One worked, the other didn't.

Book Deal

A week and a half ago I interviewed with a book publisher to update the Idiots guide to Geocaching.  I thought things went really well.  However, someone else did much better.  So my change faded away.  Hopefully things will move forward.  Maybe that is the spark to do my own book.  It would be fun, and a challenge, and a lot of work.  

I had a feeling when i contacted them last week.  They were supposed to have made the decision, but had decided to interview another.  In the real world that usually points at one of two things.  The boss has asked you to interview his relative or good friend.  So you do that just to be nice and get it over with.  The other option is that they were not entirely satisfied and decided to add another into the mix.  The nice part is that I am one of four others that are depressed today.

Geocaching Merit Badge

This weekend I teach Geocaching at Brigham Young University.  Actually it is to a ton of scouts.  120 to be exact.  Three classes of forty.  So I have been throwing together a power point.  There is another teacher and we each have a 2-3 assistants.

Well, at the moment I am done with  my power point.  I am looking for a place to upload it.  It does not seem to work well here. The file is 15meg and throws an error.  It is not very useful outside of scouts as it has a lot of time on Safety, first aid, Leave no trace, etc.  Thought it is a presentation.. the presenter still needs to talk about a lot to make it clear.

Farewell to Steve

About 30+ years ago I walked into a classroom and saw the computer in the back corner, an Apple II.  For the next 3-4 years, that computer did more for me than many others.  It was actually an apple II+

The clunky and massive computer. Built in keyboard and so much more.

The specs for this monster...

48k of memory. (not meg, not gig, but k).

Drives held 128k floppy disks.  Big disks.  There were some odd colors.  16 total if i remember.  But all your text were green on a black screen.  Unless you programmed it different.

Games, programming, formating cute girls disks. It was an amazing maching for a nerd from the day.

I look back now and think of that as the beginning.  My first computer I owned was the original after market Mac upgrade.  That was ten years later.

I would never return to them.  CAD software took me another way.  Never to return.

It did form me.  It taught me to work with them, and not to be afriad.  I went to college to go into computer science.  Something new, and exiting.  I never did continue that.  I realized I like to draw more than I liked to program.

I helped others, teaching others how to use them, and the Macs that followed.  I spend many times in college computer labs showing people how the Macs worked, how to avoid viruses, and planting funny ones on others. Those days are long gone now.  But they did form me and my future.

Thanks Steve Jobs for the vision you and Wozniak had. Thanks for telling people they wanted a computer in their home.  Thanks for making the Apple II and Macintoshes.  they pushed me on your path.

Though I do not follow apple any longer I feel part of me has moved on. Sorry you moved on at the young age that you did. Farewell, and my condolences to your family and friends.

Opencaching.com update.

Helloooooo all.

Thought I would chime in with a few notes, and interesting observations.

Opencaching.com

Not to be confused with opencaching.us .dk or some of the original opencaching crowd. I am speaking of the ones by Garmin.

It was interesting to note that this last week there were fewer caches on opencaching.com than the week before.

A friend that collects the data from OC.com  pointed it out to me earlier this week.  I did not ask him to use his numbers here so I will not toss him under the bus for all to see.  But there are a few things to note.  The site is not quite a year old.  They have about 17,500 caches, that were added.  Of those it appears 5-10% are unique.  So most of you will go out out find a cache and will find that more than 9 out of 10 are already on the geocaching.com website.

Opencaching stats. Top Total, Bottom new additions.

You can see the huge jump in cache submission when they had their GPS unit giveaway.  There was none when they did their chirp giveaway.  At least I don't see one. (I cannot remember when they did that.  

It could be that things are leveling off. It appears that way.  Most that I have talked to locally have not noticed a find on their caches. Some of the finds are imports.  You can import your finds from other caches, so they will appear.  So even logs that are there may be copies of the logs from geocaching.com.

Advertising

On another note.. there was an ad in backpacker magazine for opencaching.  The pics were sent to me.  I did find them rather funny.

If you look to the right you get the image that I was sent.  Below is the blowup. 

Yep you got it.  On a advertisement that is for Garmin's opencaching.com there is a nice picture of a GPS unit.  If you notice the GPS unit is showing a GC# or a geocaching.com cache.

Time to have a talk with your Advertising people .

Summary

I wonder what is in store.  Most people that I know of have never heard of the site still.  Or if they have they have not desire to do anything with it.  It does not bode well for opencaching. They are approaching the 20,000 cache milestone.  Assuming there are no more geocides, where people just archive all they have.

I think they may become a niche market.  Though I am not sure what there corner is. 

the Opencaching network seems very innovative.  They are trying new things and doing things that the other sites are not trying.

Terracaching has its "private entry".  You have to find sponsors, and people that trust you.  Their idea is to push the hide quality.  I am not sure that hold true anymore.

Navicache... meh... not sure.  Just being an alternative is not enough. 

Garmin has tossed some interesting ideas into the works.  I think it has pushed Groundspeak to respond faster.  In the past they may have planned Project A for January, B for March, C for May.  Now it appears they are working on A, B, and C for January, with C,D,and E lined for for Feb, March.  They are tackling more, faster, and trying new things.

All of this is good for caching.  What people will do next.. we have to see.

Update on 2011-10-03 16:50 by firennice

UTAG Event and Cache Day

Prologue

I received an phone call earlier in the week from Peanuts Parents.  He was wondering if I would go out to the event with him this last weekend with him.

Friday night. - The Drive

Well after a quick review of things with my wife, I got the green light.  So Friday night we headed south to Kanosh.  He has a little cabin there. 

