Author: OpenCaching North America

5th anniversary contest player entries drawn

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We have assigned the 128 entries (earned by 21 qualifying players) for the OCNA 5th anniversary contest! As we have on numerous occasions, assignment of the entries was done using the Random Integer Set Generator from Random.org. We requested 1 set of 128 unique integers whose value was 1-128. We have a screen shot of our actual number set at the bottom of this blog post, should you like to see it. The first 29 random numbers were assigned to our entrant with the most points, the second 25 random numbers to the entrant with the second most points, and so on. Below are all the entrants, their number of entries, and the random number(s) assigned to their X number of entries, in table form:

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Final Scores released for the OCNA 5th anniversary contest

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letteredocnalogoWe have finished compiling the scores for the OCNA 5th anniversary contest! We had a total of 21 qualifying players, about the same as last year. Remember, players received 1 entry for every 25 points scored in the contest. So those 21 eligible players earned a total of 128 entries. Our top entrant, Bon Echo from Ontario, earned 29 entries. Our next step is to assign those entries numbers 1-128 using the random number generator services offered by Random.org. Those results will be released tomorrow, along with details on the drawing to be Tuesday, September 15th.  Should anyone dispute their scores as listed below, you have until 8:00 PM Eastern Standard Time on Monday, September 14th to do so by contacting us at octeam at opencaching.us. But we don’t anticipate hearing from anyone, every single player ended up with as many or more points as they claimed on the entry form. Major bonus for every player (including helping out several people who filled out a form, but didn’t technically qualify), our admin NativTXN scored 0 points for the contest. So if you found even one cache, you “beat her”, and get 25 points. Click “read more” to see the scores. Read More

Featured contest sponsor: How to Puzzle Cache

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product_thumbnail.phpOur featured sponsor for our August 2015 5th Anniversary contest is Cully Long, Author of the book How to Puzzle Cache. He is graciously donating two copies of the book as prizes for two lucky winners. You may remember this blog interviewed Cully (Caching name ChildofAtom) about this book in December 2014. Rather than pester him with another interview, we asked Cully if he could give us an update on how things were going with himself and his H2PC effort since we last talked to him. He was happy to oblige:

First, I’d like to thank everyone for the attention and support that
How To Puzzle Cache has received! The book has sold incredibly well, selling copies in a dozen countries, both through me and through a variety of geocaching supply stores around the world. I was also welcomed with open arms at GeoWoodstock this year, selling out of my (admittedly small) book stock before 11am, but I got to meet a lot of readers, sign books and talk to people about puzzles, which is always the best part. I’ve also joined the geocaching community with appearances on Podcacher, and the GeoGearheads podcasts.In the coming months I will be releasing the digital e-book version, and announcing a secret initiative that I think everyone will be very excited about. I also have a few other geocaching publishing endeavors under way, and of course I continue to put out quality puzzle caches for my local cache area.

To learn more about the book, and how to buy it, check out his website at howtopuzzlecache.com. Don’t forget our interview with him on this blog, posted December 23rd, 2014, and check out his interview with Sonny and Sandy on Podcacher episode 497, recorded December 14th, 2014.

OCNA 5th Anniversary Locationless Event

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Birthday-Cake-Clip-ArtPlease join us to celebrate our 5th Anniversary tonight, Tuesday August 18th at 9:00 PM Eastern Standard Time, for what we believe may be the first sanctioned Geocaching event streamed on the website ustream.tv. We are certainly not the first to stream a Geocaching event, that honor goes to The Dirtbag Geocaching Society; but we at OCNA allow this type of event to occur, unlike other Geocaching websites.

You can see the event page here, and it will be hosted on DudleyGrunt’s ustream channel. Note: You will not need a ustream account to participate. And we definitely have at least one recent newsworthy Geocaching topic to discuss; the closure of a similarly named website with which we are not affiliated, that is (was) owned by a major GPS Manufacturer. 🙂

What is a Cache-Advance Cache Crate?

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CacheCrateColor_200One of the generous prizes donated for our 5th Anniversary Contest is a Cache Crate from one of the longest tenured Geocaching retailers in the world, Cache-Advance. What exactly is a Cache Crate? It could be described as a membership based service where you receive a surprise box full of Geocaching and outdoor gear delivered to your house. Cache-Advance themselves describe it as “just like finding an awesome regular sized cache filled with amazing swag”.

Membership Levels:

Cache Crates ship out on a monthly basis, although they do offer some memberships where you don’t receive them every single month. There are 6 levels of membership:

  • 3 Month gift membership for $60 ($20/month)
  • Annual membership for $228 ($19/month)
  • 6 Month membership for $120 ($20/month)
  • Monthly membership ($22/month)
  • Every other month membership ($23/every other month)
  • Quarterly membership (a Cache Crate every 3rd month) ($24/month)

Cache Crate unboxing gone viral on YouTube:

A Google search of “cache crate unboxing” shows at least 4 Geocaching Vloggers have made videos of them opening up a Cache Crate. Here we have the June 2015 unboxing by one time OCNA guest blogger The Geocaching Doc. This is the same video shown on the Cache Crate Membership page on Cache-Advance’s website. Do check that out, and consider buying a membership for yourself or a gift membership for someone else. We thank Lisa from Cache-Advance for the donation for our contest.


P.S. What happened to The Geocaching Doc on this blog?

Oh, about 3 months ago, YouTube forced developers to migrate to the latest version of their API. You might remember in 2014 a similar directive issued by Google Maps threw ours (as well as fellow alternative site Terracaching.com’s) cache maps into a tizzy. Both have since been fixed. The plug in that posted The GCDoc’s latest video on this blog was not compliant. We did hear of a small coding fix, and it worked for about a month, then abruptly stopped working again. We are looking at other plug in options, and are confident we can come up with something.