[cacheseekers]

I just thought I’d throw my 2 cents in here

Concerning the dialup access in addition.. Can you get an 800# that has a PIN that would be billed to you? We’re doing this with our ISP in Madison, where if a customer wants dailup, and to have an 800# on it, we’ll put it on there and charge per minute. Our rates are extreamly competitive, something around 6 cents a minute. (We’re still fine tuning the plans)

With the slow connections from hotel rooms… You’re probably not going to get away from this. We have a client that has this issue, and it causes their VPN to be extreamly slow. I tested it out at a hotel this weekend and had the same results. From what I can tell, the computer that “audit’s” the phone calls from a hotel room to add charges to the guests bill intercepts calls, then re-routes them through possibly a serial connection to a device that actually allows the call to dial out. That serial connection most likely will be a 19.2kbps line, although I have seen some hotels work smoothly. I think it depends on how much they want to fork out for good equipment.

(Note, I just begain the research on the hotel issue so I don’t have the terminology quite yet. So this is just the basics from a conversation with a tech.)

Hmm, in retrospect this post probably isn’t that helpful. Hehe Sorry

Nick
of The Cacheseekers

[cacheseekers]

No problem at all. I’m just glad I can help out some.

Nick

[cacheseekers]

kbraband,

I’ve taken snap shots out of MS Streets and Trips. I saved them as high quality jpgs incase you wanted to print them. A total of 7 images in a zip file, which is about 6MB. Since that is too large for e-mail servers to transfer in most cases I’ve posted it on my webserver.
http://majestic.hubns.net/~cacheseekers/wigeo.zip

I did a full WI map snapshot, and then zoomed in to get some closer shots. I can zoom all the way to street level, so if there is a particular area you’d like me to zoom into because of some heavy cache spots let me know and I can do that.

I forgot to also mention that I have the waypoints for all the caches within a 500 mile radius of Madison in a .loc file, and I’m able to export that into an excel spreadsheet if the DNR wants a list of lat/lon of the WI caches.

Hope these help some,

Nick
of the cacheseekers

[email protected]

[cacheseekers]

I can zoom in all over the state and do section by section too. I am not going to be near my computer at home that has this tonight, but I’ll be back tomorrow early afternoon and I’ll get it to you.

Nick

[cacheseekers]

I don’t know if this would help or not, but I have imported (as of January 1st) all of the caches in WI into Microsoft Streets and Trips so that it has a push pin in its location. Streets and Trips has Terrain, Political and Road map screens. Although it can show resturants, and other stores it doesn’t have anything to show what state parks a location is in. I think it has a few, but not all. But, a map printed with the push pins could be compaired to a state map that shows state parks and a pretty good count could be done I would think…

I can publish a map with the geocaches as push pins on a map to a website (MS Streets and Trips exports to html), and I could also provide the saved file that contains the data. (I don’t know if this would break some geocaching.com rule considering I just use it as a personal resource normally)

If any of this could help, feel free to let me know.

Nick
of The cacheseekers

[email protected]

[cacheseekers]

Very interesting. I hope we get time to check this out.

Speaking of holiday caches, we were considering placing a virtual/seasonal cache at Olin park in Madison to draw some cache seekers out to it to see the Christmas lights that are all setup. We haven’t had time to do so, and we’re not compeletly sure if it will be allowed with the changes to virtual caches.

Maybe next year…

But, if any of you are in the Madison area at night you should take a drive through it, it’s quite beautiful. If you don’t know where Olin Drive is, just hope onto John Nolan off the beltline and you can’t miss it with all of the lights

[cacheseekers]

Haha

Wow do I feel embaressed for not thinking of it being in hex. Hmm that will make everything easier if I persue this

Concerning the palm software, yes I’ve seen that but it then requires a person to own a palm. Although, I will look to see if there are any palm software emulators…

Now in a year or so we’ll have a palm as Katrina will be needing it for pharmacy school.. but until then I will be working on an alternative

Thanks for the input!

Nick
of The Cacheseekers

[cacheseekers]

I understand the property etc.. It would be only used for personal use so it would not (with my understanding) be violating anything. As for being noticed, that wouldn’t bother me. I wouldn’t be hiding (obviously) what I’m doing. But in reality, the amount of hits that site gets, it would require a specific search to notice it. That’s besides the point though.

Yeah, the data changes very quickly. For the most part, I’d like to grab all the caches in my area, if not just Wi so that I could cron a script to check for updates every night or week etc. Having the logs is very benificial. I have all of the way points in Wisconsin, as of this past Saturday on my laptop ready to be uploaded to my gps, and converted into MS Streets and Trips, so when driving somewhere we can see a cache near go “hey, we’ve got some time pull up the page and lets check it out”.

It’s mainly for spontanitity. I tried printing out the closest 100 or so caches, but as you said it got outdated quickly.

Now if this would cause some huge problem with the admins at geocaching.com, I would of course -not- do it. I’m just trying to think of ways to make this work for us, I don’t want to cause some sort of reformation

And from what I’ve discovered, making a script to grab all pages at X zipcode would download them, but they are not easily referencable. The page ID is different then the waypoint ID. Which, may be intentional to thwort activities like this.

Needless to say, so far it seems to be a lot more work than I have time to deal with. That, and my scripting skills aren’t where they need to be. Hehe

Maybe I’ll just pick up a cell phone adapter to dial out to get pages on the fly with my laptop 😛

Thanks for the comments,

Nick
of The Cacheseekers

[cacheseekers]

That’s just discusting that people can do that. Lets just hope that taking is the extent of bad things done to geocaches… I’d hate to hear someone starting to do.. intentionally dangerous things to caches.

That reminds me when we first started this, our families were all “How do you know someone isn’t out there waiting to kill you.” etc.. It took me a long time to get them to understand the concept and semi-trust involved. I just hope stealing is the worst thing that happens.

Nick
The Cacheseekers

[cacheseekers]

I just saw the posting of this cache today. I was in a mild shock as we were planning on placing a cache on Tivoli Island. Now we’ll have to go and find this one and decide if there is room for another.

That’s what we get for waiting so long to place one!!

Nick
The Cacheseekers

[cacheseekers]

It’s a common problem when printing web pages because they are designed to fit best for the screen. When you go to print, find an option that lets you ‘fit’ it to the page size. It’ll be there somewhere. As I’m not at a computer with a printer that would have that option right now I can’t tell you exactly where it is, but it is there somewhere.

A lot of sites have a link to click that makes the page “printable”, like news sites and such. This is something that I think http://www.geocaching.com should implement, considering most geocachers print the sheets out.

If you can’t find it, post back here and I can try to look when I get to another computer of the exact setting location is.

Nick
Cacheseekers

[cacheseekers]

In Wi, or at least the local laws are similar in that people under 21 can be in, but not near the bar area or purchase soda. We’ll have to check in on the specifics of that and post the laws if we do this cache.

What we were thinking concerning this being a family activity, is that in Wi it is completely legal for anyone under 21 to come in, sit and have a soda IF their parent/gardian is present. So this would not pull away from a family activity. (Although, this does bring to mind another location near this one that could ‘counter’ the age specifications of this area. hmm… more ideas. hehe)

We were also thinking, that we could have it counted as a ‘virtual’ cache for those who don’t enter. They can describe something of the location that wouldn’t be seen anywhere near here without a problem so that might be an idea too.

More to think about. hehe

Thanks for the reply!
Nick and Katrina
[email protected]

[Author]

Posts