Meeting notes: June 8, 2002

Greetings to all.

On June 8, the Georgia Geocachers Association (GGA) had their 13th meeting. This time, we returned to the site of our first meeting in Terrell Mill Park in Cobb County.

Participation was excellent, with 19 new attendees and 19 who have attended at least one previous meeting. An unexpected surprise awaited us – ClayJar, an accomplished geocacher from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, was in the Atlanta area for the weekend and participated in our meeting. The ever-devious mtn-man had a hand in arranging ClayJar's visit, and we thank him.

Discussion items:

Our initial meeting at this location on June 9, 2001, led to the formation of the GGA as we know it today. A "Year In Review" document was presented at the meeting, and is available electonically. If you would like to receive the Word document file, please drop me an e-mail at gpsNOSPAMfun@bellsouth.net. As usual, delete NOSPAM from the address.

Mtn-man introduced ClayJar to the meeting. As many of you know, ClayJar has been very active in the geocaching community for at least as long as GGA has been around. One of ClayJar's contributions, a cache difficulty rating system, is often used and adds a degree of consistency to the difficulty and terrain "stars" shown on cache pages. In addition, ClayJar hosts a chat room on Monday evenings.

If you have not been in a chat room, ClayJar has made it easy with a Javachat program that he paid for and offers free. You enter his room one of several ways:

(a) mIRC Chat Software (some of you may have this already). In the program, you tell it that you want to connect to the server named: irc.openprojects.net (you will need to click "Add" in mIRC to add a new server most likely). Once you're connected to the IRC server, you join the channel called "#geocache" (you can do this by clicking an icon in mIRC, or you can type "/join #geocache"... you get the hang of it really easily). Then you just chat.

(b) Just go to ClayJar's Java page at www.clayjar.com/gc/chat/, press yes for the quick download of his Java Chat program that he paid for, then enter your nickname and press "connect now" at the bottom. You will go directly to the chat room and you can chat.

(c) If you are on a Mac, the Groundspeak thread link below will point you to some software for the Mac that will allow you to chat too.

http://forums.groundspeak.com/ubb/Forum2/HTML/001763.html

Progress has been made on the issue of geocaching in Georgia State Parks. Erik88l-r has been in frequent discussion with parks officials, and we now can have limited geocaching activities in state parks. Mtn-man provided an overview of the current terms and conditions, and more detailed information is available through our EZBoard forum and web site.

Several members brought door prizes, and a number of the prizes included travel bugs. Prize items with travel bugs or special intent were described. One very unique item was a "Coast-to-Coast-to-Coast Logbook" that mtn-man picked up on a recent trip to a western state. Many of those present at the meeting signed the logbook, which will continue its journey to the east coast before starting the return trip to the west coast. In addition, mtn-man arranged for several quilting squares to be available, and the first several door prize winners were able to sign one. The squares will become part of GeoQuilt II, a project of a geocacher in NY state. The first GeoQuilt was presented to Jeremy Irish a couple of months ago.

Da Rebel provided a briefing provided on the First Annual GGA Challenge Event. The briefing is kept up to date and can be viewed at the following web page:

www.moonbright.com/GGA Challenge Event_files/frame.htm

The event planning committee has asked the GGA steering committee to provide input on the event rules. Anyone with suggestions or recommendations, either of the "make sure you do this" or "make sure you don?t do that" variety, is encouraged to forward your input to any steering committee member.

Big Doggie explained the many methods available for communication, including the mailing list through Topica, our web site, and our EZ Board forum. Links are provided below.

We have had considerable EZ Board discussions of back pack hydration systems, and Lewis suggested that some of those present provide a demo. Allen and Robert Lacy, as well as ClayJar, provided the requested demo, which was well received.

Finally, a question from the floor resulted in a discussion of "benchmarks." Further information on benchmarks can be found at the geocaching.com web site.

Before closing the meeting, we had a drawing for the door prizes donated by several members. Thanks to all.

Happy geocaching! I will not be present on July 13, but I am sure the meeting will be fun and interesting.

-Brad

(NOTE: Links have been removed from this public page.)