doesn't seem to be available any more. When I try to add it to my cart, it says my cart is empty. Is it just me who can't get the website to work? Does anyone have one of these cases in good condition sitting around that they're not using? Jamie

LD, You just gave me an idea. Jamie

Wow! I'm pretty sure that out of the 20 most recent caches places in my area, not even 19 of them are active. Jamie

What about random? Then every once in a while, they would be listed in alphabetical order, and at other rare times, they would be in order by last created. Thus making everybody happy. Jamie

In general, no... that's pretty normal, although 10 to 100 feet is a little more than usual. The closer you are to the target, the less sure the GPS is as to your location relative to it. Also, if you have a question about your GPS.. it's useful to tell us which kind you're using. There are some models more prone to this than others, and in some cases you can minimize the "effect" by making sure you have the most recent firmware. Jamie

I've done it, but it's been a while. If you're fairly internet savvy, you can find instructions. I think they're on the Yahoo! Meridian Group... Jamie

Sheesh... a lot of mine are DNFs. How were y'all so good in the beginning? Criminal, you're aware that your clip shows your first fifteen months, right? I kinda like that my finds/DNFs cover six states. Jamie

I'm not sure if there has been any recent similar events, but the the two best events I've ever attended were campouts in Louisiana: Louisiana Cacher's Kisatchie Cool Weather Campout Louisiana's Fall Geocaching Campout 2003 Although not necessarily "night" events, they were held over an entire weekend. People came and went at all hours. Aome people just showed up for a few hours, others stayed for three days. I stayed up till almost sunrise a couple of times, sitting around a campfire. Easily the best events I've ever attended. Locally, there are a couple of us who work in the "entertainment" industry, and thus are at our jobs during most weekends, when usual events are held. Back in the day, the local geocaching community accomodated those handful of use who couldn't make it on the weekend, and scheduled events for weeknights, but that hasn't happened in a while. All the recent events have been scheduled on the weekend. Jamie

I posted one of my better police encounters in The Hunt forum a while back. Jamie

They brand and model GPS would be helpful, too. Jamie

I've bought a lot of stuff online... and honestly I can't remember if I've bought from TigerGPS. I think I have. Anyway, don't listen to me, here's the ratings from Price Grabber: http://www.pricegrabber.com/rating_getreview.php/retid=2138 And from resellerratings.com: http://www.resellerratings.com/seller7180.html The get pretty good reviews with a hiccough here and there. I'd say they're ok. Jamie

A search for "RAZR" turned up this thread: http://forums.Groundspeak.com/GC/index.php?showtopic=145794 Jamie

Despite all the great advice here, in practice you'll find that most (a vast majority, perhaps?) people do not log their DNFs. This was determined a while back by a group in the geocaching chat room. Collectively, we determined that we had somewhere around a 85%-90% success rate in finding caches. That is, 10%-15% of our logs were DNFs. Although our sample is rather small (a handful of people), I propose that we represented the geocaching population well. If anything, we were all fairly experienced. Checking the most recent logs posted on Geocaching.com (is that still a feature?) showed that far fewer than 10% of the posted logs were DNFs. The rate was around 2% or 3%. This was a couple of years ago. Although times may have changed, I'd be surprised if more people logged DNFs than did then. Further, if you read through logs, you'll encounted lots of people who say things such as "Took me three tries to find this one," or "We were out here last week and didn't find it..." but those claims are rarely supported by a DNF. I'm not sure if the forum community is more likely to post DNFs, or if it's just those who do post DNFs who reply to threads such as this. There is clearly a discrepency between people who claim to log DNFs and the number of actual DNFs logged. (I'm not suggesting people are lying. I'm saying that one rarely reads a post which says, "I don't log my DNFs" yet that's the overwhelming action.) Jamie

A estimate can be obtained by taking the difference between lines of longitude and multiplying by the cosine of the latitude multiplied by a nautical mile. Jamie

I'm fairly certain the guilty party never knew the box was even locked. Jamie

Deal complete. Cacheoholic sent me a well-packaged, like new Meridian Gold for a great price. Highly recommended. I'd lock this topic, but I can't. Jamie