Found: Sep 02, 2005

It has been almost a year since I have had my GPS receiver out for geocaching. We were going to spend the Labor Day weekend at Hood Park campground so I hoped there would be some new caches in that area that I could take the kids to hunt.

Sure enough. Besides the Hood Park geocache that was in the park there was a cache, Ice Ice Baby , just up the road at Ice Harbor Dam. In August 2003 I had hidden a cache here, Ice Harbor Petroglyph, but someone absconded with it about 6 months later. I am glad to see a new one in the area.

After a little searching Brendan found the cache and we all signed the log book. There was nothing inside the container that the boys wanted to trade for so I just dropped in a couple of my million dollar bills and we re-hid the cache.

I noticed that the Ice Harbor Dam Visitor Center was open so we did the self-guided tour and watched the fish pass by the windows as they made their way through the fish ladder. Because of 9-11 they will not let you bring in cell phones or cameras into the center and adults have to show picture ID to enter.

Found: Sept 03, 2005

After finding Ice Ice Baby - GeoCache Find #531 yesterday we decided we would go out and see if we could find Micro Madness #2 - Charbonneau. We had wanted to stay here at Charbonneau Park over this Labor Day weekend but it was full so we get to do the cache here instead.

We drove right by the location so turned around and found a good place to park. Then the boys started looking. Kevin was the one who finally figured out where it was. We all signed the log book and I was able to roll 2 million dollar bills into the little container.

Originally Found: June 15, 2002 - 2nd Time: Sep 4, 2005

When we decided to camp at Hood Park over the Labor Day weekend I knew I would have to go hunting this cache again. This cache was # 10 for me when I first got started back in June of 2002. I remember taking the boys out to hunt it and being amazed that this wooded area existed in the park. This time it was just Kyle and my middle daughter, Melanie with me. I brought a Sluggo Stick and poked everywhere I remembered it to be. Well, in 3 years the cache has moved a bit. Kyle finally found it by ignoring where we knew it had to be and looked in other obvious spots. We took nothing and left the customary million dollar bills.

As I explored the area I believe I have found a spot for another cache. Will see if I can get it put together and approved.

The Onion reports that Google has announced their latest project “Google Purge.” This project is their latest step in organizing the world’s information and destroying all the information they are unable to index.

As a part of Purge’s first phase, executives will destroy all copyrighted materials that cannot be searched by Google.

“A year ago, Google offered to scan every book on the planet for its Google Print project. Now, they are promising to burn the rest,” John Battelle wrote in his widely read “Searchblog.” “Thanks to Google Purge, you’ll never have to worry that your search has missed some obscure book, because that book will no longer exist. And the same goes for movies, art, and music.”

Patrick in a comment asked the question: “What is a Sluggo Stick ™?”

I realized that this important geocaching invention needed some publicity and so a quick google to refresh my memory. Well, google does not index the comment history from geocaching.com so I had to figure out how to recover the history of the Sluggo Stick™. Luckily I use a piece of software, GSAK, that stores all the cache data locally (and allows me to export it to my palm but that should be another post) and I could do a full text search of the cache data.

Geocaches are always hidden (never buried). A common hiding tactic is to place the cache in some bushes (curse those juniper bushes), under some leaves, or in places only my kids will reach into because they have not the imagination their father has of what might be lurking in that cool, dark, and moist place. In addition to the advantage of not having to reach into places of unknown danger, the Sluggo Stick™ has the added advantage that as you probe, ‘thump, thump, thump,’ you know you have struck pay dirt when you hear that hollow thud of plastic or clank of an ammo box being struck.

So a Sluggo Stick™ is the trademarked term for what is generically known by many other names, most commonly just plain, ‘pokey stick’. As noted in my cache, Yellowstone NotSoNational Park:

This is not a juniper bush cache but a Sluggo-Stick ™ would definitely make finding this one a bit easier. Sluggo-Sticks are also known by the generic terms Pokey-Sticks and Walking-Sticks.

The Sluggo Stick™ was born on February 1, 2003 when I went looking for the cache Be Careful Sluggo and found Sluggo, a geocaching legend (that means he has been around for a long time and there are a lot of stories being told about his exploits - and has caches named after himself by others), poking around (unsuccessfully) for the cache. In my log describing that fateful encounter I noted:

We drove up and saw Sluggo poking around with his stick…

The term Sluggo Stick™ was not coined for another 3 weeks when I was searching for Only Twelve Escapes and in my log of that find I wrote:

I do definitely need to get myself a Sluggo Stick ™ to wack and poke in the bushes.

In my search for this history of the infamous Sluggo Stick™ I found these other references:

UPDATE: The body shop owner named in this article was found not guilty. See the comments below for details.

