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Like to see you find youz way out of dis, Fizzyman!!!

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quote:
Originally posted by fizzymagic:

The flag game for the picnic is ready. Should be a very interesting one. Not so easy as previous ones, I think.

 

Not that I think Kryptonite could do it anyway.


 

Death to Zooperman

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I just downloaded by pocket query file that normally shows the 150 closest files I haven't found, but today the file only had 3 caches listed. I had already cleared my GPSr's memory, and overwritten the previous download file. Fortunately I did have a backup from a few days earlier, so I could reload everything that wasn't newer than that. Has anybody else had this problem? Is it a one-time thing? I checked the pocket query generator page, and all the criteria are right, but I could delete it and redo it if that helps. Any recommendations would be much appreciated. See you at the picnic. uh... ze picnic.

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The SF Bay and Beyond picnic was immense. Even Superman showed up. Way fun. Kudos to TeamJiffy, vdbalamo, and Marky and Joani for getting this one together. Thanks fellow geocachers for sharing the fun and interesting time.

 

PS George: loc files were unnecessary for the flag game.

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Just about everybody I talked to mentioned driving through rain to get to the picnic. We lucked out and had pretty nice (if not sunny) weather the whole day. It was great hanging out with everyone. People keep thanking Joani and I for helping to put the event on, but we didn't really do anything. TeamJiffy and vdbalamo did all the hard word in our opinion, and it was a great success. We're looking forward to the next one.

 

--Marky

"All of us get lost in the darkness, dreamers learn to steer with a backlit GPSr"

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quote:
Originally posted by Marky:

Just about everybody I talked to mentioned driving through rain to get to the picnic. We lucked out and had pretty nice (if not sunny) weather the whole day. It was great hanging out with everyone. People keep thanking Joani and I for helping to put the event on, but we didn't really do anything. TeamJiffy and vdbalamo did all the hard word in our opinion, and it was a great success. We're looking forward to the next one.


 

Yes, this was a great event. I have been to three so far and this was definitely the most successful. I am so glad that the threat of rain didn't scare many people off.

 

Joani and I chatted a lot, and we did talk about another event later in the summer. I work for the City of San Jose and we have some great big regional parks here with reservable areas. Joani likes Almaden Lake Park, but there are more. Here are details on all of the San Jose regional parks that have reservable picnic areas:

 

-Almaden Lake - Has swimming, paddleboats, and playgrounds. Caches nearby.

 

- Alum Rock Park - Very nice for picnics, lots of good hiking trails, caches already in the park, and lots of good hiding places for more.

 

- Emma Prusch Farm - Smaller, but really pretty with farm activities for the kids.

 

- Kelley Park - Very spacious, many shady spaces, and also has Happy Hollow and Japanese Gardens.

 

- Lake Cunningham - Large, has fishing and Raging Waters nearby.

 

- Edenvale Garden Park - On the property of the former Frontier Village. Caches already here. Lots of shade. New playgrounds.

 

Also, I wanted to let you all know that I contacted the marketing rep for Parks, Recreation, and Neighborhood Services in San Jose to ask what the department's policy on geocaching is. She informed me that the department is way behind on coming up with policies for anything... Which I guess is good for us at this point. But she is going to look into geocaching and let me know what the director says.

 

-------------------------------------

Becky Davis

San Jose, CA

Live geocaching help 1-800-ASK-KEEN extension 0324998 - call when you're out caching and you get stuck!

Buy Tupperware for cache containers.

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quote:
Originally posted by marwagsalot:

Just a reminder, there are places that my type cannot go icon_confused.gif


Was this in reference to the parks Becky mentioned? If so, does that mean you might come to one of the picnics if it is dog friendly? icon_biggrin.gif

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quote:
Originally posted by marwagsalot:

Just a reminder, there are places that my type cannot go


 

Marwags, thanks for reminding me about this.

 

I did just check, and Almaden Lake Park does not allow dogs. icon_frown.gif

 

Emma Prusch Farm does, but not near the barn or small animals (understandable... those chickens must look awfully tempting).

 

Kelley Park does allow dogs.

 

Lake Cunningham does not allow dogs.

 

I am waiting to hear back about Edenvale, which is worth finding out about because it's a beautiful spot and there are already caches there, and room for more.

 

So since I think we'd all like to include marwags and other dogs (like Bykenut's etc.) it'd be nice to use Emma Prusch Farm, Kelley Park (both really nice parks), and maybe Edenvale Garden if dogs are allowed there. What do Marky & Joani think? (since Joani was partial to Lake Almaden)

 

-------------------------------------

Becky Davis

San Jose, CA

Live geocaching help 1-800-ASK-KEEN extension 0324998 - call when you're out caching and you get stuck!

Buy Tupperware for cache containers.

