I discovered Geocaching two weeks after buying a Palm m500. I got it at a bargain price but it was still enough that the thought of buying another toy seemed out of range for a while. Thankfully I mustered up all my courage, saved up my change and bought one anyway. Since I had just purchased the Palm, my first consideration was a GPS that would attach to it. However, the m500 sported the new "Universal Connector" and it wasn't quite universal yet. Still, as a Palm user I dreamed of somehow bringing these two devices together.

I've always avoided "two-in-one" devices, believing that with them you actually give up more than you gain. Therefore I've steered away from the Garmin iQue in favor of connectivity rather than combination. Early on I purchased a cord to connect my eTrex to my Palm and later found a Magellan GPSCompanion in a closeout bin at Staples. It was a cool purchase and a lot of fun to play with, but when I upgraded my Palm to the Tungsten T5 and Palm decommissioned the Universal Connector, I was out of luck and out of link. I did, however, enter a new world of possibilities: Bluetooth.

When the concept of Bluetooth first hit the news I was excited. This was revolutionary stuff-connecting devices wirelessly to each other. Cell phones linked to laptops, PDA's receiving menus wirelessly from restaurants as you walked by on the sidewalks, more peripherals and fewer wires. Bluetooth was the answer to all problems and, well, it was priced like it too.

CHANCES are, when you started geocaching you stepped in to a ready-made playing field. Several caches were already established in your area and your first experience was simply heading out and finding them. When it came time for you to hide a cache of your own, you took into consideration your experiences of searching for other caches and your knowledge of the area you live in.

Enter Waymarking, a new GPS game from Groundspeak. Waymarking builds off of the fun and success of geocaching, but offers a new venue for listing locations on our planet. While your geocaching experience likely began with caches that others had hidden before you, with Waymarking you have the opportunity to pioneer this new game.

Don't Get GLAD, Get MAD!

WINTER in Illinois means many things: furnaces better be working, air conditioners need to be covered, and be ready for the weather to change every 5 minutes. Just looking ahead to this week's forecast I see temperatures in the twenties and fifties, rain, snow, and maybe half a day of partly sunny. All those weather changes mean you're as likely to need an umbrella as a snow shovel. Of course, you can forget about the bug spray and sunscreen, but you can always dream.

The extreme weather changes of this season make for some good tests of cache containers. All those plastic baggies and Gladware containers that seemed like a good idea in July suddenly come back to haunt you in January. This is a time when proper cache maintenance is not only essential but very educational.