Derived from a quote by science fiction author Theodore Sturgeon, who once said, “Sure, 90% of science fiction is crud. That’s because 90% of everything is crud.” Oddly, when Sturgeon’s Law is cited, the final word is almost invariably changed to ‘crap’.
While returning from Hendersonville on Saturday afternoon I witnessed the true definition of frustration.
We were zipping along south on I-26 somewhere south of Spartanburg with Donna at the wheel and me watching the world go by at 70 MPH. Up ahead I could see three turkey buzzards right on the edge of the shoulder moving back and forth towards the road. One would take a couple steps towards the right lane and then quickly hop back. Then another would do the same thing. When we got right next to them I could see what was going on. There was a small piece of roadkill about 2 feet into the right lane and after a car passed, one bird would take a few steps towards what it considers food, he would get about 5 feet from a tasty morsel, then another car would approach making it hop back to safety. Trouble was, traffic was fairly light and there were single cars in the right lane spaced evenly about 200′-300′ apart, so there was never enough time to get a nibble safely.
Started up, went down, went up, down again, up again, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 659
After a stint as a con woman that was a pain in the side of the crew of the Firefly a couple of times in the early 26th century and recently seen stuck on Madison Ave, Earth in the middle 20th century on TDTVS2, Christina Hendricks returns to the ‘Verse sometime in the far future where space travel costs an arm and a leg, literally, as an android in a music video from Broken Bells.
The Emperor got a well deserved bath after work today.
Started up, went down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 661
Periodic audits by IT indicate that you have Mozilla Firefox software installed on your computer. Unfortunately this is not Emerson approved software and must be removed. John Smith* (our in house colateral duty IT guy) will schedule a time for removal of this software.
*his actual name
The best I can figure out the reason they wanted Firefox off is they couldn’t figure a way to prevent folks from viewing embedded video on web sites with it like they can with IE. So now I was stuck looking at annoying ads when going to websites andhaving to dimiss a several warning dialog boxes that a website was trying to connect to the intranet that was never a problem with Firefox.
I thought maybe just leaving a thumbdrive with Firefox Portable installed on it was pushing the limits, so I tried Chrome Portable. Chrome may be the fastest browser, but it was pig slow off a thumbdrive, so I gave up after 3 days. Now I just live with Internet Explorer…
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Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 664
After we finished caching on Memorial Day we had a total of 444 finds. I felt that that total was perfect and if we never found another cache I would be happy. Four hundred and forty four seemed like a nice round, even, perhaps circular number. Donna thought otherwise, she was disappointed that we had a DNF, and felt that 445 would be a “rounder number.” After the MMC meeting on Thursday there was a cache one block away, so we went over and found it giving us 445.
This morning we went for a bike ride to pay the bills (electric, water & cable) with a stop at the Atlanta read Company for breakfast after. When we got home it was only 8:30 and a bit too early to cocoon for the rest of the day, so we grabbed the GPSr and hit the road. We picked up 5 caches taking us to 450, a number we both agree is a round number.
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Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 669
We went out for a drive to check on a geocache that someone DNF’d the other day. Ordinarily we wouldn’t worry about a single DNF, but this cacher had over a thousand finds and although the cache container is bison tube, it is hanging under one of the eyes of a Forest Face!
About 5 minutes into the drive with radio down low I could swear I heard Christmas music. Turning up the volume resulted in confirmation, Here Comes Santa Claus was playing. I’ve talked about the Emperor’s music delivery system here before, but for sake of my numerous new readers, music in the Miata comes from a 10 disc CD changer that plays MP3s and now that we were listening to Yuletide Tunes again it meant that it has taken over 5 months to listen to the other 9 CDs (or approximately 1700 songs.)
Maybe time to swap out for new CDs, or I could just leave them in there and the Christmas music might next roll around right on time for the season…
Started up, went down, back up, down again, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 672
Well it is not really new anymore, we’ve had it for over a month, I’ve just never got around to writing about it, ’til now.
We’ve had a pay as you go cell phone from AT&T for some time now (it was still Cingular when we got it.) While we were genuinely happy with it, it was quite small and for those of us who grew up when phones had dials, phone numbers that started with words for the interchange and big handsets we never got used to not having the mouthpiece anywhere near our mouths.
