The Alethiometrists

Got my invoice this morning; payment sent. Thanks. I thought I had seen a similar coin to this before but, as it turns out, it was the exact same coin and I even have one in antique silver that I got from CoinsAndPins back in August of 2007. At that time, this coin was being offered in Silver and Gold versions. I'm looking forward to the arrival of my Pewter (Nickel?) version. PS - I do have a question about the icon. I've seen two icon versions: one on coincodes.com and another on the GC.com coin pages... Red Poppy (on coincodes.com) Red Remembrance Poppies (on GC.com) All the activated Canadian Red Poppy Spy coins that I've seen have the Red Remembrance Poppy icon at the top of their pages. I always thought this coin was supposed to have the Red Poppy icon as seen on coincodes.com, but I do remember there having been some sort of controversy over the use of the poppy symbol? Yes, I think there was. The Remembrance Poppy icon is the one that shows up. I didn't have anything to do with that. That's CoinsandPins fault. There were a couple of people who thought that we were showing disrespect for the Poppy Remembrance coin, but I assure you, no disrespect was intended. Merely amused chagrin that Americans inability to use Google when they come across something different from our generally boring coinage.

You can buy those quarters in rolls from the local drugstore.... I actually made a rememberance day cache and stuck some inside as swag annoying internet... I already tried to post this response a minute ago... trying again.... For Alethiometrist it would be difficult for her to get a roll of quarters from the local drugstore because she is in the States. She and I have arranged an exchange so that she can have one. Thanks, Brendah! I'm looking forward to getting this quarter so I can see it in person. I wish in the US, we could buy rolls of a particular quarter, since I also collect state quarters, but the banks are not so accomodating here.

Great story! Glad you enjoyed them! Someday, I'd like to get one of the poppy quarters this coin was based on. I'll trade one of my coins for one. Thanks, jenna

Would anyone like to buy one of our Canadian Red Poppy Spy Coins? They were made in honor of this auspicious event in American intelligence history. http://www.cbc.ca/news/story/2007/05/07/te...py-quarter.html You can see a picture of the coins here: http://img.geocaching.com/track/da7dbdb2-4...14e6514adfd.jpg They are trackable and have their own icon. Pewter coins are $9 plus $2 shipping to Canada. Silver coins are $11 plus $2 shipping to Canada. I can ship up to 2 coins for that price. You can email me at chirpxl at gmail.com Thanks! jenna

Thanks! When I said Pewter, though, I should have said "Nickel" finish. Sorry. I like what I see in the picture above, which finish is that? Um, I'm not really sure, as this is a CoinsandPins image, but they look like the nickel finish. The silver are shinier on the inside, do not have the contrast on the interior, like the nickel do.

Thanks! When I said Pewter, though, I should have said "Nickel" finish. Sorry.

Would anyone like to buy one of our Canadian Red Poppy Spy Coins? They were made in honor of this auspicious event in American intelligence history. http://www.cbc.ca/news/story/2007/05/07/te...py-quarter.html I would like to donate one to the International Spy Museum, if they'd have one. : ) You can see a picture of the coins here: They are trackable and have their own icon. Pewter coins are $9 plus $2 shipping. Silver coins are $11 plus $2 shipping. You can email me at chirpxl at gmail.com Thanks!

Wow - I'd uninstalled Google Earth because the early beta version I had crashed my machine in particularly scary ways (like, it would reboot with preferences set for an early 90s version of Windows) - but now Google Earth seems to be running fine, and this feature is quite cool. I wish it didn't just give the GC #s for the caches, since the regular listings on the TB page give the names, not the GC #s, and I wish the country borders weren't the same color as the track (I had to turn the borders off), but, on the whole, it's cooler than the old tracking map. Thanks for motivating me to re-install Google Earth and check it out!

Trackables aren't nearly as much fund without the tracking map to give you a visual snapshot of where they've been and how they've moved. Until the link disappeared, I'd assumed they were coming back. I hope they still are.

BTW, bon voyage, Kiwis! We'll miss you Up Over here! jenna and ken

Be assured that I did not mean this coin to offend anyone, especially veterans and remembered war dead, but to poke fun of American "intelligence" in the field. And maybe there would be fewer wars and war dead to be remembered if we had more intelligent intelligence. Or at least someone willing to ask intelligent questions before they put everyone on high alert. I hope people, esp. Canadians, think it's a fun coin and not an rude coin! jenna The Alethiometrists

Accidentally posted twice. Sorry!

I'm not an extreme anti-numbers person, and I didn't intend this thread to be a debate on different approaches to caching. For me, milestones have always been like birthdays - an excuse for a celebration of some kind - but having more of them doesn't make you a better person, necessarily. We almost always plan a special cache for our 100 milestones, and around here (Raleigh-Durham area of North Carolina) we do special caches and events for people's 1 K milestones. I've actually been involved in organizing several of those 1 Ks, and enjoyed our own. I just think the thing's gone too far, that we've been sliding down a slippery slope - but, again, I don't want this thread to be about that. I started this thread because I met some folks at GW5 who don't post finds, to avoid the numbers game, and that appealed to me, but it presents a few problems. Some of those have already been addressed. In addition to those, there's the fact that we often do challenging hiking caches, multis, and puzzles that don't get a lot of finds, and I know (as an owner of some such caches) that it's good to update the last-found date on those. Also, I do like having the ability to easily check the record of my own finds. So, I went to the "Contact Groundspeak" area of GC-dot-com, and came across the suggestion of posting to the forums. I hardly ever post anymore, but I thought this would be a good suggestion that might get a few cheapskates like me to upgrade to a premium membership. For the record, I have nothing against people who play the numbers game. Some of my best friends are numbers people. I've just been thinking about opting out. And if I could take the numbers off my profile, I would remove my milestones' listing as well, and keep that somewhere private. I might instead list several of those on a favorites list, since I do want to call attention to some of those cool caches.

