Jamie Z
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Posts posted by Jamie Z
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So, what you are saying is that the map should snap to my home location? Because it never has in my few months of Geocaching...
Me too. I go to the geocaching home page. Page says I'm logged in. Click on Hide and Seek a Cache. search with Google Maps. I get a picture of Green Lake Park. Always have. I've never had the maps center anywhere else in several months of using the new Google Maps.
I thought it was a bit of a pain to have to move it each time, but not a big enough inconvenience to worry about. Should it be snapping to my home location?
I'm using Firefox 3, with security settings set pretty liberal.
How do I get it to center on my home location?
[edit] Just wanted to add: I checked my home location and a map of my neighborhood comes up, with the exact spot of my house marked, so that's all good.
Jamie
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John,
Would the cache require a call from a payphone, or would that just be there for convenience?
I had a cache which utilized a payphone. I can tell you from experience it's a pain in the butt. The payphone maintenance was the hardest part and led to the ultimate demise of the cache.
The first phone I used was removed after a month or two. The next phone was removed. And the next. And the next.
For my cache, the phone was critical, and after having so many phones removed shortly after I made them part of the cache made too much work, and I gave up.
Jamie
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Or just let the unit sit somewhere with a good view of the sky for a few minutes. Eventually it'll figure out where it is. (That menu option will just speed things up a bit.)
It will probably take longer than a few minutes. Some people have reported as much as 15 or 20 minutes wait for a GPS to figure out where it is.
Jamie
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I've you've got 50 finds and 4 DNFs, you're doing better than me.
My successful find percentage is right around 90%, a bit less maybe.
Jamie
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Um. What's wrong with putting a cache there?
Jamie
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Okay, but what does it matter in terms of fish population if these men took the fish and consumed them or took them and disposed of them? The fish are still out of the lake either way.What if I invited you over for dinner. You filled your plate, then went outside and dumped it on the ground? Should it matter whether the food is in your stomach or in my trash?
Oh, yes, that would be terribly rude of me. Downright unethical. In fact, I would say that deliberately wasting food rises to the level of sin. But is it illegal?
When a government spends a lot of money to make a resource available to the public, and someone wastes those resources, they yes, it is illegal.
Haven't heard anything back from the officer...
Jamie
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The same thing for the visitors from Maine. I wonder if these folks read the logs? I think you can usually get an idea of the nature of a cache from the logs. If it's full of TFTC and nothing else, it's probably not a big lot of fun.
Do you really feel like you're drawing the ire of hordes of supporters? I felt like this is a civilized discussion...
Like you, I often pick my caches carefully. I read through the logs, read the cache page, etc... but at the same time, I still like to leave the hunt as a mystery. In the olden days, I liked to simply put the coordinates in my GPS and go. No cache page, no hint, no nothing. I can't really do both.
You're right. This discussion is civilized, but in the past, and especially locally, I've gotten some nasty responses to my view that we don't need a cache at every gas station and Walmart parking lot.
So we need better machinery to sort between 'em. I like to sort caches using GSAK's average log length macro.Interesting caches tend to get interesting logs, logs with actual sentences and paragraphs even.
Me too! I like that macro... but it's less accurate when you go to a new area and have just the last five logs to sort by. It works better when you can build a database over time.
Jamie
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I recently tried my first hide in a huge wilderness park that I discovered while caching. blah...blah...blah... so I guess I'll stick to finding and not hiding.
Did you find the other caches in the park before you decided to hide yours? If you found a cool spot, it's pretty likely that others have also found it. If you want to hide a good cache, research the area a bit.
There are exceptions of course, if a puzzle cache leads to a spot on the park, or if a multi has huge distances between stages, you can't always know that in advance, but in most cases, if you're hiding a cache someplace, it's good etiquette to find the other caches in the area.
So the reviewer denied your cache because it was too close to other caches. Fix it to comply with the guidelines and resubmit it.
Jamie
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We also have a couple of people who drive down a long road with a lot of commercial businesses and place a lamp skirt in each parking lot. Not original or exciting... but if you're really new at this game it might help you gain some confidence.
