Thank Geodness For Twitter

Very early yesterday morning there was a fire and subsequent power outage at the Fisher Plaza building in Seattle, Washington, which is the data center that houses the Geocaching.com servers. This resulted in the web site being down for over 24 hours, and a lot of disgruntled geocachers. You can read more about the details of the damage and the server outage on Jeremy Irish's blog post.

Lucky for those of us that follow Jeremy on Twitter, or monitored the #fisherfire Twitter hashtag, we were kept abreast of the events and the status of the repairs as the day progressed. For those geocachers that weren't aware of the problem, and especially those who use the geocaching.com iphone application, or GeocacheNavigator on their Blackberry, who rely on a network connection to gc.com, it must have been very frustrating. Of course, those of us who geocache the old fashioned way; by maintaining their cache lists and information in an offline database like GSAK, weren't impacted as much.

But I have to say, following the Twitter activity on this topic throughout the day was quite entertaining. You could read the panic and confusion in peoples' "Tweets" as they tried to figure out why they couldn't access gc.com. This was ultimately followed by relief once those of us who knew what was happening reassured them that there was nothing wrong with their ISP's, or their modems, or their iPhones, etc. Here is a sampling of some of the tweets from yesterday:

• I guess geocaching.com is down because of #fisherfire... I should have checked Twitter before pressing F5 so many times.
•  #geocaching Software for the #IPHONE is now completely useless? Says: No Network. Unable to search for caches. No network is available.
• #fisherfire explains why #geocaching app for #iPHONE is down. Sorry guys! Will wait patiently for the fix!
  
• Long live the offline #geocaching database! Long live #GSAK !!
• 5 DNF's, aided by the site being down all day.
• trying to research some geocaches (#geocaching ) but the blasted #fisherfire has ruined my plans.
• who else is bitting their nails over the #fisherfire? I had plans to go #geocaching.
• i finally bought the #geocaching app for my iphone and now their data center is on fire.
• been #geocaching, found 11, can't log 'em, bored now!

I wonder if there was this much panic during the stock market crash of 1929? I have to say, it sure was nice having a service like Twitter to turn to for geocaching.com web site status information. Now, if Twitter ever goes down, then we're all in trouble. For information more about Twitter and Geocaching, see this earlier post.


Cache On!

Geocaching Live

In case you weren't aware, a new beta service has been launched by Groundspeak called "Geocaching Live". Geocaching Live is a new "project focused on real-time social interactions among geocachers. While geocaching outdoors you can post logs, images and video related to your current geocaching adventure for others to see in real-time!".


While you can follow people's caching adventures in real-time from your desktop PC, it's really intended for use on mobile phones and PDA's. Unfortunately, my GPS-less mobile phone is  not one of the supported models. If you look at the live map, you'll notice that the service seems to be more popular in Europe than in the U.S. at the moment. I have to admit that it is kind of fun to follow other cachers in real-time:

If you have one of the supported mobile devices, you may want to give it a try and see what you think of it. If you do, please post your experiences here, as I'm very curious to hear your reactions and see if this service will start to enjoy widespread use.


Thanks, and Cache On!


 

New Geocaching iPhone App. Version Released

You may have noticed that Grounspeak released version 2.1 of their Geocaching iPhone/iPodTouch application this week. If you're not familiar with this tool, you can read more about it here, or, visit the Apple iTunes Store download page.

Some of the features added to this latest version include:

• Updated user interface.
  
• Three different map options now available: Street, Topo, and Satellite.
• For each map type, you can select the map source.
• Custom waypoints can be added to the navigation map - a must for multi-caches.
• Your active pocket queries can be downloaded to your device and accessed while you are outside of network coverage!
  

That last bullet is my favorite, especially since I have an iPodTouch and not an iPhone. I usually bring the Touch with me when I'm out caching, but only to listen to music. Up until now, it had no real caching capabilities since the only way I could get geocaching or navigation information was if I happened to be near a wi-fi hot spot. I can't think of too many caching locations I've been to where a wi-fi signal was available.

But now that I can download my pocket queries to the device, I may start using the iPodTouch more than my current smartphone/cachemate solution. Following are some screenshots of the new pocket query feature on the iPodTouch:

 New Interface With Pocket Query Option

  List Of My Active Pocket Queries

 

Selected Pocket Query Ready to Download

 

 

List of Saved Pocket Queries on Device

Cache List From Selected Pocket Query

(each one contains all the cache info.)