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Can I use my GPS to show that the axis of rotation of the earth has changed? In the modern tradition I want to blame someone for the terrible weather and I think it must be all the over weight Americans. They have change the balanced and the north pole is now near Fairbanks Alaska so we now have Seattle weather.

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quote:
Originally posted by hotfoot:

Can I use my GPS to show that the axis of rotation of the earth has changed? In the modern tradition I want to blame someone for the terrible weather and I think it must be all the over weight Americans. They have change the balanced and the north pole is now near Fairbanks Alaska so we now have Seattle weather.


I was just redoing the coords for Plumbers other friend last night and I swear the North Pole is closer now than when I first did the cache. icon_wink.gif

 

--Marky

"All of us get lost in the darkness, dreamers learn to steer with a backlit GPSr"

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quote:
Originally posted by georgeandmary:

Only 4 weeks left to summer vacation.


What's a summer vacation? For that matter, what's a vacation? All I ever get are daycations these days. If I don't take some days off this month I will be losing free paid time off because I'm only 2 hours from the max I can accrue. Dang it.

 

--Marky

"All of us get lost in the darkness, dreamers learn to steer with a backlit GPSr"

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quote:
Originally posted by PhilippeGPS:

I’ve added hints to crabbels CASE. Good luck.


The hints helped a little bit (it's good to see that I wasn't off base on ideas) but there are just too many possibilities that I can't rule out. I just don't see any relation to anything that can reduce the number of possible things. I think I have to first two solved, but I can't get any farther than that. Of course, I'm not the best puzzle solver...

 

--Marky

"All of us get lost in the darkness, dreamers learn to steer with a backlit GPSr"

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I agree with Marky on this one. It’s even possible to come up with “clever” ideas, that seem to make sense, and there is no way to know, at least as I can tell.

 

Imagine that solving a puzzle is like finding the key to a door. Once you know you’ve found the key for the door you want, you know you have it - it will open the lock.

 

Right now, as far as I can work out this puzzle, I have found not one key, but a whole big barrel of keys, and I don’t know which one opens the door. Until I can figure out the insight that makes it so that I don’t find a barrel of keys, but just one key, I won’t get past this puzzle.

 

-Jif

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I was wrong

 

My apologies to Lamneth, whom I corrected when he said the new cache numbering scheme was base 31. I insisted that it was base 32, because that's what the geocaching.com gurus said. But I was working on a script to convert waypoints to numbers today, and found out that it is indeed base 31!

 

crabbels CASE

 

Like everyone else, I am not working on this one any more, because there are several hundred "correct" answers to the first part, all of which make sense. If only one made sense, that would be fine, but they ALL do.

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I went back and looked at my profile for climbing that day and it was only 6000 ft. Oh well.

 

The high altitiude one kind of scares me. I'm sitting here watching a National Geographic show on people going to Nepal and getting altitude sickness. I haven't done much hiking above 9000 ft so going 11000 is kind of spooky.

 

I wanted to do a deep hike into Emigrant Wilderness last summer but my hiking parter never materialized. It's a wilderness area so bike are a no no so I'd have too hoof it.

 

Chuguy went in and hid a bunch more caches along his route. Dang that Chuguy.

 

Thirteen miles in and 13 miles out. I'm not used to walking that far. I'd have to spend the night.

 

http://www.geocaching.com/seek/cache_details.aspx?ID=32867

 

Now there are 4 caches on the trail.

 

george

 

Wanna go for a ride?

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quote:
The high altitiude one kind of scares me. I'm sitting here watching a National Geographic show on people going to Nepal and getting altitude sickness. I haven't done much hiking above 9000 ft so going 11000 is kind of spooky.

 

Don't worry about it. I grew up at 7,000 feet and have been over 11,000 many, many times. Most people don't even start to feel the effects of altitude very strongly until 13,000 feet, anyway.

 

I'll go with you this summer. Just let me know when.

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I've added another hint to crabbels CASE based on new feedback. On the one hand, I'm in the learning process of making puzzles here, and I may have underestimated the difficulty level. On the other hand, I did test it out with a non-puzzler, who found it with just one of the hints posted within hours. So I still think this is more do-able than it may look like. Anyway, I learned my lesson and will keep future puzzles below level 4 ... icon_smile.gif

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When I placed my Chess cache, I was convinced by others that knowing how to play chess was "specialized knowledge" and I should rate the cache at least a 4. I would think the same argument applies to crabbels CASE. Part of the reason the last hint is necessary was that I had never heard of the 8 word in connection with the 13 word before. I might have tried to add http to the puzzle somehow.

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Hi all Pepper here just dropping to say I finally made it #500 yesterday with the twins! Best I can figure it took 423 days to get 500 caches, and I am still having fun. Even more so now that the Husband gave me his IPac to cache with, now life on the trail with no paper in hand is awesome!

