Clyde’s Geocaching Swiss Army Knife (GSAK) program is the gold standard when it comes to geocache waypoint managers.  It allows geocachers to maintain a database of thousands of geocaches from the pocket queries they can generate if they’re premium members on geocaching.com.  Macros allow you automatically to run all sorts of complicated tasks and there are lots to download from the GSAK support site.

GSAK is free to download and use.  After 21 days a nag screen starts to appear if you haven’t registered, but you can still use the program.  Periodic updates with new features and maintenance releases are included when you buy the program, which is a steal at US$25.

Spend the $25… it’s worth every penny and more.

The latest version, 7.2.0, has added maps to the long list of features.  Now you can view a Google Maps widget in the cache preview pane.  Being powered by Google Maps, you can zoom in and out, pan around and select various maps and satellite imagery.  Of particular interest to Canadian users will be the Canadian topo button that allows you to view Canadian topographic maps.  You can see an example in the screen capture below.  (The Google Maps navigation buttons only appear when the mouse is hovering over the map, which is why they don’t appear in the capture.)

I placed GCQXR7, also known as GAG7 – Cedarview Park ‘n’ Cache, in early-October 2005 for the seventh Go And Get ‘Em event in Ottawa.  The original cache container was a small Altoids tin with a rare earth magnet that I had painted with a cracked metallic grey paint.  It was stuck on the underside of the flange at the base of a lamp pole in a park-and-ride parking lot near an interchange on the 416.

It blended in very well, but everything became damp in just a few days, so clearly the container wasn’t waterproof.  I replaced it with a small Lock & Lock container with a rare earth magnet on the bottom.  I placed this one in a more sheltered location — inside the base of the lamp post.

At the time, it seemed like the perfect location — sheltered and relatively easy to reach.  I didn’t give much thought to the bundle of wires running up one side of the inside of the pole.  The container was placed in such a way that it was far enough away from the wires.  Naturally, I assumed people would put it back where they retrieved it from.  As anyone who has placed a cache knows, geocache containers often have this tendency to wander around where they were placed.  On a couple of occasions, I found my container tucked up higher into the pole, sometimes behind the wires running inside it.  Yikes!

Another problem with the location was that it was possible to fumble the container when retrieving it or replacing it with the end result being that it ended up at the bottom of the hollow concrete base about 1m below the surface.  This happened twice.  The first time, another geocacher retrieved it and tied it off so it couldn’t fall again.  The second time, model12 retrieved it again, and put a more foolproof tie-down in place.  A tip o’ the hat to him for doing this (twice). 🙂

Overall, it was logged as found 124 times, which is quite respectable.  Thank you to everyone who sought it out.  People seemed to like the cache, but as geoSquid pointed out in comments on my blog entry about lamp post caches, many LPCs are inherently dangerous because of the wires running inside virtually every lamp post and this was one of them.  I didn’t want anyone to be injured or killed because they were electrocuted because something caused the insulation on the wires to crack or they came loose.

That’s why I archived GCQXR7.

If you’re a geocacher then the chances that you’ve found a lamp post cache (LPC).  For the uninitiated, LPCs are geocaches where the container is hidden in the base of a lamp post, typically under the liftable skirt on the base of the post.  It’s actually a clever place to hide something — until you’ve found a couple of dozen at which point they become rather repetitive.

But, the problem isn’t that they’re repetitive (although Sonny of the PodCacher Podcast might disagree on that point!).  The problem is that lamp posts with liftable skirts tend to be found in shopping mall parking lots and shopping mall parking lots are, technically, private property.  Increasingly, shopping malls are installing video surveillance systems to watch over their property.  So, if you go into a shopping mall’s parking lot for the sole purpose of finding a geocache, you are probably being observed.

And you’re probably trespassing, too.

Even if none of this is a deterrent, you might want to look at it from the security guards’ points of view.  Some guy (you) walks up to a lamp post, fiddles with the base of it, probably removes something and then puts it back.  At best, that will be treated as curious behaviour.  At worst, you could be accused of vandalizing the lamp post or even planting a bomb.

There was a series of geocaches placed for a Go And Get ‘Em event in Ottawa sometime in the last year or two that included a few caches placed on shopping mall property.  Go And Get ‘Ems (GAGs) and similar events see numerous geocachers head out to find as many geocaches placed for the event as they can in a short period of time.  Naturally, this means that easy-to-find caches, like LPCs, will see a huge amount of traffic while the event is taking place.  In the case of one such geocache placed in a shopping mall parking lot for a local event, this annoyed the landowner and the geocache “disappeared” shortly after the event started and geocachers were asked to leave if they were spotted.

So, one solution might be to only try such caches at night when the mall’s closed, right?  Wrong.

Think about it: Now, not only are you probably trespassing, you’re also doing this at night, under the bright glare of the lights at the top of the pole you’re trying to be stealthy around, and you’re being recorded doing this.  How inconspicuous can you be in the middle of acres of pavement with nothing around but your car?

Maybe a good New Year’s resolution for geocachers is to refrain from placing LPCs in shopping mall parking lots.  There are lots of other places in the urban environment where you can hide a geocache.

Update: See what I did about an LPC (ex-GCQXR7) I had.