Plus, whenever it would get dumped into Donna’s purse when on, it would come out with a display full of random numbers and we were afraid it might accidentally call someone in Kenya. The keys would get pressed from the phone being jumbled around inside there. It did have a key lock function and we tried using it, but it was more of a hassle before we were always forgetting to unlock the phone before trying to dial someone.
The solution to both those issues was to get a larger flip phone, but for pay as you go customers there is no phone upgrade path. I hunted and hunted around on the AT&T website and couldn’t find any way to do it. I then called their customer service and was told that it just couldn’t be done.
This time when we got down to zero minutes on the phone we thought, what the heck, there are only like 2 dozen people who know our cell phone number anyway, why not just but a new pay as you go phone with a new number? So we picked out a $50 flip phone (Samsung A167) that came with $30 worth of air time.
When the new phone arrived there was a large bright yellow sticker on it that says something to the effect, “ATTENTION AT&T customers just transfer the SIM card from your old phone to this one.” Cool, maybe that will work for me. I plugged the old SIM card in the new phone, turned it on and nothing happened. Not actually nothing, the screen displayed a line of text that roughly implied, “Sorry Sucker.” Sigh.
So I took out that SIM and put in the one that came with the new phone and went online to the AT&T site and registered the new phone with the same contact info as the old phone and waited. It was supposed to take 30–45 minutes for the $30 airtime to get credited to my new account.
After an hour I checked to see if the minutes were there and they weren’t. For the heck of it I logged into the old phone’s account and what do you know there was $30 worth of airtime! So now we have and old phone we don’t want to use with big minutes and a new phone we want to use that has zero minutes.
Ever the tinker, I take the new SIM card and put it in the old phone. Turned on the phone and it works, no minutes to really test it, but when I check the Own Number in the phone’s menu it reads the new number. So I put the old SIM in the new phone and it works! In spite of everyone saying it can’t be done, it was, I have successfully upgraded my AT&T pay as you go phone.
Now if I only hadn’t erased the contacts of the old SIM in the process of looking to donate it to Cell Phones for Soldiers…
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Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 675
Summer is here in Aiken, SC. This weekend the temperatures were supposed to hit the upper 90s, maybe even break the century mark, so earlier in last week Donna and I planned a weekend getaway into the state’s northwest corner where it is mountainous and cooler, plus we could finish up those final 2 counties and 3 DeLorme pages for those geocaching challenges.
As the weekend approached, like all good sailors, we kept a weather eye out on what was in store for northwestern South Carolina. It looked like there was not much relief to be had up there, maybe 4 or 5 degrees cooler with just as much a chance of afternoon showers, so on Friday afternoon we decided to save the couple hundred bucks (and I’d forgo having cinnamon buns for breakfast) by staying home.
Saturday morning we went for a bike ride and grocery shopped returning home by 9:00AM and not leaving the house again except for my trip to the mailbox to pick up the latest Red Envelope full of Law & Order: Season 1. Amazing who has popped up so far in guest starring roles; Samuel L. Jackson in a brief bit as a defense attorney, Philip Seymour Hoffman in his first credited role as an accused rapist, the future Lt. Van Buren, S. Epatha Merkerson, as a mother of a mistakenly shot child and TDTVS’s Harold Perrineau as a young drug dealer.
Sunday we stayed outside a little later, through lunchtime (although the top was up for the last couple of hours) doing some geocaching. We headed over to North Augusta to search for some on the Greenway, an old abandoned railway bed now paved over into a biking/walking trail. We started at one end and after we found one right near the beginning, we were quickly distracted by a cache down by the river, which led to a couple in a new park around some old ponds, which then again led to a new section of the Greenway which parallels real close to the Savannah River and we never really made it to the actual Greenway Greenway.
With our t-shirts soaked with sweat, looking like Jack & Kate after a trip into the island jungle, we called it quits and headed back to the car with 8 finds. Realizing that put us at 458 total Donna said we need two more to make it an “even” four hundred and sixty. We snagged one in a small park outside the Greenway entrance that we had DNF’d a couple of weeks ago then another in a park that we have passed a hundred times and never been in. When I got home and logged that last one I noticed that there was a second one in that park as well. Good thing we didn’t realized that at the time, because if we found it, we probably would have had to find 9 more to make the total even again…
Started up, went down, back up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 677
Between Friday at 6:00AM and Monday at 6:00AM I received 171 pieces of Spam at my work email address. 165 of them were caught by the company’s spam gaurdian Postini, 4 ended up in the junk mail folder thanks to Outlook and 2 made it successfully into my inbox.