Michelle Durand writes in the San Mateo County Daily Journal about some auto body shop owners in California who are facing jail time for insurance fraud:

A Redwood City body shop owner nabbed with nine others in an undercover auto fraud string last December will face trial for allegedly inflating an insurance repair estimate unless he agrees to a plea at the end of the state.

Yohannes Mesfine, 47, has pleaded not guilty to fraud charges and is scheduled to possibly agree to a plea bargain Sept. 23, according to Chief Deputy District Attorney Steve Wagstaffe. The offer would discount state prison, Wagstaffe said.

Mesfine owns Mesfine Auto Body and Paint in Redwood City. He and nine others were arrested in December as part of Operation Scorpion, a joint undercover sting by the state and the San Mateo County District Attorney’s Office insurance fraud unit. The operation targeted 13 auto body repair shops throughout the county. Of those, nine reportedly gave fraudulent repair estimates.

In each case, investigators brought the shops a car they claimed occurred during a hit-and-run, making the damage insured. They then pointed out some damage that occurred prior to the accident and asked the auto body shop owners to include it in the insurance estimate.

The body shop owner tells the client he is doing him a favor - and now both of them are committing insurance fraud. Something that seems so innocent and can be rationalized by saying you have been paying premium for so long and never turned in a claim to get it fixed - well - is it worth jail time?

My sister-in-law sent this to me over a year ago. I have saved it in my e-mail box for too long, but did not want to throw it away in the bit bucket.

Much has been said about “tough love” for misbehaving children.

Most of America thinks it improper to spank children, so my spouse and I have tried other methods to control our kids when they have one of “those moments”.

One that we found very effective is for me just to take the child for a car ride and talk.

They seem to calm down and stop misbehaving after our little ride together.

I’ve included a photo below of one of my sessions with our son, in case you would like to try the technique.

While in Olympia for the wedding of the daughter of some old long-time friends I had a chance to do some geocaching. I did a search and found 480 caches within a 25 mile radius of our friends home outside Olympia, WA. 480 caches! It seemed like if you planned your route correctly there would be less than a mile between caches!

Kirsten and I went out before the wedding to hunt for some caches while Von helped get things ready at the church. The first cache we did was Bigelow Springs (my log ) and had a great view of the capitol building. Kirsten found the cache container, a little altoids tin, tucked away nicely in it’s hiding spot. We then drove down to the hill and looked for Mud is Good but it was a 2 stage multi-cache and it started to rain so we decided to pass on it for something hopefully easier.

The GPSr then directed us to Pencil Mine (my log) which appeared to be located in the shrubbery outside an office supply store. Luckily the store was closed so we did not feel too conspicuous. I poked around in the shrubbery and lifted up the juniper bush branches all to no avail. As we were about to give up and go on to the next cache it occurred to me that I had been looking at ground level but it could be in the branches of the shrubbery. I started peering in and what do I find but the cache hanging like a Christmas ornament in a surplus decon canister.

We then drove over to Easy as Crabcake? but as it states in the notes - “the difficulty of this cache is much higher if you go when the market is open but that’s how it should be approached.” It was swarming with people and I was too self-conscious to be looking under tables and benches while the area was so busy. We then headed over to Lets Go For A Paddle where we again struck out. We spent probably 2o minutes searching up and down a floating walkway for something out of place or out of the ordinary - but all to no avail.

I noticed there was a cache, Dancing Waters (my log), within500 feet - just across the busy intersection in one of those water fountains for kids to play in. We looked around and I tried to think where I would hide one here and sure enough we found it right there. This one had a ’secret word’ that the owner requires you to e-mail to him to confirm that you really found the cache.

Well, the wedding was within the hour and Kirsten and I needed to get some lunch so we stopped in at a Safeway and shared a Chinese dinner and headed to the wedding. Our batting average was not too good - but we did find 3 caches in about 2 hours, some good father-daughter time, and had fun to boot.

A combination of FatWallet.com and Magellan GPS Companion is really responsible for my getting involved in GeoCaching. I sporadically watch FatWallet for great deals. I do not remember the exact deal right now but a post at FatWallet showed up detailing how you could buy this GPS attachment for your Palm Handspring Visor for $40 or so using the clearance price at Staples, a rebate, and some coupons. The retail price was closer to $200.

Well, a genetic trait I possess makes it very difficult to pass up on such savings. (FatWallet was also responsible for my original purchase of my Handspring Visor.) Only one problem. What is a GPS and what can it be used to do? Google to the rescue. I did a quick Google search and this thing called geocaching kept popping up. There was even a link to an NPR story about a dad taking his kids out to geocache and how much fun the kids had. Well, that was all the justification I needed.

The great thing about the GPS on the Palm is the software that is available that can use the GPS. The programs I use most frequently are Mapopolis, CacheMate, and Outdoor Navigator.

