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Oh no! A whole website of people whose brains work like mine! This is one of those things I have always noticed, although I tend to do it more with license plates instead of signs. I stopped mentioning these to Julie after the third “Yeah, real interesting (yawn)”. Thanks for posting this.
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Originally posted by jvechinski:
As an exception to this rule and to further confuse things, the Garmin Foretrex 101 has PC interface capability but does not come with a cable…
Wow, you’re right about that! They sure don’t publicize the fact, do they? The manual for this unit seems to make it look like it has Etrex functionality in a Wristmount case.
Oops, one more, the GPS 72 doesn’t come with a cable either, but does connect to a PC. This unit appears to be identical to the 76, but without an external antenna port (and a cable). For this one, the cables are around $13 delivered on Ebay. I didn’t bother to cost one with Garmin, but I am sure it is significantly more. So, if you want the features of a 76, but don’t want the external antenna, this unit will save you around $60 if you buy the cable on Ebay.
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Originally posted by Team B Squared:
+1, I spent a lot of time hand entering coords for big trips before I found a way to import waypoints to the GPS…not fun.
If you are going to buy a Garmin (the only brand I really know about), the ones without PC interface capability are the Geko 101, the Forerunner 101, and the Rino 110 (basically if it has two ‘1’s in the name). The standard yellow Etrex, the Camo Etrex (exact same unit, different color, more money), and the Etrex Summit do not come with a cable, but you can buy one on Ebay for around $12 delivered. (Or you can buy it from Garmin for $50, you decide. ) All others come with a PC interface cable.
Let’s see….A cold war relic….physical challenge…..probably not an obsolete nuclear missile….How about a big chunk of the Berlin Wall with a dogtag?
Thanks for the kind words, Zuma. Thanks are also due to jvechinski (I hope I spelled that right!), who made the whole thing possible. I haven’t been around long enough to know which caches were nominated (as if I could remember them.) He extracted the nominees for the system and created the webpage version of the list. I just did the GC list version.
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Originally posted by jvechinski:
I put together an “unofficial” list of COTM honorable mentions and sent it to Deejay. Unofficially there are about 130 caches in the list going back to February of 2003. This count may be a little high, and I’m going to rely on Deejay to let me know about the problem caches in the list. Once the list is cleaned up, I will make it publicly available (there will be a link to it off the main COTM page).Note that I also added links to the COTM winners and COTM honorable mention geocaching.com bookmark lists to the WGA COTM page. I think having the bookmark lists in addition to the official lists on the WGA site is a good idea, and I thank the folks who are/will be keeping them updated.
The bookmark list is out on GC.com. Note that the list does not include any archived caches, nor any inactive caches which don’t show activity by the owner within 3 months (my personal pet peeve). There are currently 86 caches on the list, including 2 inactive: Get Fit Travel Bug Hotel and The Big Payout. Both of these show recent owner activity. If you have an inactive cache that you want on the list, just activate it and let me know.
A related question: When I use a regular magnetic compass with my Etrex (yellow), I find that I cannot hold the compass with the same hand as the GPSr, because the compass will point at the GPS, rather than north. Obviously, my GPS is emitting some level of magnetic fields. Is this normal or is this a special Garmin “feature”?
Here’s the start of the honorable mention list (Just the ones I can remember). I will complete when I get more info.
Honorable mention listquote:
Originally posted by jvechinski:
Yes, we actually do keep information on all the caches that were nominated, as well as the number of votes for each cache, who voted, their comments, etc. We have this information stretching back to the start of the “new” COTM system which was put in place in February 2003.Maybe we need a to use this data to put together a list of “honorable mentions”… caches that have been nominated but have not yet won. Maybe to keep the list managable we should only list those caches nominated in the past 12 months?
Jeremy, If you could send me the information for past months, I will put together the honorable mention list and maintain it. Any format is acceptable (even handscrawled on a napkin) as long as I can either see it or read it into some sort of program. Just a list of the cache names or waypoints is all I need. Email me at drsecond at scj dot com.
