Okiebryan

Coordinates are VERY easy to convert by hand. 1 degree=60 minutes. 1 minute=60 seconds. If you want DD MM SS Degrees Minutes Seconds) and you have DD MM.mmm (Decimal Minutes) just take the mmm part and multiply it by 60. The other way, divide the SS by 60 then put it where the mmm goes after the decimal. There is also Decimal Degrees (DD.ddddd). Again, divide the MM.mmm by 60 and put the result in the place of the ddddd after the decimal. Clear as mud? If you work with it a few times, it will become very easy.

Oh, believe me, I know all about Mingo. It's 450 miles away from me, and it WILL be my 2000th find, so long as it's still active when I get there sometime next year. It's been on my watchlist for months. Oh, yeah...got my eyes on that one for sure.

The problem is, I don't know where you are, and what a "green acres tract" is.

I changed my caching name before I had 300 finds. I copied the logs from one account to the other, then deleted all the finds from the first account. At the end of each log under the new account, I added, "Signed log as Disenchanted". Not one cache owner gave me any grief about that. It took me about 24 hours to accomplish this with a very high speed internet connection. If I had waited to do it when I had more finds, it would not have been worth it.

Thursday evening about 8PM I was out caching with my girlfriend, when I got a phone call. A guy in Phoenix who knows a guy I know was looking for a qualified truck driver and was in a BIG hurry. Seems he had sold a truck to someone in Northern IA, and his driver had been stopped at the weigh station going into Kansas, and been put out of service due to license problems. He was looking for someone with a valid CDL and enough time to run to Iowa. He was offering good money if I'd get up there quick. I called the wrecker company I work for and asked them to take me off of the board. I threw together a change of clothes and my girlfriend and I headed north the 2 hours it would take to recover this truck. I get the truck turned loose from DOT at about midnight, and headed through Kansas. All the way I was trying to figure out how I was going to get a cache in the states I was going through. I already had a find in KS. Right as I was leaving NE, using my smartphone and the GC.com website, I found a very cool cache location, "Lunch with Lewis and Clark". It was hidden outside of a very nice and new L&C interpretive center. It was about 4am, so the place was closed. I wouldn't have had time to visit anyway, but I'd like to go there again sometime. The cigarette lighter in the truck didn't work, so I lost access to cache data when my phone went dead. I wasn't able to charge it until I got all the way to Spirit Lake, IA, where I was delivering the truck. I got there aobut 11AM. I told the woman there about geocaching, and that I had noticed a cache about .5 away. She wanted to go! So we got in her van and found a very cleverly camo'd gallon jug. I took a geocoin from there, and I'm taking it to our local geocaching meet and greet on Saturday. She took me to Albert Lea, MN (2 hours away) where I was to catch a bus home. I was there about an hour early, and there was a cache .6 away. I took off on foot once I had bought my ticket. Unfortunately, my only Minnesota find was a leaking film can with a wet log, but it was in a very nice little patch of woods right next to a lake. I arrived back in OKC this morning at 7AM, $500 richer and with finds in 3 new states. Although I have 12 years experience driving a truck, I hadn't driven a big truck in 3 years...so it was fun to see that I still had the skills it took to make a long overnight run. The experience on the bus, is another story that I will spare you...

I just found caches in 3 new states. I was disappointed to find the site down, because I want to update my maps. I hope the fix is not too troublesome for The Cheeseheads. He has a great site, and I love it.

I reached 1000 back on January 1st of this year. I remember that it felt like a HUGE milestone. It was like I had moved into a whole other group of cachers. Congratulations on joining the club! I hope that feels as good for you as it did for me.

Add me to the list. This is ugly and wrong. I'd delete it if it were my cache. Oh, and the whole "2nd find" concept is mega-lame.

For the record, Kitfox... when I said "your bad behavior" I meant that generically, not specifically. Sorry for the confusion. Let me check the off-topic-freefall-drift meter and see where this thread is... Hmmm... let's see. Religion, now politics, and little to no mention of religious propaganda in caches. I think it's time to shut this one down.

I do already have a GPS. That is how I discovered how badly it sucks to have to input all the coordinates. I currently have a Garmin Etrex Summit, and don't have the means to upgrade. I have thought about picking up a palm pilot, but I am concerned that the one I pick up won't be able to run the software needed to go paperless. My goal is to download all the caches for my area, then when I am out and about on errands and have a few minutes, I can pull out my GPSr, see what caches are nearby, then consult the gizmo of choice for information on hints, parking, size, difficulty, etc. without having to have my laptop and a wireless connection. GSAK is the way to go as far as getting caches into your GPS easily. On a separate note, which cell phone carrier are you on?

Oh, here's a lovely piece of work from Mr. Chick. Imagine if a little kid found this one in a cache! Lisa

Apparently you weren't aware of the fact that Christians are still persecuted all over the world in mostly Islamic nations. http://www.persecution.org/suffering/count...46828483e0286f5 There is far more hatred being preached by Islamic fundementalists than by Christians any day. Would I care if someone placed those in caches, the answer is no. They have the right to free speech just as I do. Actually, Kitfox, I'm quite aware of the persecution that you refer to. I also don't think it's right to point to bad behavior on the part of others to justify your own bad behavior. Persecution of anyone is wrong. It's beside the point that geocaching is a "light and family friendly activity". Tracts like those I linked to above are anything BUT light and family friendly.