Here are my favorite subject lines that sound dirty, but probably aren’t: Do it please from jyfyfiemu5227@tpnet.pl received at 7:47 am on Friday You don’t have to take bald lying down from Pamela@b2happycinq.info received at 1:47 am on Saturday Become a Multi-Lingual Master! from info@andlerig.com received at 3:21 pm on Sunday
Biggest volume subject lines:
On Friday with 9 — FIFA World Cup South Africa… bad news
On Saturday with 7 — Angelina Jolie invited you to join Facebook…
On Sunday with 6 — asco.com account notification (our old emal server domain)
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Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 682
I’ve been listening SKY.fm’s Solo Piano Channel as my background music at work recently and as the name inplies it is just piano music, no vocals, no nothing else. Most of the time it is just what I like have going, but occassionally there will be a song played that stands out, both in a bad way and in a good way. As a bad example, try Rainbow Connection played at about half the pace as Kermit singing in the first Muppet movie. For a good example try 2:30AM by Tom Grant (a 30 second snippet.)
When I first heard that song I felt I had heard it somewhere before. After burning up numerous brain cells trying to come up with it, I finally did. There was a small scene in the 1996 movie The Fabulous Baker Boys (probably most famously remebered for Michele Pfeiffer singing “Making Whoopee” atop a grand piano in a short red dress) where she comes down to the ballroom early one morning at the resort and Jeff Bridges is quietly playing a jazz tune, right there that’s the song.
At least I was sure I did. Dave Grusin was responsable for the soundtrack and there is no mention 2:30AM in anyplace I looked on the web. The Tom Grant tune came out on an album released in 2003, so was Tom influenced by the tune in the movie? Or maybe I have misremembered and the songs are nothing alike. I own the DVD of the movie, I guess I’ll have to pop it in the player and find that scene.
Started down, went up, back down, back up, down again, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 686
Thursday morning on the way to work the Emperor blinked past the 109,000 mile mark.
Thursday night I was surrounded by 109,000 conversations from a couple thousand people. There is that old joke about going to a fight and a hockey game breaking out, well a half dozen of us from the MMC went to a beer bash and a baseball game broke out. It was Thirsty Thursday and small beers were just a buck and a huge chunk of the crowd took advantage of the offer. Donna and I bailed after seven innings to ensure we beat the inebriated to the roads.
Today we threw about 109,000 pieces of candy to folks along a parade loop in Trenton for the 40th Annual Ridge Peach Festival.
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Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 689
While waiting on the meet up with the MMC for breakfast yesterday and the trip to Trenton to be in the Ridge Peach Festival Parade we thought we would snag a nearby cache. Because this was the only cache we were going to do that day we had brought just the GPSr and the old Pocket PC. Wouldn’t you know it the batteries were dead in the GPSr. Being to cheap to go to the nearby gas station and pay for some AAs we used our geosense and the clue from the notes on the iPAq to come up with the find.
This morning we headed over to North Augusta again with the express purpose of geocaching along the Greeneway again, so we brought the whole kit (including loads of fresh batteries.) I even turned on the GPSr before we left home. So wouldn’t you know it, when we got over to NA and started looking for caches the iPaq we use for notes wouldn’t turn on. An attempt at reboot was no help, sometime between yesterday and today its battery had run down! We attempted 4 caches by using just the ±20′ coords from the GPSr and our geosenses and came up with 2. Not bad, but not Jedi Master material yet.
Started up, went down, back up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 691
Our teacher asked us what our favorite animal was, and I said, “Fried chicken.”
She said I wasn’t funny, but she couldn’t have been right, ‘cause everyone else in the class laughed.
My parents told me to always be truthful and honest, and I am. Fried chicken is my favorite animal.
I told my dad what happened, and he said my teacher was probably a member of PETA. He said they love animals very much. I do, too … especially chicken, pork and beef.
Anyway, my teacher sent me to the principal’s office. I told him what happened, and he laughed too. Then he told me not to do it again.