Congrates to fizzymagic on hitting 700! geezze at this rate I will never catch up ya'll, oh well it's fun trying.

 

Pepper

 

icon_geocachingwa.gif

Horizontals where it's at!

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OK, PDA and Watcher users....any ideas on this one? (This may have been discussed somewhere, if so, just point me to the URL..I did a search and the stuff I came up with included comments like ...*no one could solve this problem for me*.)

 

I got a pocket query for Sacramento caches. I downloaded it. Used Spinner on it and loaded the *new* names and coords to my Etrex. There were 200 as that is what the pocket query was set up for. (I've now updated it to 400 to see if that makes a difference)

 

I also used watcher on this...for use on my laptop when traveling in the car. I also put it on the PDA.

 

I loaded the pushpins to Topo by National Geographic and used it as I moved around Sac.

I pulled up the map and it showed Old Mills and I had Old Mills in my gps.

 

When I pulled up at the location, I looked up the description on the Watcher on laptop and on the PDA...it wasn't there.

 

The same thing happened on Totally Tubular by Wasser Adventure Seekers and their Planes, Trains and Automobiles and Trader Joes.

 

So I went to a couple of these places and poked around a bit, but without descriptions it was a little rough and I abandoned them. The Trader Joes coords put me near a Long's Drug store apparently across the street from Trader Joes. When I got home I looked these up on the web site. Since I only had six-character names and no descriptions on Watcher or PDA, the names didn't do any good in what to look for. The Trader Joes finds indicate the coords are off 100 feet, across the street. Without a description or clues, I was looking entirely in the wrong area.

 

Ron

 

I've never been lost. Fearsome confused sometimes, but never lost.

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Not really sure what's going on there Ron. I don't think it's related to the 200/400 pocket query size. You used the same .gpx file to upload to your GPSr as you did to view in Watcher, and Watcher didn't show some of them? I'm just trying to put boundaries on the problem to see if we can figure out what is going on. (Not that I'm an expert.)

 

--Marky

"All of us get lost in the darkness, dreamers learn to steer with a backlit GPSr"

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Well I don't know what version of Watcher is being discussed. I do know that 1.35 can not read a Spinner GPX file. I did let Clayjar know about the problem I had and he was going to look at it. I was using 1.33 when I first noticed the problem as it would not load into watcher. 1.35 gives a error message though.

 

Better to cache alone, then not at all.

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Marky...

 

I thought maybe it was the *breadth* versus *depth* issue in Plucker, but it is set up for *breadth* as recommended by Spinner. So, that's not it.

 

Kusanagi....

 

I just looked and I am using Watcher 1.20 exe only according to the popup indicator when I just move-over the watcher logo.

 

*************

 

Lots of possibilites I guess. I'm now looking at the *stand alone* Spinner and of course there's Fizzy's program too...so many choices!

 

Ron

 

I've never been lost. Fearsome confused sometimes, but never lost.

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quote:
I thought maybe it was the *breadth* versus *depth* issue in Plucker, but it is set up for *breadth* as recommended by Spinner. So, that's not it.

 

Plucker is notoriously picky about the HTML it will accept. If there is something on the page that it considers "illegal" HTML, it completely refuses to load the page! This happened to me at Get The Point? last week. The color "gray" was misspelled, and Plucker just refused to load the page. So there I was at the cache site with no description! I ended up calling Jimswim to read it to me.

 

Send me the GPX file you had, and I will try to figure out what went wrong for you.

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Thanks for looking at this everyone...

 

Fizzy....

 

I also opened the zip file instead of saving it to disk, and once again, while then looking at this in EasyGPS, the suspect files show up, but when looking in Watcher, they don't...just a little more narrowing for you tech types.

 

Fizzy...

 

I have sent you an email through the geocaching mail system.

 

Ron

 

I've never been lost. Fearsome confused sometimes, but never lost.

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quote:
Originally posted by kusanagi:

Well I don't know what version of Watcher is being discussed. I do know that 1.35 can not read a Spinner GPX file. I did let Clayjar know about the problem I had and he was going to look at it. I was using 1.33 when I first noticed the problem as it would not load into watcher. 1.35 gives a error message though.


This has been a known problem for a while. It is suggested that you run your unspun gpx files through watcher first, and then spin them. This is how I combine a bunch of pocket queries and filter then down to a manageable size that I can load into my GPSr.

 

--Marky

"All of us get lost in the darkness, dreamers learn to steer with a backlit GPSr"

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quote:
Originally posted by Ron Streeter:

The same thing happened on Totally Tubular by Wasser Adventure Seekers and their Planes, Trains and Automobiles and Trader Joes.

Ron


 

That's interesting. I had the same problem with those 3 caches also.

 

Wouldn't show in Watcher, but they did show up on my gps after spinner.

 

I loaded the newest version of watcher and I could then see those 3.

 

Alan

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