The drive was a long one, about two hours.  Ok well it was not really long, but it was long enough for me.  I am not big on many hours in the car.  The plus is that I was able to grab caches on the way south. Normally that is a no no.  Kids are not fond of stopping for a lot of caches.  We took the time to find a mystery cache in Nephi, then stopping in Fillmore to grab another cache.

When we got to Kanosh, Utah just as it was just getting dark.  He showed me around the area, inside and out.  There is a great view of Utah's West desert with various cinder cones and old extinct volcanoes.

PeanutsParents had a ton of caches. And I do mean a ton.  So we spent a good part of the night talking and putting together many of the containers for his cache run.

Sunrise over Utah's west desert. Saturday Morning

The next morning is when the adventure began.  We left early in the morning. About 7:00 AM if my mind is correct. Things are fuzzy for me early in the morning.  We packed things up, and got everything ready.  Neither of us wanted to sleep too long.

There are no stores in Kanosh.  So food is what be had brought with us.  Well, that was some Jolly Ranchers and a few V8's.  what more could you ask for.

Our drive began and we stopped for one or two caches that Peanuts had never grabbed before even though he was nearby.  He had left them for the perfect moment. Now.

Then our drive included him placing a number of caches.  So as we headed into town and he took me to a few caches, we started to see many of the nice caches that I had never been to. 

Then off into the desert.

The desert west of Kanosh is pretty sparse.  This year as you walk around there are a number of desert flowers blooming, and a little green.  It has been pretty wet (for a desert) this year.

We headed to a string of caches that had been placed earlier this year down a little dirt road. Well that is where things got strange.  The road was no more than a few car tracks into the desert.  We needed to go three miles.  So off we went in our truck.  (Bad Idea #1) Those car tracks dwindled until we were on a ATV trail.  That was getting a little nerve wracking.  Then it turned into a cow trail only a few hundred yards from where we were going.  Then little by little a few tracks joined ours. (We did get the caches)

I am not sure that was the wisest choice, but it was not our last dumb one.

The race to the event.The roadless road.

We headed off to the event so we would not be late.  The event was about 30-40 miles to the north. Well we were heading west.  In the desert.  At one point we had a choice.  Head south, 8 miles to the road, or take a dirt road to the north. 

Well I voted for north.  It seemed logical, we were going that way.

Bad idea #2 - Eventually the road got nasty.  very nasty.  In fact it was not there.  You could see remains. It had been a road where they placed a power-line up out in the desert.  in the 70's.  but not much of one now.

I admitted that I had made a bad decision. Peanuts decided perhaps we would drive on. (Bad Idea #3).  So off we went.  I snapped a pic out the window.  You can see where the road was, but not much of a road, and few have traveled it in years.

Happily we reached the rail line and there was an option to go North or South (there was a road there).  Well once again, why go south to reach or destination in the North. (Bad Idea #4).  It was 7 miles.  but the roads were even worse.  I wish I had taken a photo or video.  Eventually the road turned into a two-track trail, then a single track. We could see where the road had been. It would have been in the 50's.  We traveled wash outs and horrible ledges. And eventually it faded to a cow trail.  Eventually as we came within a mile the road started to appear again. People had traveled it from the other end anyway.

We got to the event an hour late.  Oh yea... did I forget to mention we had a flat?  When we finally hit the highway we found out that we had a flat.  The tire was so hot I could hardly touch it. Same with the lug nuts.  Ahhh life int he desert.   Welll not many were at the event, but it was nice anyway.

Hunting for the benchmark.Drive home

The drive home was an afternoon with benchmarks.  Peanuts was putting caches near them.  We actually found three that were placed by other cachers doing the same thing.  So we were pre publishing ftfs on them.   Ahhh the joy of people with the same ideas.

We had fun hunting for them on the way.  Especially the ones buried, that we actually had to find. 

Benchmarks can be way off anyway.  A hundred feet or more. If you can find the sign marking them you may be in luck.  But even then they are buried in the sand in the desert.  So we had to work to drag them out.

That was the afternoon drive home.  We found another 10 benchmarks, making for about 20 benchmarks on the day, with about 50 caches. Plus Peanuts placed another 25-30.  So it was a long fun day.  We were tired when we made it back home.

Update on 2011-09-27 05:15 by firennice

10 years

Normally about everything that I write has something to do with geocaching, sometimes a scout post is mixed in.  However this time it is not. It is a look back 10 years go.  Tuesday Sept 11, 2001. 

I woke up that morning, and do not remember much about it. Scrambling to get things together. I was surprised to hear what was going on while I was driving into work.  Apparently a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. It was a long drive, I drove slow to listen to what happened.  There was a lot going on, and the reporters were trying to keep up with what was taking place.   They also had no real idea.

I was running late, and the radio reporter for KSL had a TV going on at the same time, and different feeds from the internet.  Trying to keep up on the information that was coming in.

I was pulling around a corner leaving the old highway to head into Spanish fork and he said. We are getting reports of a second plane going into the other tower, then a few moments later he conformed it while the tv replayed the image of the impact and explosion of the other plane.  I pulled over. to the side of the road.

I am pretty sure I heard the radio say it, or I just thought it.  "We are at war".  I was in shock, and tears came to my eyes.  I wondered at that point who we were going to go after, where would they be?  I guessed the middle east, but who?  What would become of my kids what, and what world would they grow up in.

When I got to work I had the only computer that was not in the office.  Calls came in all day long.  Everyone did not have a cell phone at that point.  People were coming over all day.  There were notes of bombs going off, other planes crashing.

I remember sitting in a pizza shop for lunch watching cnn, and the towers came down, and seeing the hole in the pentagon.

That night i remember telling my son that the world had changed.  We thought ouselves above all the fighting from around the world.  He would grow up in a world different than I. And he has.

So I wanted to take a moment to thank those that have died for the country, have fought overseas, in the towers and in the planes. thank you.