The next day in class my teacher asked me what my favorite live animal was. I told her it was chicken. She asked me why, just like she’d asked the other children. So I told her it was because you could make them into fried chicken. She sent me back to the principal’s office again. He laughed, and told me not to do it again.
I don’t understand. My parents taught me to be honest, but my teacher doesn’t like it when I am.
Today, my teacher asked us to tell her what famous person we admire most. I told her, “Colonel Sanders.”
There is a building along the northwestern section of Our Fair City’s bypass that started life as a hardware store. That lasted maybe a couple of years and then an auto parts store moved in. It lasted maybe a year. It sat empty for a while before becoming an auto paint store which I bet didn’t last 6 months. It has sat empty for a half dozen years since, probably because no one else wanted to take a chance of their new business only lasting 3 months…
I don’t don’t know when this tin man showed up, but it seems like it might have been there since the very beginning. It looks like the perfect place for a geocache, so this morning Donna and hopped on the tandem to ride over and check it out, plus grab some breakfast at the somewhat nearby Dunkin’ Donuts. We ended up riding for a total of 15 miles.
After the bike ride we hopped in the Emperor and picked up a couple items at Lowes, a few things at Walmart and did our weekly grocery shopping at Krogers. Tonight we made a return driving trip to Lowes for something completely different and had dinner out at Chik-fil-A. With all that driving I think we might have equaled the mileage covered via bicycle in the morning.
Started down, went up, back down, back up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 703
While out caching in September one of our finds was called Bread Crumbs #2. I knew it was part of a series of caches from my reading of the description:
I designed the Bread Crumbs series #1–6 to lead cachers from North Augusta to Greenwood or Greenwood to North Augusta. In either location there are many very good caches that you can goto once you have reached which ever city you are heading for. On each container you will find clues for two finishing caches. One is in North Augusta the other is in Greenwood. you must complete the series # 1–6 in order to find either final cache. Also don’t forget my other two caches that i have along this route. One is “In the middle of nowhere”(GC1MH7R) the other is “Cachers Dash # 1″(GC1N1GB) which is another series of caches i have that leads you to a 5 stage multi cache. Good luck.…kaboyd
So I alertly wrote down the snippet of coordinates that were on the cover of the container. Donna and I put it on our wish list to do the series in the future. The future turned out to be 2 months later in November. We started at Crumb #1 near Exit #1 of I-20 in North Augusta and worked our way to Greenwood. We skipped #2 because we already had that one in the bag. Each hide was well thought out with an nice spot for parking and it was just far enough into the woods so you wouldn’t be seen while you hunted. All the containers were the same, so you knew what to look for, and the route was 2-lane through almost entirely undeveloped land. The only one that gave us any problem was #6, it was slightly over 40′ from where our GPSr said GZ was, but once we had it we had all we needed to find the two final caches.
The Greenwood final cache was right up the street in a little park. As I turned into the parking area it was jam full of cars and loads people milling about. There was some sort of soccer game going on, so we opted to not even try. I backed up out of the lot and we came home, figuring we would come back in the future. The future turned out to be 2 months later in January. It was a sunny New Years Day, so we took a nice little top down drive back to Greenwood hoping there would not be a soccer game going. Turns out the place was deserted. Cool. About 400′ into the woods we found the cache. It was an odd looking container, almost looked like a miniature ships wheel with a screw off center.
We signed the log and left behind a couple of small trade items. Felt kind of weird finding a cache and not getting to log it as a find. I had searched Geocaching.com for the key words “bread crumbs”, but nothing came up in our area besides the numbers 1 through 6. And even though we wouldn’t get “credit” for either, we decided to do the North Augusta final in the future.
Last week while researching caches to do along the North Augusta Greenway, I found one at the far end from where we have been looking called, End of the trail ‘North Augusta’, and the description read:
The above coordinates are bogus.This is an unusual looking container that contains a log but byop. It is big enough for a few trade items (small) Also it is in the woods so be careful.
——————————————————————————–
This is the North Augusta end cache for my bread crumbs series # 1–6. You need the clues from each of the containers in that series to hunt this cache and the one in Greenwood.
HUH!?!? So I searched in Greenwood for something called End of the trail and sure enough there is the other one.… You do get credit for finding the final caches in the Bread Crumb series. We’ve been robbed! We have more finds than we thunk! We had a good idea on where to look for the final caches to see what date we had signed them, so we could log the finds on the web site, but knew there was no way we could find them again in a patch of woods without the actual coordinates. Trouble was after we found the two finals we tossed out the coordinates, so we will have to do #1 through #6 all over again.