I have the maps for the entire US available for Mapopolis. I always keep the local counties on my GPS and anytime we go on a trip I just transfer over all the counties we will be driving through. Besides telling me where I am at any given moment I can ask for directions between any two spots - usually where I am at the moment and where I am supposed to be. It is a great tool for someone who is navigationally challenged like myself. I am still using the OS-3 version that was designed for the Handspring. It does everything I need - plus I have paid for it. The new version has a lot of features like spoken directions, etc. But if I need someone to tell me which way to turn I can just bring my wife ( big grin ).

Outdoor Navigator is also a mapping software but instead of showing street maps it actually displays the USGS topo maps by quadrants. You can plot points on it manually or through other software. What makes it handy for geocaching is that a cache might only be 100 yards away - but if it is on the other side of a river or 500 feet above you - well you get the picture. Using the topo maps you can ’see’ before you get to the cache location how you will want to approach it - or if you even can without backtracking back to the a bridge or access road.

CacheMate is the palm program for geocaching. I can transfer all the geocache locations I am interested in from the online www.geocaching.com web site to a program on my PC called GSAK (Geocaching Swiss Army Knife the PC program for geocaching). GSAK will slice, dice, and convert the geocaching locations to a set of files I can use with CacheMate. CacheMate will need to have a post describing all the things you can do with it, because besides being a database it has plugins that allow me to instantly go into Navigation mode to find out where a cache is, transfer the cache location as a ‘dot’ onto the Outdoor Navigator topo maps, and most impressively, it will let me export the cache locations to my Garmin GPS (so when I got to Olympia I just transferred those cache locations to my handheld GPS).

2005 Summer Vacation - August 5th - Day 7

After visiting Fort Clatsop and getting some lunch we drove over to Fort Stevens State Park.

We followed the signs to an old wreck, the Peter Iredale, which ran aground during a storm in 1906. The rusting hulk is more than half buried in the sand on the beach. We viewed it from the car since we did not plan to play on the beach and saw no need to get out in the wind and track sand into the car.

We then drove over to the Historic Military Site which had a small museum and what remains of the original Fort Stevens. The original fort was constructed in 1863 for the Civil War and remained active until shortly after World War II.

I had no idea the west coast had any involvement in the civil war. It is hard to imagine Union soldiers standing guard over the mouth of the Columbia. The stories one reads usually take place in the east coast states with some mention of states as far west as Mississippi. A brochure at the fort explained that President Lincoln ordered the construction of the fort due to British and Confederate sea raiders in the area. There was a need to protect the shipping coming in to the Columbia River as well as to deter foreign powers from taking advantage of the situation.

On June 21, 1942 Fort Stevens gained the distinction of being fired upon by a Japanese submarine roaming off-shore. The submarine fired 17 shells at the fort but the fort did not fire back and no damage was inflicted on the fort.

The concrete gun batteries, which are the most prominent feature of the site, where built between 1897 and 1904. Using their FRS radios the boys had great fun playing a modified game of hide & seek in the many rooms and passageways.

As we were leaving a group was beginning to set up for a civil war reenactment scheduled for later in the week.

Inside the museum there is a scale model of the fort which helps give you an idea of what the encampment at the fort looked like when it was still commissioned. Also inside were some of the guns and shells that were used as well as one of the WWII era mines that was used to protect the mouth of the Columbia River. Detonation of the mines was electronically controlled from the Mine Commander’s Stations at Fort Stevens or across the Columbia River at Fort Columbia

Near the museum a long house has been reconstructed at the site of a Clatsop Indians village. Lewis and Clark traded with these Indians during their stay at Fort Clatsop. My lack of knowledge regarding Native American culture was evident in that I thought that all Indians lived in teepees.

More Photos:

• Fort Stevens
• 2005 Summer Vacation

As an auto insurance agent Washington state drivers license / identification card numbers have always been a part of my job. I have used them often enough that I have the pattern that the state uses memorized so that if someone tells me their driver’s license number I can usually tell them their birthday. It can be fun to tell people that you can tell their birthday from their checkbook. They do not realize that the driver’s license number they have printed on the check tells all.

Washington state encodes your last name, first initial, middle initial, and your date of birth into your driver’s license number. A Washington Identification Card uses the same number as the driver’s license for someone who does not or cannot drive. This online program by Alan De Smet will calculate a drivers license number for you if you want a good guess at what someone’s license number would be.

His site also has the best explanation I could find of how the system works:

These license numbers look like the following:

• WOO**JT546KA - “John T. Woo” born on May 1st, 1946
• WALKECR579DU - “Christopher R. Walken” born on March 31st, 1943
• LLLLLFMYYXmb - Pattern deciphered below

Drivers License Status

You can go online and check the status of a Washinton License or ID Card number. The screen shot on the right shows what information is available online.

