Bloencustoms

LOL, Now that's a speeding ticket!

I know how bad it feels to have things stolen. I have had three bicycles stolen, two gas cans from the carport, and a $1,000 set of wheels and tires for my car. The police have yet to recover any of my stolen property. They do, however, seem adept at giving out tickets. It's a lot easier to cacth someone in the act than it is to follow a trail. What really bothers me is the last ticket I recieved for having dark window tint. The cop had tint on their cruiser! This is a ridiculous double standard. The law is supposed to protect cops from being shot by people with guns who are invisible behind the tint. Well, every cop carries a gun. So why do they get to hide behind tint? Just yesterday I was passed by a cop with no lights on going at least 20 miles over the posted speed limit. If it was an emergency, the lights should be on to alert other drivers that there is someone travelling at a high rate of speed. If it was not an emergency, then that person was abusing their power. Wherever they were going in such a hurry is no more important than my destination. How can we respect the people we pay to protect us, when they scoff at the very laws they are paid to uphold? The last ticket I got before the tint was on the way to place a cache. The guy let the expensive car in front of me slip by. I got the ticket. Just another example of the people who can least afford to pay stuff, compared to those that can yet never do. It would be nice if fines were a percentage of net worth, rather than a fixed amount. Then the guy in the BMW would be shelling out $10,000 or so for his speeding tickets. Seems fair to me.

That's a tough call. I had a couple of caches go missing, on of them was secured with velcro. I allowed the finders to log it when they described the position of the velcro, because there was no way they would have missed the cache if it had not been plundered. I don't believe cachers who took the effort to go all the way to the exact location should be denied a find because some muggle took the cache. I had another multi that required driving about 20 miles across town to locate. Some cachers who were just starting at the time took the entire adventure, only to find the location, but no cache. After describing the area to me, I was satisfied that they would have logged it if it had not been missing. A few weeks later, I was caching with one of them in the area. We passed by the location of the now archived cache, and they pointed out exactly where the cache had been. Part of my motivation for allowing a find was to avoid discouraging new cachers who were just getting started. (It was their first cache attempt.) In addition, because it was a multi, they already "found" two caches before they arrived at the final stage. Finally, I don't believe it's cheating. I think it's entirely up to the individual finder to decide whether to go ahead and log a find if the owner allows it. The cache belongs to the owner, and requirements for finding it come from the owner. If you choose not to log a find, that's your business. If you are worried about cachers having more finds than you because they follow a different set of standards, too bad. Understand that they are playing a different game and you are not in competition with them. Seek out players with similar caching practices and compete with them, but don't be suprised if they don't care if you "win". There will always be someone with more finds, more money, a bigger house, etc. If you dwell on that, and the way in which they gained their finds, or wealth, life will be a continual disappointment.

In practice, many negative stereotypes have formed around various demographic groups because of the actions of a few members of the group in question, rather than the actions of the entire group. Let's try a different analogy. A company produces tires. One of their tires fails, causing a driver to lose control of their vehicle and crash. Even if the tire that failed was only used on a specific type of vehicle, say SUV's, all of the tires that company produces will be viewed as poor quality products, even the ones used on compact cars.

Ah, well. According to this article, ambidextrous people are "brain damaged"

Well, I use my left hand for writing, spoons, forks, chopsticks, cigarettes, and telephone handsets. I use my right hand for throwing balls, batting, cutting with scissors, gripping with pliers, opening cans, chopping with an axe, firing guns, my computer mouse and other stuff. The odd thing is I can't comfortably do most of them by switching hands. I certainly can't write legibly with my right hand. So, I don't know if I'm in my "right" mind or not.

And I thought the forums were supposed to be free of political agenda. I hope everyone comes home safe, and I hope you change your avatar to something more appropriate.

Yet Another Parking Lot Micro OK, so do I win a prize?

I'd let it hang around for a while. You never know if there's someone who was planning to find it. You can always do something to improve the cache rather than give up on it entirely. Change the container to make it more difficult to find, or give the cache a theme to make it more interesting. It's hard to comment on it's possible "lameness" without actually visiting the cache. If it's your first hide and it follows the guidelines, lame is in the eye of the beholder. Let a few people find it, and you can take suggestions from the subsequent logs to improve that and any future caches you place.

Well, as far as compasses are concerned, if it isn't liquid damped, it's practically useless for on the go. Who wants to wait for the needle to settle every time you want a new bearing? Anyway, I found some little spherical pin-on compasses at wally world for $1.99. It's too big to inset into the top of my hiking stick, but I do have it pinned to the wrist strap. I like compasses, and they are a nice addition to a hiking stick, or a cache.

Untill I got to the second to last post, I was going to go drill out an ammo can and stick a vacuum gauge in it. I'm betting the vaseline suggestion will do the trick. Make sure not to use mentolatum, though. Might attract some curious animals.

Boy am I glad someone brought this up. I tend to avoid caches like that because I don't want to have to explain myself in the event I am "caught" accessing the cache. I can almost sympathize with Lessenergy's viewpoint of only seeking caches that have positive proof of permission. Obviously, there aren't many caches like that to find, so I don't adhere to that kind of policy. Still, I would feel a lot more comfortable knowing that there is no way I'm going to get in any kind of trouble or be hassled by cops or security while hunting a cache. This also is wishfull thinking, but anyone who has found caches in a few different areas knows that they vary greatly in the amount of privacy the actual location affords. Allmost all of the caches placed within the last couple of months in my area are in highly exposed locations. I'll get to them eventually, but I'm in no hurry to throw caution to the wind. It almost seems like there is a competition between hiders to see who can place the most "risky" cache. (Not that there's anything wrong with that.) Eventually, someone will place another cache of the type I enjoy most, and all will be right with the world.