Guess what we did today? Right. We set the alarm for early, ate breakfast and started out following bread crumbs. They were not too difficult to find the first time though and this time we made short work of locating each container. Park, walk a hundred feet into the woods, open the lid, grab the coordinate snippet and on to the next. We found a fly in the ointment at #3 though, the bonus cache coordinates were faded beyond recognition. The only thing I could make out was that they were for North Augusta, so we continued on to Greenwood, figuring we would worry about that little problem in the future.
There was no soccer game at the Greenwood park and after a spider web busting walk, we found the odd shaped container for the second time in 6 months. We opened it up and seeing as there was a new log, meaning no proof we had actually been here back in January, I went ahead and signed it. I’ll go online later today and log the now official find of the End of the trail ‘Greenwood’.
Because it was still early, we went over to Greenwood’s Rail to Trail where there was a series of 6 caches to look for. We started at the high numbered end and found #6, DNF’d #5, found #4, 3 & 2 before the combination of the heat, the distance left to #1 and the fact that 4 of the last 6 folks to look for it came up empty caused us to turn around and head back to the car. On the way back by we made another pass at #5 and couldn’t find it again.
Because it was such a pretty top down drive up, we drove back home via the same Bread Crumb route, but this time we had the top up and the air conditioner blasting. Donna wanted to try the North Augusta final next weekend, but I talked her into giving it try today so we could cross this series of that wish list. Bad move. It was now past 11:00 AM and it was probably above 90° and even though the North Augusta Greenway was still shaded, there was no breeze and the humidity was just as high as the temperature. We didn’t have the whole set of coordinates because of the faded Bread Crumb #3, but because both Donna and I remember finding the North Augusta final before, we figured we could spot the trail we thought it was off of and work it out. Using the trail, the degrees and the decimal portion of the minutes we had we could locate the cache. As we looked for that side trail a conversation, turned into a misunderstanding, which escalated into a DISCUSSION, stopping short of an argument, so after a half mile we did an about face and went back to the car defeated.
Because I didn’t blog about finding the North Augusta final I can’t pick out the date we did find it. And now looking back through our finds, I can’t seem to see any other found caches that would have put us any where close to the area where it should be. The only two times we cached near that end of the Greenway was in August of last year, before we even thought of doing this series. Maybe we didn’t do it. Odd.
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Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 705
A strange alignment of circumstances allowed us to get our first geocaching First To Find. The cache was a mile into Hitchcock Woods, it was published at 11:00AM, it was a very hot & sticky afternoon, then a really nasty set of late afternoon thunderstorms rolled through, and a wife who usually takes a late evening walk suggested we walk together in Hitchcock Woods.
As I read the description I thought I knew exactly which trail it was hidden on, turns out I did. We at one time had a cache on that same trail just 51′ away called “No Horses Allowed”. So we drove over, parked on Dibble Road and headed for the cache location not really thinking we would be first. When we got to GZ Donna immediately pointed deep into a bush. I pooh-poohed that idea as there was no way you could get in there without damaging the bush. We then spent 5 minutes wandering in circles looking for likely hiding spots until she ended up back at the same bush calling, “I found it.” It wasn’t where she first thought, but it was real close.
Started up, went down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 706
On Sunday evening the cache owner of the Bread Crumb Series received 3 emails from me. The first one was was sent using the contact form on geocaching.com to let him know that we couldn’t make out the coordinate snippet in #3:
My wife and I re-did the Bread Crumb Series this morning (explanation coming via a log later) and the coords on #3 are totally unreadable, so all we have for the North Augusta final are:
N33° _ _.006
W081° _ _.892
Could you fill us in on what the correct minutes are?
Thanks, Brian
P.S. The black paint on the #3 container is flaking off in your hands when you hold it. #6 was full of water, but the log was OK in its baggie. We cleaned out the the soggy stuff and dried off the unaffected items.
