November 27, 2010

Spending Black Friday Outdoors

While most people like to spend Black Friday fighting for parking spaces, enduring traffic jams, and locked in elbow to elbow combat with masses of people in climate controlled shopping malls, my friends and I opt for the antithesis. We spent this Black Friday hiking and geocaching in the gorgeous Las Trampas Regional Wilderness near San Ramon, California. The details of our hike are available below through Everytrail.

Black Friday Hike



Find trail maps for California

Hope you all had as nice of a Thanksgiving, and day after, as we did.

Cache On!

November 21, 2010

News Flash Mob

Here's a quick burst of random, geocaching-related current events:


And finally, a shout out to my buddy Jeff who just added his 7,000th unique beer bottle to his collection (you should see his garage). That's over three times as many cache finds as I have. Quite a feat, considering he has to travel further and further to find bottles he doesn't already own - kind of similar to the dilemma long-time cachers face.

Cache On!

November 13, 2010

Release Notes

A few days ago, Groundspeak added some significant feature upgrades to the geocaching.com website. You can see the entire list here, or read my abbreviated summary below.


  • Souvenirs will be awarded retroactively.
  • You can now run your "My Finds" pocket query every 3 days instead of every 7.
  • A new Trackable Type has been added for trackable tattoos.
  • You can now mass delete caches on your watch list, rather than having to do one at a time.
  • Reformatted Coordinate Change Logs for clarity.
  • Added a new link on the cache page; "you logged this as found on..." if it is a cache you found.

In addition, there have been a number of bug fixes as well.
And finally, the promise of Stats, Ratings and Maps "coming soon".

And last but not least, the Windows Phone 7 Geocaching Application is now available. You can read more about it and download the application from Groundspeak's Windows Phone 7 Application page.


Cache On!

November 6, 2010

Badges, Badges Everywhere

I'm starting to think everyone is going badge-crazy. It all started with Foursquare and the nice little badges they add to your profile for your "check-ins". And, with all the different types of badges available, the more likely people are to do things they perhaps wouldn't normally do just to score another badge.


Well, it wasn't long before we started seeing badges infiltrate the geocaching world. One of the most notable examples, yet not the first, was the recent launch of "Souvenirs" on Geocaching.com. Souvenirs are virtual pieces of art that you can discover and display on your gc.com profile page.


As I mentioned, gc.com was not the first site to offer geocaching badges. The statistics generating website, mygeocachingprofile.com, has been providing a variety of "geoachievement badges" since its inception.


But in case you crave way, way more geocaching badges than these two sites currently offer, your prayers have been answered by BadgeGenBadgeGen is a GSAK add-in (called a macro) that analyzes your databases, and generates badges based on various criteria. Just take a look at all of the different badges available here. This should keep you busy for a while.


Cache On!