A night with the Bomb Squad

Last night I spent the night with the bomb squad.  Not a bomb squad that had me in handcuffs and in the back of a police car, but at a presentation about bombs and geocaching.  Bomb Squad area - Notice boxes labeled booby traps and IED'sOne of the trhee bomb robots that we were shownA containment vessel used to haul materials to a safe disposal area. The group.. a few had left at this time.

A few months ago I heard about one that was done in a state back East.  An event that might help open the eyes of cachers and the bomb squads, and open some lines of communication.  So I tossed the idea out to Mr Morty.  He thought that was a great idea and he went out and set something up. 

So last night  We got together and went to the county police complex and sat down and watched a presentation about bombs and bomb squads.

I saw that only 4-5 had responded and I expected maybe 10 so I was happily surprised to see a full house, with a few standing in the hall.  I counted 40+ that were attending.

His presentation had a lot of things that made me think.

He pointed out things that made them suspicious and more nervous up front. 

Duct taped items.  That simple act of adding duct tape adds a lot of explosive power to something.  So that simple process makes them more wary.  Painting does not matter as much to them.

Clearly label.  Sounds simple enough and few people actually do it.  It removes a lot of worry when they see the label "geocache" on the package.  It could be a simple sticker, or handwritten on. That simple act usually will but them more at ease.  It may not prevent them from destroying your cache, but you stand a higher chance of avoiding damage to it.

Location

Nothing can do more to have your geocache destroyed than where it is located.  Police stations, government buildings, freeway overpasses, electrical substations and bridges tend to be places that make them nervous.  And wearing heavy 90 pound suits up steep inclines to find a paint can full of swag is not a great idea.

Container looks.

Having things with wires hanging from them, duct tape, Pipe looking containers, PVC capped tubes, are all poor ideas.  Though they may believe they are harmless, they have to treat them as if dangerous, especially if they are near a sensitive area, and are missing labels your cache may go bye bye.

A lot of what we were told was a simple "use your head"  We were thanked for his overtime that sent him on a few vacations.  He understood that it was a fun hobby for many of us, and did not really ever come out and slam us or the hobby.  it was more of an information session, and question and answer.

Afterward we went out and saw their equipment.  The armored vans, trailers that carry bomb robots and equipment, bomb making areas and some materials they use.  It was all really interesting. 

Hopefully both sides will take something out of the experience.  Be careful in cache placement, and design.  Label it, even if it is with a sharpy pen.  Keep it out of bad areas. 

Opencaching.com opens doors.

Well after all this time, the door is finally open to the website.  This is very patchy blog entry, most of it is rambling thoughts of skimming through the sites.

I sat down and started to look through again, after my first run through their system a month ago.

Here are my reactions.

Tons of dead links.  I ran into a lot of dead ends.  Some of my pages seemed to freeze.  I could not get anywhere until I started over with the main page.

There was no verification when i joined, and when firennice was taken, it assigned me (without asking) the FIRENNICE150 handle.  Apparently lower case has not been figured out at Garmin.

I took the time to enter the cache that I owned.  There are only three cache types traditional, puzzle, and multi.  So if you were hoping for something else then good luck.  It went in ok, and it calculated the initial "awesomeness" of the cache for me. 

There was no review.  I repeat  there was no review. That surprised me.  Most know that a lot of caches are never listed, and many others are asked to modify them.  I get one cache a week that is in the middle of the ocean, others in wilderness area.  There apparently is no checking,.  I also get a few dozen "update coordinate" notices here in Utah every week, but I don't see that ability here.

The guidelines are odd... very odd.

Under Rules and etiquette.

The real rules here...Family Friendly, no digging, or trespassing.

Under how to hide they add.

Seek permission, saturation (.1 miles) , avoid places that set off alarms, keep others save  

"Don’t hide your caches on cliffs, down abandoned mines, in trenches or anywhere that might put the safety of geocachers in peril."

As a cache owner there does not appear to be a way to delete my cache, or disable it?   Apparently it is there forever. Unless I cannot see it.  No one has logged anything.  But there are no controls that I see to delete bogus logs, or entries.   So who knows?

Searching was sporadic.  But with imfrog2002 and mine the only two in Utah there were no options.

You can import your finds, and your caches. So your info tracks

I could not get the link that report a cache that is against the guidelines to work. 

Summary

This is beta, I hope.  Messy, and many things that seem to be a future issue.  I do think that opencaching.us is better at the moment, but the other cache site is cleaner, and better to use, and it has more cache options.

Deleting my caches and logs on my caches seems bad, tracking me on two sites?  how does it interact between the two?  (more on those thoughts later).

I don't see anything appealing.  With cache rating coming on GC.com soon, there is nothing that would draw me over to the site.  I will keep playing to see what I get.  

No review and check of new members opens it up to attack.  Spamming the site with fake caches, grabbing caching names.  I wish i could keep the same name, but apparently I cant.

It does work to transfer info between the two sites.

Opencaching.com, Terracaching.

It has been a while since I posted last.  We are at the end of the month at work and the push is on.  There is also a bit of news and a few things that are going on right now.  So I wanted to take a moment and throw a few thoughts down.

Opencaching.com

They have a new splash page now.  Some weird blue thing in the corner. Perhaps an evil squirrel?  I have not seen many blue animals running around.   Oh well.    I did translate the German.  I got lucky in assuming that it was German

Soon also under a stump in your proximity: Free of charge, openly, in your language!

Now it appears they are just running the site trying to build buzz until they actually do something.  I was getting a lot of hits from Garmin, and their competitors.   Things have tapered off recently, it seems the buzz is fading a little.  In my opinion anyway.  I would have guessed they would release it just before Thanksgiving, just to get things moving while all the pod casts and forums were discussing it.   Now most of them will be moving on.

