Recently in Geocaching Category

I had a really good time yesterday at Grove City when Jonathan and I went to see Balloons Off Broadway. This is an annual event where hot air balloons are launched, tethered "rides" in a balloon are available, a band plays and then a night glow is performed. 

After a couple of quick geocaches, we settled in to watch the balloons being prepared. Eventually we decided to just start taking photos instead of just waiting from our spot so we had a good 30-40 minutes taking photos as the balloons were prepared and launched. After that we jumped in the car and caught up with the balloon chase vehicles and hoped to get some pictures of the balloons landing. Unfortunately we weren't able to get close enough but it was great fun joining in the convoy of people following the balloons and getting some photos on the way. Fortunately I had got my 2 way radio with me so we set it to scan and listened to the conversations between the balloonists and the trucks which was very funny. It was a bit disconcerting when one of them said the battery on his radio was about out and he would have to resort to hand signals - I would have been a bit concerned if I was a guest in the balloon and heard the operator say that!  There were also some pretty funny comments about the landing sites chosen and apparently someone's basement was really awesome.

We then headed back to the launch location for the glow - it wasn't as spectacular as I hoped but still fun to watch. I managed to get a couple of fairly decent photos - it was the first time I'd even done night shots like this so there was a lot of experimenting. In the meantime, the band The British Invasion were playing and they were pretty good. They play covers of various British bands such as the Beatles and play all over Ohio - well worth seeing them if they play near you.

Pictures of the event are at my Balloons Off Broadway gallery and a few highlights at my Flickr gallery. Finally a video of a balloon being inflated (along with the hissing of the air) and a backing track of "I get by with a little help from my friends" which I thought was quite appropriate uploaded to YouTube (below)

Zooomr are giving away free pro accounts to bloggers (like me) that sign up and post an image from their servers so the image below is my deer photo taken with the cameraphone last night whilst out to do a geocache - GCWFY1. Funny thing is that I can't see any information about what a pro account is on their site - a free account gives you 50mb storage (plus 1mb per user you refer).

 Found my 400th cache yesterday - a great day out caching - thanks for the company Team Lefor!

Kristen woke me up yesterday morning with the phrase "Its a nlce day today, you should go geocaching".Needless to say I didn't need asking twice. I had a good 5 hours caching and managed to do 7 caches, 2 of which I had tried to do before and had failed and 1 other cache that I couldn't find but was probably already missing. Whilst out doing one of the caches I saw about 6 or 7 deer which were pretty curious about what I was doing in their woods. I had a great time, got loads of exercise with all the walking and saw some nice animals, now that is what it is all about. Update I've corrected the flickr links so that you will be able to access the photos now. Thanks Kristen!

I've requested that the library get a copy of The Dead Place by Stephen Booth as apparently its based around the police finding a geocache and contains some pretty realistic geocaching information.
Update Unfortunately I've just realised the book is only just out in the Uk and not out in the US for some time - next year :-( I'll have to get a copy when I go over to the UK sometime.

Waymarking is a spinoff from geocaching where rather than hiding cache containers in places, you now go to a certain place (or can obtain the location of certain places). An example are Trigpoints, libraries etc. As the domain has just been launched today there is not much information in there but later it will be populated with all the locationless, virtual and webcam caches.
I've already added a wifi point, my blog location and the Dublin Library.

Mike linked to Synctoy's release and I downloaded it yesterday and started playing.
I did have one peculiarity in that the second time I did a sync after removing the usb disk and plugging it in again it decided to sync some files again (even though nothing would have changed). This has, so far, been the only time it happened but I'm very impressed with the developers as they saw my comment on Mikes blog about this and then emailed me to ask for more information on the problem. Totally unexpected as this is a powertoy, not supported by Microsoft AND my comments are not visible on Mikes homepage.

I really like the product and at the moment have 4 syncs set up.
2 synchronise the download locations of firefox and thunderbird to my usb disk. Therefore when a new extension is available, I download it to one place, normally on the main computer but it could be on a laptop or remote computer if an extension is released whilst i'm using a different pc) and then when I synchronise the usb disk back home, the latest extension is updated back to the home pc. Now I don't have to worry that I have all the files needed to install firefox (or thunderbird) at a friendsfree client's house.
The 3rd synchronisation contains all the gpx's I download for geocaching. These files are retrieved via email within gsak and I can sync these to the usb drive for use on another pc automatically using "C:\Program Files\Microsoft\SyncToy\synctoy.exe -R" after the download withing gsak.
The 4th synchronisation is an entire copy of the usb drive onto disk. This way I have a backup copy in case I loose the disk or it gets corrupted.
I will be adding some more functionality to synchronise the gpx files onto the SD card used in my pocketpc for caching out in the wild and possibly to synchronise mp3 files from my pc to the creative zen (if thats possible - not had chance to try that just yet.)

