man & nature # 35 ~ 2 mysteries
Friday, September 5, 2008 at 09:11AM 
A sign of things to come • click to embiggenLuke wrote: The scroll bars on embiggened photos, which had been working nicely, have just today disappeared again. Which, in turn, caused Aaron to write: oh man... I would have waited until noon or something to tell him that. No Coffee yet, no tee time scheduled...things will be flying this morning in that office!
Yep and nope. Yep, the scroll bars which magically appeared have again magically disappeared. Thanks once again SquareSpace, especially for the fact that there has been absolutely no communication about what's going on from them since this latest on-again, off-again scroll bar fiasco started.
Nope, there is nothing flying around the office this AM. Instead, I have channeled my energies into figuring out a way around this nonsense. I mean, point in fact and to get to the heart of the matter, how big a deal is it to offer your subscribers the option to have control over scroll bars / resize on popups? They did it before (although they apparently didn't know they were doing it).
And that got me to thinking - what if used the old code that their software generated in V4? So, I uploaded today's pictures using the new V5 software, copied the image source info from it and pasted that info into the old code in the appropriate places, deleted the all the new/V5 code, and, holy crap, it worked - once again, I have complete control over popup window size, popup window scroll bars, and the popup resize handle.
It's a bit of a pain in the ass workaround, but it does seem to work and therefore worth the effort. I am now anxiously awaiting to see if SS magically f***s this up for me.
So, AS A TEST, today's popup window is deliberately sized smaller than the image so that scroll bars and the resize handle appear.
THIS SHOULD BE WORKING FOR EVERYONE ON EVERY BROWSER. PLEASE LET ME KNOW IF IT IS NOT WORKING.
And now, back to our regularly scheduled programming
Over the past few years, the Catskill Mountains / Park (a similar but much smaller version of the Adirondack Mountains / Park) in southern NY was overrun by some kind of gypsy moth catapillar(?) infestation. And I do mean overrun. Vast vista of denuded trees where everywhere evident. It was downright butt ugly.
I don't know if today's post is a picture of that kind of infestation or not but I did notice a fair amount of this kind of thing in my traverse of a stretch of the Adirondack Coast region. I hope this not a portent of what's to come.
Reader Comments (6)
I have noticed the same thing down here in Washington county. We have many trees where the trees are full of leaves but the top looks like sticks, they are stripped bare.
We have gypsy moths down here in PA but they are usually pretty patchy. I have also never seen them build webs (or whatever) is shown in your photo. They also typically prefer oaks.
Maybe they are tent caterpillars?
I don't get the photo - are you starting to vingette in the center of the photo, too?
Scrollbars work in Firefox : Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.1) Gecko/2008070208 Firefox/3.0.1
I would prefer the popup to be the size of the photo without scrollbars.
Mark,
Scroll bars work fine here in IE on my work computer!
It looks like it could be tent catapillars, but I can't really tell what kind of tree this is. Tent catapillars like the rosacae family, such as apples, crabapples, black cherries, etc. This looks like it could be a black cherry to me, but like I said, I can't be sure in your photo.
Not sure if you've got the same thing, but here's my posting of our version here in Virginia. I believe they are Hyphantria cunea, aka fall webworms. According to all the sources I read, they don't actually permenantly harm the trees, but are what we think of as "ugly." Although that light effect is pretty spectacular, Mark.