The next one he would have got would have been the automatic email generated as a cache owner when ever anyone logs a Found or DNF on one of his caches. This is what I wrote in the log for the Greenwood final:
We did the bread crumb series in November and when we got to the final location in Greenwood it was muggle city. We came back 2 months later (New Years Day actually), had the place to ourselves and made the find. Didn’t know it had a GC number that could be logged on geocaching.com. We thought that was kind of weird, but we were new enough to geocaching that we figured sometimes that happens with these bonus caches. After all it is not about the numbers, it is about the hunt. Right?;)
Last week, while researching caches to do along the North Augusta Greenway, I found one at the far end from where we have been looking called, End of the trail ‘North Augusta’, and right there in the description it said: “This is the North Augusta end cache for my bread crumbs series # 1–6. You need the clues from each of the containers in that series to hunt this cache and the one in Greenwood.”
HUH!?!? So I searched in Greenwood for something called “End of the trail” and sure enough there is the other one.…you do get credit for finding the final caches in the Bread Crumb series. We’ve been robbed! We have more finds than we thunk!
So today, because we had tossed out the coordinates for this hide (having already found it), we headed to Greenwood re finding all 6 of the Bread Crumb series on our way. When we arrived at GZ we had the place to ourselves again and after a spider web busting walk, made the grab for the second time in 6 months. Opened it up expecting to look back and see our siggy, but a new log sheet was started in February. With no proof we had actually been here back in January, I signed the new one with today’s date. Which, when you think about it, works out OK because now I can log it online today as well.
After I logged the find, I used the contact form again to make a couple suggestions that might be helpful to people like me in finding out the names of the two final caches:
Maybe it is just us because we were are sort of new when we first ran into the Bread Crumbs, but we didn’t know that the two finals for the series had GC numbers and were loggable on geocaching.com.
It might be helpful if you plugged them (with name & GC#) in the descriptions of the 6 bread crumbs caches like you do for your other caches along the way.
I don’t know if you can rename an already published cache, but it would help them turn up in a keyword search on geocaching.com if you could put the words “Bread Crumb” in between “End of” & “Trail…” in the titles.
I’m not sure which one, or if it was a combnination of all three, but I pierced someone’s thin skin. Within an hour I received this scathing stream of conciousness email back from the cache owner:
well I am sorry my bread crumb finals were not to your approval. how ever if you read the whole discription in #‘s 1–6 they tell of the two end caches BY NAME.And since you are the only one that has complained of the name and that you could not figure out the bonus caches then I will have to conclude that it might be you. I’m sorry if this comes off alittle abrasive but I have already had a big mouth cacher that did not approve of my final containers. And I am going to say the same thing to you I said to him. I paid for all of the items for these caches as well as the means to put them out from NA to Greenwood, I don’t remember anyone else helping me with either of those.To that end I am not going to rename my caches and further more not reading the cache descriptions is not my fault as well. I have 49 hides as of right now which 48 are active. I put these caches out to further the sport and for cachers like you. I don’t do it for my benifit. So yes I do take it personal when someone has a complaint. If you read any log that I have ever wrote you will not find anything in them that I have said that would be disrespectful. I have done some caches that were great and some that I thought really sucked but I would never ever post that nor would I ever tell the cache owner of it. I have 620 finds I see you have 400 plus, that is enough finds under your belt to have a damn good grasp on how this game works. So please read the cache pages before you complain to me about one of my caches. And again I appologise if this offends you but I take my caching very serious. If you need the coords to an end cache please fill free to email me again but it looks like you got it figured out.….…kaboyd
WOW! He tells me three times that the final caches are there in his Bread Crumb descriptions, but I’m betting he hasn’t looked in a while, ’cause both Donna and I have read all 6 cache descriptions multiple times and there is nothing there. Maybe they were in the very beginning and he edited the descriptions and somehow dropped any mention or he is thinking of his other series, Cacher’s Dash which does mention the final by name. Rather than respond in kind and counter his diatribe point by point, I decided to try my polite best and replied back with this:
kaboyd,
The trouble with electronic communication is that you cannot see the expression on a person’s face, nor hear the infliction of their voice and it is sometimes easy to misinterpret what is being said. I am sorry if anything I wrote via email or posted in the log for the Greenwood final upset you in any way.