Only a few hours remain in 2007, so I thought I’d take a moment and look back at the last year as I experienced it.

I did a fair bit of travelling in 2007, most of it for work. During the year I visited Toronto a couple of times, Halifax (work), Sturgeon Falls (work), Sudbury (play) for a few hours on the Sturgeon Falls trip, Miami Beach (play), Winnipeg (work) and Edmonton (work). In fact, between mid-October and early-December I boarded 16 different flights, and passed through Toronto’s Pearson Airport (YYZ) four weeks in a row. I also passed through airports in Montreal and Calgary in the course of doing these trips. And, I think I’m missing a couple of trips from this list.

Work-wise, I was successful in a generic competition at work that saw me move from being in a technical position to that of a research analyst. This was a big move and I’m still getting used to it, even though I’ve had this new job for a couple of months now. Fortunately, though I changed jobs, I did not have to change the group of people I work with.

According to my records, I went geocaching 29 days in the year and in every month except March and August, with April and October being the two months with the highest number of finds. Overall, I found 119 caches, the most recent one yesterday evening. I went geocaching in Ontario, Quebec, Halifax, Winnipeg and Edmonton. (I was too busy lying on the beach in Miami Beach to do any caching.)

My friends Ken & Margaret got married in June and I was the best man at the wedding. The guys took Ken away for a weekend of golfing-and-other-activities-that-shall-not-be-spoken-of. The day of the wedding, we went trap shooting before taking Ken off to be married.

During the summer I did a lot (for me) of amateur radio. I spurred on the Manotick Amateur Radio Group to run special event station VC3R for a couple of months to celebrate the 175th anniversary of the Rideau Canal and its inscription on the UNESCO World Heritage Site List. We operated at several locks over the summer and had a lot of fun doing it.

I didn’t get out scuba diving this year, but I did join GoodLife Fitness through work and I’ve gone to the climbing gym about once a week and I’ve lost a fair bit of weight since the end of February. 🙂 I also took up golfing in 2007 and am looking forward to it in 2008.

To help offset the benefits of being less of a couch potato, I bought a Nintendo Wii a couple of months ago. It’s the first gaming system I’ve owned since the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) I was given years ago and I’m having a lot of fun with it. In addition to the games, it offers all sorts of nifty things.

Overall, 2007 was a positive year.

My work has taken me to Halifax this week. I arrived Sunday evening after an uneventful flight and met up with my colleagues Monday morning. One person had flown down Saturday while the other flew down early Monday morning. Our work has been in the late-afternoons and evening, so we’ve had the days to ourselves to “play tourist”. Yesterday morning, my colleague, Amanda, and I met up for breakfast and then I introduced her to geocaching. It only took one geocache for her to get the bug and we headed off to find another two caches before our boss arrived at the hotel. We met up then headed out to wander along the waterfront. John and I headed off towards Pier 21 while Amanda did her own thing. I turned on the GPS at Pier 21 and as luck would have it we were about 10m away from a geocache so John and I started looking. John retrieved the container and we signed the log and then headed back to the hotel where we joined up with Amanda and headed off to the regional office to look after work part of the trip.

This morning (Tuesday), the other two had a meeting to attend so I took advantage to sleep in and then met up with them for lunch. Amanda had to fly back to Ottawa in the afternoon, so John and I wandered along the boardwalk before heading off to the regional office for a second monitoring session.

The weather here has been absolutely beautiful. Monday was about 22C and today it was probably 18C. The weather forecast is calling for a bit of rain overnight and maybe tomorrow, but I can’t really complain. I’m looking forward to my next visit to Halifax in a couple of months, even though it’ll probably be covered in snow and ice then.

A few months ago, I wrote about how ammo boxes should not be used as geocache containers. One of the reasons is that they’re opaque and that authorities responding to bomb scares can’t see in them and thus will tend to blow them up. Groundspeak, home of geocaching.com, is now selling 3-piece geocache container sets with geocache labels that look suspiciously like Lock ‘n’ Locks with stickers on them. The description of them includes the phrase “…see-through (for safety)…”. So, it would seem that Groundspeak thinks opaque containers are a bad idea, too.

Go And Get ‘Em 10 (GC11RNC) started Friday evening at 6pm and ran through to 6pm Saturday, followed up by dinner. I went caching Friday evening until about 23:30 and then Saturday morning with the geoMob, a group of local cachers who get together every Saturday morning for breakfast and caching. While it was damp and misty, the weather was actually pretty good for caching. It didn’t rain while I was out, though there were definitely a couple of caches that were very wet and muddy. Darin and I went caching Friday evening and shared a couple of first-to-finds.

Overall, I logged 19 caches of the 66 that were placed for the event, including the event cache itself.

When the event was first announced, it looked like this would be the last Go And Get ‘Em event because they’re victims of their own popularity. However, the organizers announced at dinner that the tradition would continue, though possibly in a slightly different form. It’s become increasingly difficult to find reasonably priced venues that can accommodate more than a hundred hungry cachers. We were at an Italian buffet this evening and we managed to fill the room. In fact, things were a little cozy, so we really need an even larger place.

The event cache brings the total number of caches I’ve found to-date to 286.