Ok, well here's one I found in a cache not long ago. I'm looking for the other one that I found... Men of Peace Here it is. Get a bucket.

I'd like to pose a question to those who have so vigorously defended the practice of spamming caches with bible tracts. I hope you will respond. Would it be ok with you if someone put tracts in all the caches in your area? Tracts that say that all infidel Christians are wrong and that Allah is the one true route to salvation? How about if they show photos of infidel Christians being put to death and made to suffer in the afterlife? How about if they said that the children of infidels would be better off dead than to live on believing a lie? Would you be ok with those tracts? Would you leave them in the cache?

Didn't we cover this all the way back on page 1? Yes, but Team Cotati took the exact opposite stand up until page 8. Whooda thunk it? I agree that the thread had derailed into an argument about proving or disproving the unprovable. I still think that tracts do not belong in caches.

I'll go check a surveying message board that I frequent. If GPS has been wiggy today, there will be talk about it there. BRB. Edited to add: No reports of GPS problems over there, and they have posters from all over the world.

Have you ever tried to stay on topic? This thread is about the appropriateness of religious propaganda in caches, not about arguing whether God/Jesus/whoever is real. This is really not the place to try to defend your faith or convince anyone else. This has been a pretty good discussion and I'd hat to see it locked because it took off on that tangent. Besides, I have no freaking idea what you are rambling on about.

You said that you don't want to use a smartphone solution, so I'll tell you what I did BEFORE I got smartphone. I have a Palm. One of the newer ones with an SD card and a color screen that doesn't wash out in the sun. I have always had a premium membership, that is absolutely required to go paperless. I set up pocket queries by date placed, and get the entire state of Oklahoma in 13 PQs. I get these once a week, sent to a special gmail account that is used for nothing else. Ok, with me so far? I use a program called GSAK to manage this database of about 5500 caches. GSAK is set up to go to this email account, download all of the PQs, then crunch through them and update my entire database. Then, I clean up the database. Delete all of the caches that didn't get updated within the last week, as they are archived. Delete all the caches that have had DNFs for the last 3 logs. If they get found later, they will come back into the database next week. Now filter out all of my finds and hides. Now export everything that is left (about 4000 caches) and run them through a couple of pieces of software that spin them into html pages and render them in a way that palm can read. This process took me typically 4 hours, but would not of you weren't dealing with such a large export. Then I have access to the cache page of any cache I want to go after, while out in the field. I got sick and tired of this process, and got a smartphone. Now I do all of the same GSAK stuff, but then export the 4000 caches to the SD card of my phone, tell Geobeagle (free app for android) to sync to the card. This takes 20 minutes, and I don't have to do anything during this 20 minutes. Now I'm out on the field, open geobeagle, it uses the phone's GPS to determine my location. It opens a list of the caches within 10 miles or so, I choose one, then a navigation screen (compass) opens up and leads me to the cache. It also ties in with Google maps (if I have data service) and shows me where the cache is on a map. I've now found over 200 caches with nothing but my phone and a pen to sign the log. The phone cost $149, the phone service costs $75/mo with unlimited talk, text, and data. The app was free. GSAK was $10 several years ago, and the premium membership is...what? $30/yr?

This is probably the best summary of this thread's issues so far. Well done.

I got all my regularly scheduled PQs for today at about 6:30am signal time. I ran a myfinds PQ about noon and it came in about 10 minutes.

I can't believe that this thread managed to go to page 7 before it became about something completely other than religious tracts. I'm impressed. No problems with name calling, nobody told anyone they were going to hell, great job everyone!

INCORRECT! Tracts are nothing but advertisements. They are worth (financially speaking) less than the paper they are printed on. You are confusing cost and value... As far as advertising, I see business cards and coupons in caches all the time. Just saying.... You just proved his point. Business cards are not swag, they are more like a sig item...if even that. Just because you see them in caches doesn't make them of any intrinsic value, regardless of whatever cost is associated with them. I never said they were swag. I said they were advertising. Anyhow, the point was that they were in caches and nobody seems to mind because everyone just ignores them.... If by "nobody seems to mind" you actually mean "some people seem to mind" and by "everyone just ignores them" you mean "some people just ignore them", then, yes... I agree with you. Otherwise, I'd have to say that you are full of it.

Nice job guys. I'm glad you fixed the edit bookmark bug.

Oh, please tell us what behavior that you have managed to control in others. I can't wait to hear this one.

INCORRECT! Tracts are nothing but advertisements. They are worth (financially speaking) less than the paper they are printed on. You are confusing cost and value... As far as advertising, I see business cards and coupons in caches all the time. Just saying.... You just proved his point. Business cards are not swag, they are more like a sig item...if even that. Just because you see them in caches doesn't make them of any intrinsic value, regardless of whatever cost is associated with them.