I'm a basic member and have been for years. Since I don't do pocket queries, I don't really have a use for a premium membership, but I would gladly pony up the fee if there was a way NOT to display my finds numbers on either my profile page or my logs. After some of the things I've seen and heard, I've been tempted to stop logging finds, but I know that I appreciate people logging finds on my own caches, and I have no problem with personally having a record - I just don't want any part of the numbers game. If I could just disable the display, I'd gladly do it. So, Groundspeak, here's one user who'd appreciate that service, and since I met folks at GW5 who don't log finds at all to avoid the numbers game, I suspect I'm not the only one.

So, did any of you in the NJ-PA-NY area get to the screening this past weekend? How'd it go?

"Alias" often reminds me of geocaching - especially that episode where Sydney and Dixon were searching for that underground Rambaldi cache - they even had GPS receivers. But GPS has come up often on that show. 'Course, you should know that "Lost" is from the same production company - JJ Abrams "Bad Robot" productions, and "Lost" often brings to mind geocaching, as well. If Abrams isn't a cacher, he should be. Anyway, speaking of "Alias," there is already an excellent "Alias" cache out there, which I highly recommend: Rambaldi Mystery ...check it out!

We already have a "Lost"-themed cache in the field: Le Territoire Foncé (GCQWNY). We'd be happy to work it into the game.

FYI - "Adventures in Geocaching" is only half-an-hour long, and is being shown as one of three documentary shorts. This was the same way it was screened in Los Angeles, and it seemed to work out well for the geocachers who attended, based on their comments on the USC event cache page (see link above).

This will be the first general-audience showing of the film, which has only been screened twice before, both times in connection with Geocaching events, the first at the University of Southern California, where the film was produced, the second at Duke University, where some cachers who helped the director work (present company included ). If you'd like to see some geocacher responses to the film, you can check out the event cache pages for the two screenings: USC event Duke event

I don't know about Otter Boxes, but Pelican Cases don't work. We have a submerged cache, and even a combination of a Pelican Case and a kayakers dry bag didn't keep water out. In the end, we went the route that someone else has already suggested -- waterproof paper. To this, we added a waterproof pen -- both from Rite in the Rain. REI sells the paper; so does Groundspeak. We got both paper and pen from a local archaeological supply company. Under sustained immersion, both performed extremely well. Here's the cache: The Night Country Now, let me take a closer look at those PVC tube ideas...

Thanks for recommending "The Gourds" -- I'm playing a free download from "Blood of the Ram" now. Austin's a great town for music -- If you haven't already, check out "The Asylum Street Spankers" -- We've played their CDs in the cache car, on some outings. Now I've got to go check out that Canadian alt blue grass band someone mentioned...

That's a good way of explaining it, but I must make one correction: You mean "minute" here, not "degree," or the Earth just got A LOT smaller. Here, where I ballpark 5 feet per .001 longitude, it really works out to something like 4.85 feet. Close enough, says I.

BTW, "In the Summertime" was by Mungo Jerry, though Shaggy did an interesting reggae version.

Here's a good website that explains the relationship between longitude and latitude and distance: http://www.eomonline.com/Common/Archives/Oct95/olsen.htm Roughly speaking, .001 latitude is 6 feet. Around where I am, anyway, .001 longitude is about 5 feet. Of course, the closer you get to the poles, the small the distance represented by .001 longitude. To get distance apart using longitude and latitude, unless you're due north, due south, due east, or due west, you'll have to do trigonometry. For instance, if you're 300 feet east and 400 feet south, you're 500 feet from the point of beginning. It's a lot of fun, for me. I've done some puzzle caches that required trig to solve them. (Did you know that in the UK, they call their benchmarks "trig points"? They look much cooler, too.) If you're doing this sort of thing, you'll want to learn how to work with a UTM grid, but you won't need that just to figure your distance from a particular point using long and lat.

There have been so many great suggestions on this thread that I've printed it out. I see a lot of stuff here in common with our own tunes - Nanci Griffith, The White Stripes, They Might Be Giants, Ben Folds, Modest Mouse, The Flaming Lips (we, too, are particularly fond of "Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots"). All that plus NPR. So, I figure y'all have some good taste. We're always looking for good music, which can be hard to find on local radio. KCRW (Los Angeles) is great, but we don't have satellite radio to listen in the car, so we find stuff we like (mostly on KCRW's morning show), and download off of iTunes (or other legal sources). Recent faves include: - Gorillaz, "Feel Good, Inc." - Robyn Hitchcock, "We're Gonna Live in the Trees" - Louden Wainwright III (of "Dead Skunk" fame), "Here Come the Choppers" - Louis XIV, "Finding It True Love Is Blind" (but not if my daughter's in the car) - Jesca Hoop, "Seeds of Wonder" - The Chemical Brothers, "Galvinized" - William Shatner (yes, him), "Common People" - Scissor Sisters, "Take Your Mama" - Joanna Newsom, "Sprout and the Bean" - Franz Ferdinand, "Take Me Out" - Dresden Dolls, "Coin-Operated Boy" (but not if my daughter's in the car) - Beck, "Loser" - Ben Lee, "Catch My Disease" ...I could go on and on. It's amazing, now that you raise the topic, how important the music is when you're on the road.