Deciphering the Number

Started out the morning hoping to find a few geocaches. Using CacheMate I promptly drove to the closest cache to the motel, Road Going Nowhere. I parked the car and headed up the blocked road spur to what looked like a good path into the “woods.” The GPS said the cache was about 50 yards in, so in I tromped. I spent about 30 minutes searching but to no avail. Finally decided to give up on this one and search for some easier caches.

Next was the Mark Twain Cache which turned out to be a bronze sculpture of the writer sitting on a bench prominently placed at the corner of a fairly busy intersection. I could not sit with ole Mark because the seat was very wet but I wasn’t much in the mood for sitting. A litte searching produced a small altoids tin that was cleverly hidden.

As always I left some million dollar bills in this cache as I did in each cache this morning. They were all micro-caches this morning so I did not have to worry about trading - though I usually never take anything but always throw in a couple of million dollar bills if there is room.

Sunset Drive-Inn was the next cache on my list. The coordinates placed me in a undeveloped lot with some trees. Where could it be? Looked around the area and decided there were only a couple places it could be and sure enough it was at the first place I looked.

Next was supposed to be a cache at the Home Depot but as I approached it I realized I was on the wrong side of the interstate. As I drove I saw a walkway over but it was still too far away. Then I remembered seeing something about a walkway and sure enough my GPS showed Tumwater Bridge Walk The hint for the cache said it was at kid height and, sure enough, I wish I had one of my kids with me. Wasn’t sure this old body would get to the cache but was able to retrieve the large altoids tin.

Freddys was right at the overpass. I pulled into the employee parking and saw a light post - and immediately knew to lift the bolt cover for a quick cache & dash.

Well it was time to be getting back to the hotel so we could check out and visit our friends. I still had the De-Pot to do over at Home Depot. I pulled in next to the cache location and scoped out where in the landscaping a cache could be hidden. A little sluething and I found the little film canister.

When I see something I like on someone else’s blog I always want to find out how they did it - and more often than not it is a simple WordPress plugin. Well, someday someone may see something they like on my blog and want to copy it. Now they can! I just installed pluginsUsed from AndrewSW.com and am using it my page: Wordpress - Plugins Installed .

This plugin displays the plugins that are active in one of two ways:

• displayPluginsAsTable() - which displays as a nicely formated table with links to the author and plugin URIs.
• displayPluginsAsList() - which displays a list of links to the plugin URI suitable for a sidebar

Both are php functions so to use them on a regular post or a static page you must use either RunPHP or PHPExec plugins. I have been using the PHPExec plugin.

As shipped, WordPress the title of RSS-comment-feeds only include the author. This makes it real difficult to understand what a comment is about since all you have is:

• by Joe Schmoe

as the title of a comment in your feed reader (I use Newsgator Online) and then their comment. So you get a series of comments regarding different posts from the same site, many of them looking something like this:

by Joe Schmoe
I really agree with you on that but you may want to check out xyz.com

I had previously hacked the WordPress code to add the title of a post to the RSS feed. I was able to remove that hack and use PostTitleInCommentRSS plugin from Scattered. I modified the plugin to output:

• by: Joe Schmoe Re: Post Title

instead of

• by: Joe Schmoe on Post Title

I ran across this article and realized how desperate some people are to make a sale. You really wonder if the folks he was dealing with even considered that if he was willing to do this, what made them think he was being honest with them? Would you buy a car from a guy who was willing to do this? Almost like the Nigeria Scam you realize it takes 2 dishonest people for the scam to work. Let’s not just hope we never run into anyone this clever or desperate to sell us something but pray that it is not tempting for us to participate.

From KHOU news in Houston, Texas:

Robbins Autoplex has been around since the 1930s. It is family-owned and operated. The Humble dealership has weathered many storms, but none like the case of veteran employee Tobias Green. Green was arrested early Wednesday on charges of burning cars for customers. He is charged with arson and insurance fraud.

As 11 News first reported, Green allegedly called his scheme the “rotisserie special.” Investigators say he’d torch cars for customers, but there was a catch. They had to agree to use the insurance money to buy a new vehicle from him.

“We believe he is approaching everybody, for the most part, who is upside down in their car and has good insurance,” said HFD arson investigator Scott Clemants. “If they have good insurance, than he talks to them about his deal in a backroom.”

Clemants said they once watched Green in the act. “The suspect had come into the location with another female and intentionally set a car on fire,” Clemants said.

Before joining Robbins, Green was a police officer in Ames and Liberty counties. Investigators believe that experience may have taught him how to make the arson fires look like an accident to fool adjusters.

They point out that arson schemes drive up the cost of insurance for everyone else.