Oh, and I’m not too worried about the list being unmanageable. If you review past months, you will see that rarely was there more than one or two caches nominated for the first time, so we are only talking about 50 or so on the list. Between older caches being archived and others actually winning the COTM, the list will tend to stay at about the same size once it is created.
[This message has been edited by Team Deejay (edited 03-01-2006).]
The other option is to pay to have our statistics collected by the cachestats.made.nu site.
Hate to be a wet blanket on this, but I checked out this site and they are approximately 3 months behind, probably indicating they stopped downloading data in November. I checked several of the clubs (change the last digit to check out other clubs) and no one has anything new after November. Maybe the GC.COM lawyers caught them when they were heading out to the trail….
That said, the features on this site are really first rate. If we decide to create our own site, we could do a lot worse than to emulate their features. One example: When you click on an individual user profile, you not only get a count of each type of cache, you also get how many of each size, each state, each country, etc. Another example: the site apparently grabs a listing of the most recently placed caches in the club area (I didn’t count them, but I would guess they are grabbing about 40). Both of these features are very nice. Too bad they seem to have given up the process.
Edited because I don’t know how to not hit enter at the wrong time.
[This message has been edited by Team Deejay (edited 02-27-2006).]
Does anyone have a record of all the caches nominated for COTM that have did not win? I would like to maintain a public list of these if possible. For me, the main value of COTM is bringing outstanding caches to people’s attention. I do participate regularly in the voting (although not this month, haven’t gotten to any of them yet), but every nominee was thought to be special by at least one person. Everyone of the nominees that I have visited has been at least above average, if not outstanding. I would think the list would be of value to others besides me.
On cache ratings, I don’t know how well this would work. I am afraid that this would be very discouraging to new and younger hiders who don’t yet have all the experience to understand when they are making a “not so good” hide. For example, we have a person hiding caches in Racine who has hidden 3 caches. The first one sits in a regularly flooded area, lying on the ground behind a tree, in a pill bottle with no camoflage. It is located on the edge of an unremarkable park with a nice view of the adjacent strip mall. His second hide was a puzzle cache with numerous spelling errors where the coordinates are slightly scrambled (AFTER solving the puzzle) as a poorly executed joke at the expense of people with dyslexia, with the final coordinates still being off by more than 60 feet in a rockpile (in the same unremarkable park overlooking the same strip mall). The third is a guardrail hide beside a busy city street, where the coordinates are actually in the middle of the road. If I were rating these caches 1-10, I would rate them 1, -1, and 3 respectively. But, would I want to do this on their cache page (or other obvious public place)? The answer is a resounding no. It is not in the best interest of the activity to discourage people from participating, which is what the public humiliation of “bad” ratings would do. In this case, I chose to email the person (not that it has done much good, obviously) with a few soft nudges towards cache maintenance, site selection, coordinate accuracy, etc. I am hoping that, as this person grows up, he will be more consciencious in his cache placement and stick with the activity. That is the beauty of the COTM/Recommended caches idea. We can point out the great ones without having to put down the lesser ones. JMNSHO!
Deejay Dave
Until this gets decided further, here is a working site to hold you over.
http://grand_high_pobah.home.comcast.net/Wisconsin1.htmlAs you will see, this doesn’t have the detail of House of Brew’s list, and you may also find that you are not on the list. The site looks at certain “popular” caches to get names of cachers with more than 200 finds, but, if you are like me, you haven’t actually found any of these specific hides. In this case, you can just email the website owner and he will add you manually to the database.
[This message has been edited by Team Deejay (edited 02-27-2006).]
Just thought of one other thing. Should we petition GC.com to amend this to allow for “legitimate local geocaching organizations” to also host event caches as well as individual “legitimate geocachers”? Just thinking ahead…
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