pklong

If you'll excuse the poor photo, this was mine and ClareLouises cake topper: We got it from justtoppers.co.uk

Ve8, It's just lunch boxes in hedges, not world peace. Also it's the National Trust, not McDonalds. I like caching on National Trust properties. If we start being awkward they could easily turn around and require that all caches on their properties be archived. I think that would be a great shame as they are exactly the places I like to go caching. Remember they are guidelines not hard and fast rules and I think that we need to be pragmatic in this case. Philip

Maybe this is time for a reality check. I quite liked series of 20 - 30 caches or so arranged in a nice long walk somewhere, so long as they were not all micros. It seems so did many others, hence the popularity. Then the one upmanship started. Who can find the most caches. Who can hide the most (no matter if their is no way they can maintain their hundreds of caches). It seems to me to have spiralled out of control. Is it time to get back to just one nice big box, at the end of a walk somewhere nice? Philip

In the UK it's about £1.30/litre. $2.05 Canadian. Cheap! On the M1 at the weekend it was £1.39/ litre which is $8.56 per US Gallon.

Q. Is it OK to hide a cache in Ivy, even a micro? A. Of course you can. It's not against the guidelines. Q. Will I enjoy finding your cache? A. Probably not. Especially if it's a micro in a wall of Ivy that's like searching for a needle in a haystack, wet slimey muddey haystack too. Q. Are you some kind of micro cache or Ivy hateing weirdo? A. Probably, I'm sure there are lots out there who love that kind of hide. There are also lots who care not a jot about the cache itself, but love the smilie. Philip

If caching is no longer fun then it's time to take a break from it and do something else. You can always come back to it later or just do the odd one that appeals and forget all the chaff. A lot of the numbers cachers seem to have slowed down recently and I think this can only be a good thing. For me this has been a slow year, getting married and moving house were more of a priority! Philip

Actually looking over my logs, virtual caches have usually scored highly. There have been a handful of stinkers where the pointlessness of bringing me to the location was compounded by the lack of a cache to find, but on the whole they have brought me to interesting locations where placing a physical cache is impossible. I can't wait for their return. Philip

Do you not have some free web space included with your broadband connection from your ISP. Philip

I think if I were you I would stick with the Iphone until I was ready to get a more expensive and feature rich GPS. The Etrex H will give you longer battery life and be far more rugged and weather proof than an Iphone, and the H version will give you as good as you are going to get under trees. (H for high sensitivity, the old yellow non H versions were useless under trees). I don't know how good the GPS in the Iphone is so I don't know if it will be an improvement. However, it is a very basic GPS, pretty much all you will get is the co-ordinates and an arrow. You will have to print off and take with you the cache page etc.

There are plenty of other Geocaching listing sites out there (opencaching.com) being one for example. Spend a little time using the competition and you will very quickly see how good a job Groundspeak is doing with geocaching.com, frankly the competition is laughably bad by comparison. Yes it's not perfect, but you try doing better. It seems you're just a little peeved that you've had to expend a little effort learning what Geocaching is before heading out into the woods for your first find. This in my mind is a good thing. I don't want someone who can't be bothered spending 5 minutes reading the FAQ and my cache page heading off to find one of my caches. Who knows what they might do. Keep a trackable, take a shovel and start digging up wild flowers. Anything. Philip

You're not only using IE, but IE6 by choice. My word!

Yes, it's cool to see all the caches in the world completely zoomed out. My next wish would be an Ordnance Survey map's layer, but I suspect I'm asking the impossible. Philip

Stop boasting about your massive monitor

Aint much use as anything other than an ornamant now, but believe me, gold just doesn't look right... How about a chrome finish, you can use it as a glitterball then! Jon Shame that as it is a white jeep it can't be given a new tracking number and send out again.

I'm not sure what has changed. It looks the same to me, with some cosmetic changes. Hopefully they have also changed it over to a database engine with more grunt to end the dreaded mysql timeouts.

That's OK, nobody's making you....

They replaced the Hamsters, they breed ones that can run twice as fast approx every 18 months.

Two answers: 1: GSAK allows you to filter by supplying coordinates of a shape you would like your caches in. 2: Are you really lucky and the river is a border to a state? if so apply the state filter to your PQ. Philip

Keep it to the Mega events only, otherwise no point in having it.

How many film cans would you need to melt down to make a proper cache? An experiment is needed?

Erm cos it's fun to try to guess who it is?

another myth about the magnetic compass. the compass has no influence whatsoever on the GPS readings you get. however, with the compas enabled, you will constantly get updated directional information when you're standing still. this will make it appear "jumpy" at close range because that's just how GPS works, but technically you're getting more information that way than with having the compass disabled (in which case the directional pointer will just be stuck in the same position). 0 - 30ft: This is normal. 30ft -> 50ft: Grumble a bit unless under trees or a cliff or something else GPS's hate. 50ft -> 70ft: Grumble in my log. 70ft ->0.1 miles: Write a needs maint log. 0.1 miles -> infinity: Laugh at the cache owner, needs maint log.

Agreed, grow some balls put a note on the tb page appologising for the mistake and return the tb to circulation, simples. This lets the tb owner know what happened. Losing a tb is something all of us could do and nobody should condemn you for an honest mistake. The Amnesty service is a good idea if you are too chicken though Philip

If you want to find a tricky puzzle, a cache at the top of a mountain miles from anywhere in the scottish wilderness or a cache with a string of DNF's suggesting a problem with the listing Philip

All you can do is make a new pocket query and make sure the day of the week the server thinks it is (says on the PQ page is ticked). The PQ system usually runs fine but seems to crash every so often, and in that case you won't get your PQ for hours, which is why I keep a big database of caches from old PQ's even though Groundspeak say it's naughty.