I tend to think that's not the case. I think new cachers discover geocaching, go for a few hides near their home, and give it up because they get quickly tired of visiting parking lots.
I've been in a couple of situations where people I met learned I was a geocacher. They'd say, "Oh yeah, we've done that a few times" and the proceed to tell me how everything they looked for was behind a dumpster, or in a sewer drain, or in a parking lot so they lost interest.
Not new cachers, but a few weeks ago a well-known couple from Maine took a trip through my area. I was excited when they called and wanted to meet for lunch. When we got to the restaurant he asked me if Memphis had any caches that were not hidden at a gas station. All three caches they'd searched for since they arrived were in a gas station parking lot, one of them in a really questionable area of town. Frankly, that kind of makes me mad that we have visitors come from another part of the country and they have to wade through a bunch of rotten caches in order to find something worth seeing. How would these visitors know ahead of time?
And the environment is such that you can't discuss this type of thing without drawing the ire of hordes of supporters. Who places and who looks for this stuff? I don't get it.
Jamie
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Fish and game are a limited natural resource, and every state and many local governments have agencies who maintain game populations...
Okay, but what does it matter in terms of fish population if these men took the fish and consumed them or took them and disposed of them? The fish are still out of the lake either way.
What if I invited you over for dinner. You filled your plate, then went outside and dumped it on the ground? Should it matter whether the food is in your stomach or in my trash?
I know what you're saying. I'm just as confused about their intentions as anyone. If they have a legitimate explanation, I'd be the first to accept it. I speculate that their reason is laziness however.
I support hunting and fishing, but I have very little use for people who abuse animals and wildlife. There's a difference, and the law acknowledges that. I just hope I hear something about this case. I'd like to see the look on the guys' face when an officer shows up at their door and shows them pictures of them dumping fish. Despite their careful observation, they didn't see me.
Jamie
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Has anyone but me wondered why the fish were not even cleaned? My hypothesis. The vehicle has a trailer hitch on it. The guys went fishing and put the fish in a live well on their boat. They get home after some kind of delay and the fish are all dead and the water in the well is hot. Not wanting to risk the chance of eating spoiled fish or have wives mad that they tossed the fish in the household trash, they go dispose of them. Taking one last look at the fish as they dump them. Only 'crime' looks like a minor illegal dumping.
I guess I left out one piece of information in the OP, that is that the fish were still very much alive when I observed them. I can't say that all of them were alive, but at least two or three were flipping their fins and moving their gills.
The vehicle has out-of-state plates, if that's significant. I don't know.
What I know is that if these guys had gotten out of the vehicle and acted normally, I'd probably have not even paid any attention, nor ever cared or looked at what they tossed. Instead, they were very aware of their surroundings, glancing around, looking up and down the highway. It was this odd behaviour which attracted my attention. In fact, I had some concern while taking the photographs that I might be caught. Whatever they were doing, they knew it was wrong.
Jamie
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Hey Markwell!
I'm with Markwell... the rate of new caches continues to climb (where's Fizzy's charts when we need them?) meaning that the number of interesting and well though-out caches also increases, but my seat of the pants feeling says that the number of toss-and-mark caches outpaces those which were placed with a bit more effort.
The "if you don't like it, don't hunt it" defense if pretty thin. There's no easy way to filter them out. You can read every description and some of the logs (which is what I do sometimes) to get an idea of the cache, but often that's not feasible. Usually, you just have to go and see for yourself.
What's most surprising to me is that there are large numbers of people who enjoy searching for every micro stuck to a guardrail. I don't get it. It doesn't make much sense, but it's not going away and has been with us since very near the inception of geocaching. It's not just the past couple of years.
Jamie
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Please help an ignorant city-slicker. Why is it a crime to dump fish on the side of the road?
If they were taken out of season or without a license, it is a crime.
They were not taken out of season. Whether the guys had a license or not, I don't know. They had the fish in their vehicle, so it's not like they were going to get caught either way.
