Provo Tabernacle Burns

I know this is normally about geocaching, but was sad to me. 

In the mid to late 90's I lived in downtown Provo.  Single and passing the time I would take many walks throught the downtown district.   One of the features is the Provo Tabernacle.  It is the gathering place that is used every week by the local LDS church when they wish to have a conference or a gathering for a number of local wards (parishes).

It is also used for many community concert and choir events and being in the center of the city many county activities surround the building.

Over the years I have taken a number of pictures of the building.  Black and Whites (that I need to find now).  Now that has came to an end.  Finished in 1890 after 15 years it was some of the nicest woodwork, architecture,  and stained glass fin the state from that era.  

I feel like I lost an old friend. It will be missed.

Here is a link to more pictures from before the fire, from the historical website.  A warning they are large and it takes a while to load the page.

Stats, Maps, and Favorites.

They have been discussing these changes for some time, in some cases for a long time.  Ideas were tossed around and off they went.  Then a few months ago the reviewers had a sneak peak at some of the ideas, and others we were told what direction they were going.  More ideas were tossed around, and now we are coming to a culmination of what I would imagine is 6-8 months of work on the projects.

All of this is subject to change, and barring a massive collapse of the system, or finding a huge bug that has been undiscovered we will get a number of fantastic new changes to the site.  So without further discussion......

Stats

There will now be a new page on your profile.  It will house geocachings new stats page.  This will be a compilation of a number of the commonly gathered stats.  There are plans to make more additions to this, but this is the initial roll out of the information.   You will be able to hide your stats if you wish, but the default is a planned "on".  It will be tied to the Premium Member feature, and I am seeking more info on that.  I should know soon. 

The stats page will look very familiar.  We see many of those out and about now.

Maps

This is really cool, really cool.  Did I mention it was cool?  When I first heard of it and saw the link to a movie I kind of ignored it.   After hearing how cool it was I went and actually pulled up the video.  A photo/screen shot cannot really do it justice. 

The biggest change....... wait for the drum roll please...... No more 500 cache limit.  Actually the limit will be infinite.  You could (in theory) see all the caches at one time.

The maps are larger, and far more dynamic.  Zooming in and out looks very smooth.  Much more than the one we use now and especially when you get to 400 caches now it is very choppy, but with 3000 it looked smooth.  :D   woo hoo.

Favorites

This is a huge change for the site.  Where the other steps make the experience on the site very useful.  This is a game changer in how you may actually look for caches.

Based on the number of finds you will get a favorite point. 

These will be earned by finding caches.  Woo hoo, finding caches give you points.. everyone likes that.  Except now a you will be able to award points to your favorite caches.  

The problem with many averaging systems is people.  I may rate a persons find high because he is my friend, or I love all power trails so I rate them high, or mountain peaks, I may even love LPC caches, or quick finds.   Other people may hate my cacher friend, power trails or LPC's, and only love those that challenge. 

In essence votes start to cancel others out.  You never see a 1 star or a 5 star.  or even a 1.5-4.5 if many votes are given.  they tend to all end up in the 2-4 range, and over time a 4.5 star cache degrades, and cache quality also.  The system quickly becomes useless.

Now you can take the points that you earn, and donate them to your favorite caches.

On a cache page you will have the ability to add your favorite points to caches, and take them away.

Voila simple and clean.

You will be able to go to the page and see who liked the cache.

Your page will tell you where the points are, so you can go back and reclaim points if you find better caches, or when you realize that a LPC, or nano cache is not really your favorite.

Last but not least you will be able to sort by favorites.  Look for those that others found most excellent.

Hopefully you get the idea.

Wrap up

Premium member.  that is the magic word that I did not mention much.  Most of these functions are going to be available to premium members only in varying degrees.   Premium members will be able to give favorite points (to avoid spamming the site with fake logs, and likes).  I do think this is a game changer.  You can only give them to caches you have found.  So once a cache is found you can mark it as a favorites. 

So start dusting off the cobwebs from your mind.  Think of the best caches you have visited, so you can mark them, and then you can find them on the new map while checking your fantastic stats.

(Screenshots used were courtesy of Groundspeak)

Update on 2010-12-15 15:34 by firennice

On a quick follow up.  Some skimmed over my opening note where i mentioned the changes were due in the next few weeks (before Christmas).  The site upgrade on the 14th had more to do with the site hardware, and some other upgrades not the monthly website upgrade.

Update on 2010-12-16 03:26 by firennice

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