I have to disagree with this sentiment. Does it reflect badly on Ford if a bank robber uses one of their vehicles as the getaway car? The only thing I would think is how paranoid is this country getting. Are people that afraid of everything they don't recognize? As to the main topic, Please don't alter my camo paint job. I try to paint the container to resemble the surrounding area. Just my outlook on things. John

Here's a gentle suggestion to anyone reading this. Remove any old military markings from your surplus containers and ammo boxes before you use them as cache containers. This will help prevent them from being confused with containers of explosives and ammunition. In addition, labelling them as geocaches when possible will help even more. If someone mistakes a geocache for a bomb or something similar, it reflects badly on geocachers as a whole, in addition to the person who hid it. Do yourself and us all a favor and take a few minutes to dress up your surplus containers a bit.

It used to be "Geocaching. A way to share interesting places with people of similar interests." It is becoming "Geocaching. A way to share completely banal locations with people who are too driven by a sense of exploration to want to waste time visiting them."

Grab a copy of GSAK and it'll take only one program :-) Wow! That looks like a fantastic program. The ability to create files for S&T and upload to your GPS is great. It's appropriately named.

I don't think that's possible. I use Streets and Trips software to display all of the caches in my pocket queries on a map. It takes two other programs to make it happen, but the end results are pretty slick.

24 out of the nearest 100 I have yet to find. That makes 76% and the furthest of the 100 is 8.8 miles. Not that the numbers matter. Still, this seems to be a much more interesting statistic than raw total finds. (Because I'm not doing so bad.)

Discussing the faults or shortcomings of a small segment of cachers, caches, or locations does nothing to validate an argument. There are always some anomalous bad placements. Some are bad because they violate guidelines. Others are "bad" as a matter of opinion. That said, caches are as different as snowflakes and each presents a different challenge to potential finders. There are thousands of caches to choose from. We have all found caches we enjoyed, otherwise we wouldn't continue looking for them. The fact is, if you do enough caches, you will find (or not find) some that you like less than others. Free will allows us to make choices about which caches we look for. If you dislike micros in the woods, choose not to look for them. Some days, I like to be challenged. I'll take on a difficult hide for the feeling of accomplishment I get after finding it. Other days, I just want to go find a quick, easy cache that doesn't require much thought or effort on my part. Fortunately for people like me, there is an abundance of variety in the types of caches people have placed. If I were going to go out right now to find a cache, I'd like to visit one that could be found quickly and didn't require me to search in an area where I could be observed by muggles. Micros tend to be a good bit more difficult to find than full size caches. A micro in the woods far from observers would allow me to search in relative privacy. Finally, I would rather see full size caches whenever the conditions permit. That doesn't mean I think people should be forced to place them that way by some new rules. Right now there are almost 20 new caches I haven't looked for in my immediate area. They are all micros. I'll get to them eventually, but I'm not compelled to rush out and find them right away. If a really neat "tangible" puzzle cache popped up, I'd be in the car before the dust settled on my keyboard. Find the ones you like, save the others for when you're really bored.

It's almost as if cachers have developed their own language. Everything gets prefixed with "geo".

You ought to make a trip to Baton Rouge LA and pick op one of Bast of Trall's sig items, a little green bugblatter.

On larger "woods" caches, if the coordinates are accurate and it is in an area with good reception, the hint need not be to specific. On micros, or caches in areas with poor reception, hints would be more helpful if they were clear. Obviously, some caches are hidden with the intention that they be very difficult to find. On those caches, no hint at all is sometimes better than the cryptic hints you often see. The whole game is based on the honor system, so I believe that if you are going to leave a hint, make it one that will guide the cacher to the placement. If they didn't need a hint, they wouldn't have decrypted it. I'm sure that there are some that automatically decrypt the hint before even looking. (I've done this on several occasion when I knew I was looking for something tough right out of the box.) Perhaps another kind of smiley? One that indicates a find without the use of a hint, and one that indicates a find that required a hint. This would open up another opportunity for the FTF crowd. You could be FTF, and FTFNH > no hint.

Or-derv anyone?

Well, most sig items probably aren't worth a lot of money, but they are highly collectible. If I came across a sig item from a well known cacher, I'd be quick to trade for it. So far I only have one sig item, but it is one of my favorite trades. I left a bottle of hand sanitizer in the cache. As far as what to take out of a cache when leaving a sig item, I think nothing would be most appropriate. You have no way of knowing what value future finders might place on any given item, but it hardly seems fair to leave something that is only valuable to sig item collectors in trade for a more universally valuable piece. I'd just leave your sig item in every cache you find, and bring other stuff to use for trades. In some cases, certain cachers might have some really nice sig items that have some utility beyond their collector value. In those instances it's probably fine to trade one for a generic cache item of equal or lesser value. Now, if anyone want's to know why caches get traded down, watch a couple of episodes of "The Price is Right" and you'll see that people have wildly different ideas about the value of just about everything.