The other nice thing is that downloading the pocket queries to the Touch goes much faster than loading them into cachemate on my smartphone. My only complaint so far is that not all of my pocket queries show up on the active list in my device, and I haven't figured out why that is.

But for now, this is good enough to start testing to decide if it will become my new paperless caching solution. Stay tuned.

Cache On!

Get Your Log Sheets Here

So you've been geocaching for a while now, and you've decided you're ready to give back to the community and hide your first cache. Well, good for you. But before you do, you'll definitely want to check out geocaching.com's brief guidelines and helpful hints in hiding your first geocache.

Whether you're getting ready to hide your first cache or your hundreth, one of the most time consuming parts of the process is creating an appropriate log sheet for your container. Lucky for us, there are plenty of kind cachers out there who have already created numerous log sheet templates and made them available online.

Following are links to some of the web sites I've used to download and print different log sheets for some of my caches:

TechBlazer
This site contains a slew of different size, styles, and colors of log sheets; free for the downloading.

Cachebox
You can purchase rite in the rain sheets here, or scroll further down and print out pdf versions of 4 different sized templates.

Micro-cache log sheet, by Lil Devil
A micro log sheet in MS Word format that you can modify to suit your needs.

I'm sure there are other sites out there besides these that provide pre-made logs, but these are definitely three of my favorite. Now, go hide that cache!

Cache On!

New and Improved "Cache Along a Route" Filter

With the summer traveling season approaching, it's nice to know that geocaching.com allows you to select out just the caches you want along a route that you define (point A to point B), which you can then load into your GPS receiver. Those of you who have used this function in the past may be interested to know that there is a new and improved means to accomplish this task. You can still do it the old fashioned way if you prefer, but why would you when it's much simpler now?

Now all you do is click on the "Create A Route" link under the "My Profile" page, select your begin and end points and your search radius (buffer), and then "Save Route Changes":

This takes you to the "Create/Edit a Route" page, where you can add additional information about your route, and then save it as a pocket query and/or a gpx file:


Once you save the route as a pocket query, you will now have access to a list of all the caches along that route, within a given radius of the route, for your use. It doesn't get much simpler or sweeter.

Cache On!

The Saga Continues

I recently posted a piece on a Challenge Cache that a friend and I are doing called the Lil Devil Challenge which requires the successful geocacher to find all the hidden caches in Mt. Diablo State Park. During our most recent outing, we were able to find 9 out of the 10 caches we attempted that day.

One of the problems we're having, besides a few DNF's, is that new cahces keep getting added within the Park boundaries almost as fast as we find the existing hides. Three new caches were hidden there just in the last week.

In any event, here are our current stats:

• Total Finds: 37
• Total DNFs: 4
  
• Total Yet-To-Find: 38

You can follow along on this map of our progress.

Cache On!

Shout Out To Geocachers

This post is simply meant to thank all you geocachers out there for hiding your treasures for the rest of us to find. Even though I live near some of the best parkland and open space areas imaginable, if it weren't for the caches that you all hide, I most likely wouldn't visit these locations nearly as often as I do.

On a recent outing, I had decided to visit Anthony Chabot Regional Park, located in the hills above Oakland, California, to grab a few new caches that had been placed there. Of course, I brought my bike, as this park has miles of dirt trails for horses, hikers and bicyclists. The trails are lined with huge Eucalyptus and Oak trees everywhere you go, which made the ride even nicer (I almost forgot I was looking for caches at times). And even though spring is quickly turning into summer out west, there was still quite a bit of Monkey Flower blooming.

 

After finding five caches in this park, I headed north to the neighboring Redwood Regional Park. This amazing place is home to a forest of Coast Redwood trees, and I love it whenever a new cache is hidden here, as it gives me an excuse to return. I was after one particular micro cache on this day; but it was definitely the journey that made this visit worth while. Here's a sample of what I saw:

 

Towering Giants

 

Fern Grotto

 

Trail to the Cache

It's worth noting that the location of the first picture was only 6 miles away from the others, which speaks to the tremendous natural diversity this region has to offer. So once again cachers, thank you for getting me out there to enjoy it all!

Cache On!