Disposing of game fish is illegal for several reasons. For one, it's littering, that's obvious, and possibly unhealthy. Do you want people dumping animal carcasses near human populations? In addition, lots of resources, your tax dollars, go toward making fishing opportunities available to the public. Fish and game are a limited natural resource, and every state and many local governments have agencies who maintain game populations, who maintain access to lakes and streams, who issue fishing and hunting licenses and set limits for that game to make sure the resource is available to everyone, including future hunters. That service isn't free, and must be protected.
And... this should be a no-brainer, it's simply unethical. Why would anyone keep a live fish with no intention of utilizing it? What if someone went deer hunting and when they shot their deer, just left it out in the woods?
I don't fish, and I don't hunt. But this really made me angry.
Jamie
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I'm all for increasing the separation to 1/2 mile or more.
It's easy enough to get an exception to this if the geography warrants. We even have a webcam here in Memphis which has two separate caches. You stand in one place, get a photo, log a find. Walk 0.1 down the block, same camera, get a pic, log a find. When I brought this up to the reviewer, he merely shrugged and said all he could do was follow rules.
In another case, I placed a cache closer than 0.1 miles to another. There was a stream in between them, and mine was, um... not at the same elevation.
Jamie
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Sigh. Just one more thing that used to be useful or fun about caching tossed on the scrapheap.
It's the times, I guess. Everything either costs more or you get less and less for your $.
This post is especially ironic.
It wasn't just a couple of years ago that we were all complaining because Buxley's (can we say that yet?) wasn't allowed to scrape GC data. So Groundspeak upgrades the map to Google, which are fantastic by the way. And you're complaining that removing a feature that didn't exist a couple years ago is a sign of the times?
What used to be fun about caching is when they made it possible to load the caches into your GPS so you didn't have to enter them by hand! That was a sign of the times.
I still want the old maps back so we can see archived caches.
And the old log pages back so my PaterQuest logs don't look like an unreadable mess. 
Maybe there's another hobby better suited to you, though I don't know what that is.
Jamie
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No idea why they would dump the fish, what a waste - I wonder if they were out of season for the area, and thought they were being followed?
As a matter of fact, the officer who called me from the scene told me that they were perfectly legal fish. He wondered aloud that even if the fish were acquired illegally, why would they keep them and then throw them on the side of the road.
FWIW, I haven't heard anything back since the last time I posted. I hope I get a call with the outcome, though I'm thinking I won't.
Jamie
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Where's the Date With Kablooey cache?
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I wish people would consider the fact that GPS units are often off 23-80 feet when they are placing their caches. It's not just a matter of whether their cache is in a safe area, it's whether the search area is safe.
Safety is the responsibility of the cache seeker. Why should the cache hider have to tell you to be safe? How about some personal responsibility?
Jamie
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It's not Soup Nazi is it?
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I have a bug open for this already.
Great.
Fortunately, it's not a loss of functionality. It simply means I have to apply a filter to my PQ results when I get them. At least for me, it's not a big deal, though I thought I'd mention it.
Jamie
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I'm not sure what you're asking.
It sounds like you left geocaching for a while and in the time being your caches were archived. All you have to do is make sure that the containers (or parts thereof) are no longer in the location.
Jamie
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Ok, ok... y'all convinced me. I just downloaded Firefox 3.
So far, it looks very much the same... but no IETab? Hm.
[edit] Ok, found IE Tab. I'm happy.
Jamie
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Did you select the "Selected Types" radio button first and then make the individual selections?
There's no "Selected Types" button.
Perhaps a visual would help.
This is how I set my PQ:
Thn I scroll to the bottom and click Submit Information. The screen reloads and this is what I see.
As you can see, all my selections have been lost. And not even "Any Cache Type" is checked.
Jamie
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Uhh, what? 3.0.8 is still Firefox 3, only with bug fixes and security patches.
Besides, being like windows Vista is nothing to be proud of.
Exactly. Then you get my point.
Jamie
Handicap Access
in Website
Posted
By definition, a cache rated 1-star terrain should be wheelchair accessible. Unfortunately, probably most 1-star caches aren't. I've even politely emailed quite a few cache owners with 1-star caches suggesting that they increase the terrain rating of their cache. As far as I can remember, not a single one did so.
You can also check out http://www.handicaching.com/
Jamie