Just tagging the Greasemonkey scripts that I've installed.
geocache2flickr.user.js

I created my first greasemonkey script that will add a link to flickr in a geocaching web page for pictures tagged with the geocache name. For example GCMAG6. The experience of coding was a bit of a headache as I didn't know what greasemonkey was expecting and I don't know much about javascript (it's VERY case sensitive!). The tutorial/book at Dive Into Greasemonkey was very helpful for the former problem and using the javascript console solved the latter problem.

Using the google maps api I made a map of all geocaches that I've found, centered on my home town. I'm pretty pleased with it so far. It requires the gpx of my finds uploaded to my webspace, the html page and a google maps api key.
I now have this at the top of my geocaching blog and would have it in this post if I could work out how to get an iframe to be displayed inline on a blog entry.

Friday I took the day off for my birthday and we met up with Tash & Dave (non-bloggers) to go to Birmingham's BullRing shopping centre and then to Outback for tea. The bullring was an interesting shopping centre - not the usual meadowhell/trafford centre type layout of shops and the outer design is definately funky in the extreme. I was not impressed at the parking fee's though - it is VERY expensive to park in the middle of birmingham - we paid over £5 for 3 hours parking. I managed to get one geocache done, A bit of ..... which is a bit of a cheat really as it was a virtual and needed a photo taken of a bull statue. After lunch we went to see Hitch which was very good and funny (although the funniest bits were shown in the trailers for the film. We went to an AMC cinema and that was suprisingly cheap, £3 for the matinee performance and £5 for shows after 6pm. The local Vue cinema near us charges £6 and you have to pay about £3 for parking so a night out at the cinema works out pretty expensive (which is why we go on Orange Wednesday's instead). Photo's uploaded to my flickr page.

I found mt-rebuild which allows you to schedule a rebuild of an entry/page/index which is just what I needed to force a rebuild of my main index page on absocachinlutely to include my latest finds in the side bar of the page. I had to rename my Main Index to MainIndex and then include the blog id, set the mode to index and provide the template name in a cronjob as follows:-

/full-pathname-to/mt-rebuild.pl -blog_id=9 -template=MainIndex -mode=index

Looks like they've update the entire site with new colours and everything - my first thought was eek! My second thought was hmmm - wonder what is new.
So far there is a new feature called bookmarks to share a list of caches, and the cache page has the ability to bookmark or ignore listings.
I don't like the way the pages change the background colour for each page that you visit but I might get used to it.....

With a couple of freeware downloads and some batch programming I've been able to create rss feed's of my latest cache finds (and a few of my close cachers) which means I can easily keep up to date with what caches they have used rather than having to load up their individual profiles or webpages.

Spent the morning at the Roaches in Staffordshire as I attended the Don't Look Down cache with loads of others. Had a great time but it threw it down with rain right at the end. It was still raining this afternoon so I didn't feel like going out again and taking photo's in the rain. In the meantime, this post is written with the version 4 beta of <w.bloggar

Well after visiting Black Brook Black Hole, which was my nearest unfound cache at 7.3 miles away, I hit the one hundred mark. I had a great time although it was really really hot and I think I got sunburnt - even though I was wearing factor25 suncream and was out for a couple of hours. With Kristen coming home from a weekend away, what a fantastic way to finish a lazy weekend.

How annoying is that? 1 cache short of a hundred as I was unable to find the second cache this morning which meant that I was one short as I hadn't made a backup plan of having an extra cache planned just in case.
Still 99 is a good number to rest on and shows that I am not addicted and can stop when I want to (for the day anyway!)
Had a fantastic day out visiting yet more places I've never heard of and seeing some great wildlife. There were loads of baby ducks at the first cache I went to and I saw several squirrels and a jay at the penultimate one. Now my feet ache so I'm going to have a bath.

As documented on my Caching blog I managed to do 9 caches over the weekend and collect 3 travel bugs and two trig points which is a pretty good tally. My knees are aching a bit though and I was very glad of my two walking poles when coming down the hill at Shutlingsloe. I was able to use them as crutches, put my weight on them and allow me to navigate down the hill without too much pain. Today, two days later, my knees were protesting a little bit when we doing the caches, even though I'd specifically chosed caches with terrain less than 2 (although that relies on you parking in the correct spot for the cache!) but I was able to walk without much assistance. So as the Doctor said a week or two ago - I just need to get used to it. As soon as they've recovered a bit more I need to get back on the eliptical cross trainer to build the strength in the knees.