I never meant to imply that I was unhappy with the series, *or* the final caches. As a matter of fact we think the Bread Crumb Series is one of the top series in the area. Each hide is well thought out, evenly spaced mileage-wise with nice spots for parking nearby. The caches are just far enough into the woods so you wouldn’t be seen while you hunt them and with the containers being the same, you know just what you are looking for. As a bonus the route is a 2-lane road through almost entirely undeveloped land, making for a very enjoyable drive.
My only complaint was that I didn’t know the finals were actual caches with CG numbers on geocahing.com. I re read each description in full this morning and while the finals are mentioned, no names or GC numbers are given. Here is a direct copy of the descriptions:
This is a small lock type container camo painted that contains a log book and a pen. It is big enough for some small trade items. These caches are in the woods so be careful.
I designed the Bread Crumbs series #1–6 to lead cachers from North Augusta to Greenwood or Greenwood to North Augusta. In either location there are many very good caches that you can goto once you have reached which ever city you are heading for. On each container you will find clues for two finishing caches. One is in North Augusta the other is in Greenwood. you must complete the series # 1–6 in order to find either final cache. Also don’t forget my other two caches that i have along this route. One is “In the middle of nowhere”(GC1MH7R) the other is “Cachers Dash # 1″(GC1N1GB) which is another series of caches i have that leads you to a 5 stage multi cache. Good luck.…kaboyd
As you can see, the only 2 cache names given are for the two other caches you have along the same route, “In the middle of nowhere” & “Cachers Dash #1″ which is why I suggested adding the series final’s name & GC# in the descriptions.
Also, if you would, please email back the snippet of coordinates for the North Augusta final that are in bread crumbs #3, as they were to faded for us to read.
Thanks
Brian and Donna Bogardus
BTR & D2!
It has been over 24 hours since my last email and I haven’t gotten anything back from him, not even the coordinates for the North Augusta final. I worked out several possible combinations of whole minutes to combine with what I do know about the coordinates and plotted them on a Google Map and think I have a good idea where the final is. We’ll probably head over and hunt it this weekend (like Donna wanted all along.)
Started down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 707
Stopped off at the cable place on the way home from work today. Saturday the Tour de France starts and to get Versus, the network that carries the race, we have to upgrade to the Digital Plus tier. It costs and extra $20, but it is worth it for the three weeks of Phil Ligget and Paul Sherwin narrating the bike race and watching the beautiful French countryside glide by. While my CSR was filling out the “paperwork” I picked up a channel guide and noticed something called “Value HD” which offers most of the usual cable channel’s HD versions. I asked her how much more would that be, $4.95 came the reply. What the heck, we have a HDTV this year, it’ll be worth the extra five spot to try it out.
We got home and quickly realized that we had no real place to put converter box. It is a lot larger than last year’s model which fit on top of the tube TV. At first I figured I’d place the flat screen TV on top of the converter box, but it was full of holes for cooling and I didn’t want to melt the TV’s plastic base. Even if there was room, I couldn’t place the box sideways because there were holes there as well. Next we thought that we could just place it on the floor in front of the armoire, it’s only for a month. I doubted the remote would work with it there without having to hold it high over our heads to get the proper angle to clear the coffee table. Didn’t matter, the cables weren’t long enough. It ended up on the empty shelf to the left of the surround sound/DVD player, the only down side to this is we have to keep that door open when watching TV. Small price to pay.
The remote they gave me didn’t match the instruction sheet they gave me, so at first I couldn’t program the cable remote to operate the TV. That meant we now needed two remotes, one for channels and one for volume. I did a internet search for the model number of the remote and found several helpful sites that would offer me the manual — for a fee… But then I decided to RTFM and there on page 3 of the cable company’s booklet were instructions for the remote. Now we are making progress.
I then started surfing through the HD channels and of the approximately 40 available it seemed like every 4th or 5th was viewable. That’s no good. So I then checked to see if we could get Versus, the whole reason for getting the converter box, and we could (unfortunately it isn’t offered in HD though.)
As always the Digital Plus comes free with the half dozen of each Encore and Starz movie channels. I checked them out seeing if I could find something to watch and as I surfed them I kept on going past and discovered that I could also watch all the premium channels, HBO, Cinemax & Showtime.
So, should call and complain about the missing HD channels and take the chance that when they correct that they will also yank the free premium movie channels? or should I keep my mouth shut and enjoy the movies and learn to live without the missing 2/3s of HD channels?
Started up, went down, went up, back down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 710