Terracaching

It seems the site owner and manager is throwing in the towel.  The talk from a few people in the forums is that they just walked away after it took too long for improvements to the site to be made.  It appears now that many people have asked to take over the site.  Who knows what will become of that site now.  Perhaps the pressure of a Garmin site, and the issues made the owner want out.  It seems like an ideal time.   Will it be around?  I would guess so.  Some cacher will buy it just to say they own the site.  Even if it does not do much.

Update on 2010-12-02 19:33 by firennice

It just occured to me... it said "under a stump near you"    I wonder if they will rotate it to "under a LPC near you."  They seem to keep changing their title.  Lol

Bonolo and Dorkteam6

Many of us are worried about two friends and cachers Bonolo (Jason) and Dorkteam6 (Chris).  They left to go canyoneering and geocaching in a slot canyon in southern Utah.  Bother are very experienced climbers and back country hikers/climbers. 

They left on Saturday and have not been heard from since.  Search and Rescue have been called out.  A helicopter should be there tomorrow morning if the weather is good enough.  The canyons they are going into were difficult, and dangerous in the dark. 

They found one vehicle with camping equipment and an itinerary on the seat.  However the person I spoke with did not know if it was theirs, or where the other vehicle was.   There are many possibilities.  They do not know what canyon they went into, though there is a good guess.

Please keep them in your prayers.  It is cold tonight.

Update on 2010-11-22 15:34 by firennice

There is no new news yet.  Hopefully weather is clear and a helicopeter can get up and check out the area.  

Update on 2010-11-22 17:46 by firennice

It appears to have worked out ok.  The helicopter found them, and word is they are getting them out.  So there were two more than I had heard of.

Rumor has it they got stuck and tried another way out, and had no luck. More to come when available.

Update on 2010-11-23 03:41 by firennice

They are all home and warm.  For those who have heard/seen the new movie 127 hours, this is in the same area. 

Geocaching, Opencaching, other sites and the future.

So we are apparently moving towards the arrival of a new site.  I had a few ideas about the site.

I only believe there is room for one site that you pay for.  Would I drop geocaching.com for another?  No.  Would I pay for another site?  No.  It would have to be substantially better then the geocaching site and I don't see that happening.   I also have invested a lot into this site, and the phone apps that work with it.

The battle of the free sites.   I have not seen much in the free arena for a while.  Navicaching, and Terracaching seem to be languishing.  At least here in Utah.  I counted 40 caches for Terracaching and 100 for Navicaching.  Many are listed on all three sites, and many are in hard to reach locations.    Because I tend to geoaching alone these are out of the question.   My wife would kill me if I died in the back country geocaching.  I am serious she would hunt down my ghost and kill it again and again, and say "I told you to never go alone." 

Opencaching.us is the newest kid on the block, and is another novelty at the moment.  Yet also seems slow out of the gate.  Well at the same rate as geocaching was at first.  In a few months they have garnered about 350 caches.  Slow going but still to early to know if they can be as successful as the other two.

I actually think there are three ways that a website can survive, and thrive.   In today's market you need money.  So your site either needs to make money off of advertising, ask you to pay, or dump money into it. 

Paid memberships.. Geocaching and Terracaching

Advertising - the original Opencaching and Navicaching

The money dump - Garmins opencaching.com

So I dont see a contest between Geocaching and Terracaching. There is not enough caches to realy make me work at terracaching.

Advertising and selling products (t-shirts, hats, etc) is a hard haul.  If you are not the big boy on the block your advertising income is pretty low.

Dumping money.  Apparently this is free. I saw no hint of how they intend to make money off the product.  Advertising could be there.  Would Garmin allow Delorme and Magellan to advertise?  Would they even want to?  My guess is no, unless there was no other game in town.  They may want to use it to pimp their own products. 

The hard part is that it costs money to run a site.  Programming, so it looks professional and up to date; bandwidth; product development; advertisements; all of them start to add up. Some strike an equilibrium.  Many of the sites listed above do not have a full time staff, or even a part time staff.  It is all volunteers working on their own time.  They try to find that balance where the costs and the income meet.  Updates are put off because of lack of time or money, upgrades consist of new cache types, or maps, and advertising is zero because the money is not there.

If a company is not making money?  Why is it around?  How many advertising campaigns last five years?  One or two years is unusual now days.   That is my concern with the opencaching.com.  If Garmin is dumping money to keep it up to date, how long will that last.  If there is no income it will fade.  Eventually a change in corporate leadership and someone says.  "Why are we dumping a half million dollars into this again?"

Advertising?  I know many geocachers that have said they may be nearing a point to look for a new gps unit. The other (non-Garmin) units are getting better, and are made for geocaching.  If Garmin stabs us in the back why stay with them?  Only time can tell. Hopefully their customer service for the website is better than the service for their products or they are in trouble.

Are there benefits? Of course.  There are those that will have another outlet.  Some are never happy with the way things go and like to have other options.  Competition means more innovation, and faster changes in the market.  New ideas will pop up and people will move them into the market faster.   Customer service becomes more important.

Do I worry about the future, no.   I do not think it is in the cards for opencaching to take down geocaching.  If it is free and intends to be a free service, I do not think they can make money in a corporate environment that will keep it alive for 10+ years.   If they become a paid site, what is the advantage over the existing service? 

My prediction with only having had a cursory look of the site:  It will be the most successful of the non Geocaching.com sites.   I see many that are disgruntled going over there, and people that want to protect their cache sites cross listing their caches.  I do not see a group where caching is a side venture to sell gps being more successful than a group thats living depends on success.  

Just my 2 cents from the porch.