Geocaching: cross-training for computer geeks

When I was in eighth grade in 1983, I joined the new computer club at my junior high school. All we did was try tricks out of the Beagle Bros. catalog and play Escape From Rungistan on the Apple II's. But one of those Beagle Bros. tricks was to hide code in a BASIC program, and in one of the formative experiences of my life, I found a hidden comment in an exercise that our club advisor wrote. It said:

THE SUPERINTENDENT OF THIS [redacted] SCHOOL DISTRICT CAN KISS MY [redacted]!

I was hooked.

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foundinthewild's tips for loading custom POIs into the 60CSx via GSAK worked like an absolute charm, and so in the last 12 hours I have loaded my entire database of caches into my microSD card about 40 different times. (Hm... let's see, can I edit the macro so that the description of every cache says "BOOYA!"? Yes, I can!)



But I don't want to go down the custom POI route simply because I can and because it's something else to toy with. There's something comfortable about just loading one pocket query of 500 caches (guh! 1000 fit.), labelled with %drop2, and keeping all the extra information in the PDA. It's great to have all this flexibility, but it's tough to break out of old habits. I'd like to hear how others' caching and waypoint-managing routines have evolved.

And so it's a good thing that geocaching involves stepping away from the computer and getting outside, albeit for activity that must later be logged (and blogged) on the computer. If it were not for that part of geocaching, the get-out-and-walk-around part, this is all we'd have to look forward to:

KB's Challenge of a Century: 100 GSAK Macro Edits!