Woodpress

Last night I played chess with my six year old son. Considering how few games he’s played in his life, he’s pretty good. He has a pretty solid understanding of how the pieces move. At some point in the game, I decided to take a couple pictures of the board, and I got one that I like:

On Sunday I took a nice long walk with my good friend Matt. I took pictures. I also got a mild sunburn, but there’s a nice non-burned area on the back of my neck where my camera strap was.

Like some insects and arachnids I’ve worked with, Matt was a very cooperative model. Unlike an insect, he takes requests for poses. (Matt is unlike an insect in several other ways, too.)

Here are another couple pictures of Matt from above.

This is the area where the next few photos were taken:

Some closer photos of the falling water:

Matt found a piece of fabric that someone had apparently left behind. It smelled like suntan lotion, and made a fabulous cape… so naturally he played superhero.

Somehow a couple ants got on the hat Matt was borrowing from my wife. I think they wanted their pictures taken. I only rewarded one of them.

Here’s Matt walking away from me:

We visited a pond with an incredible amount of life in it. I sat in one corner and took pictures of various little critters that showed up while Matt explored the area. Eventually he came back and directed the critters to help me get better photos.

This bug swims upside down under the water. Maybe it thinks the air is the ground, and the water is the atmosphere. I have decided to refer to this confused insect as “6nq umop apisdn”.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen one of these squiddy looking bug critters before. I haven’t tried yet to look it up.

This spider was swimming on top of the water. I took some video of that, but I haven’t watched it yet.

There were a few of these little guys moving around.

Here’s the same guy after crawling out of the water and onto the concrete.

Again, the same guy on the concrete. About the time I took the picture below, Matt made a comment about this being pretty much the way life evolved.

In this picture you can also see some odd little greenish blobbies. Those things were everywhere; floating on top of the water, sitting on the bottom, etc. You can see them in a couple other pictures too. I’m not sure what they are, but I suspect they’re eggs.

We also found a wasp nest. I suspect it had been poisoned and knocked down. After I took this picture, Matt turned over the nest with his foot (I stood a safe distance away) and a couple live wasps came out.

When the wasps came out of the nest, one flew away, and one writhed around in the grass. The writhing wasp is the reason for me thinking they may have been poisoned. Matt suggested that maybe it was a baby and its wings weren’t developed enough for it to fly yet. Here’s a picture of the writhing wasp.

A lock.

Here’s Matt wearing his cape on his head on the walk home.

There are many other pictures from that walk, but this is plenty for now. At the end of the walk, my wife and youngest child came to meet us, then we all went out to eat.

It’s been a while since I’ve posted. Life has been busy, and I need to get to sleep, but here are a couple insect photos I’ve been meaning to post for a while.

I decided to play around with the wasp photo I just posted. I overlayed color contours on the original photo and added a border. I like how it turned out, but I still prefer the original.

I also posted a [higher resolution version of the original on deviantART.

I’m not sure exactly what type of flying stingy thingy this is… wasp, yellowjacket, or something. I’m considering spending more time studying insects, because it’d be nice to know about what I’m photographing and be able to say something more informative than “here’s a bug picture I took.” For now though, here’s a bug picture I took.

OK, I can’t just leave it at that.

Looking at the Wikipedia articles on hornets, yellowjackets, and wasps indicates that this is
a wasp, which is a general term that also applies to both hornets and yellowjackets… but it’s not a hornet or yellowjacket.

It looks a lot like the top picture on the yellowjacket page, but it doesn’t have the yellowjacket’s entirely black antennae. It doesn’t have the wider abdomen of a hornet, either. It appears to be a Paper Wasp or Polistes. That seems likely, because I’ve removed a number of those nests from our property.

These critters are apparently mild mannered, which explains why I was able to get a decent picture without getting stung. According to the Wikipedia article, Polistes dominulus (which as far as I can tell looks identical to the wasp in my photo) didn’t even live in the US prior to 1981.

Grasshoppers freak out my wife. Something about them getting stuck to your clothes and losing legs when you pull them off, I think… but she’s pretty quick to change the subject, so I really don’t know much about this particular phobia. I figure if I keep bringing it up, eventually she’ll either tell me about it or get over it (or both). Anyway, neither of those things has happened yet, so she’s going to hurt me for this picture.

To me, grasshoppers are kind of cute. Not at all like in A Bug’s Life. When I was a kid, I caught many grasshoppers, and although I did dissect a couple (my wife is going to hurt me more for mentioning that, I suspect), I quickly got over that and viewed them as pets. One summer I collected over 50 grasshoppers in a box (covered with plastic wrap) and named them all.

I used to be very shy and antisocial. A few years ago I started going to a local bar and began learning to interact with strangers. These days most people laugh at the idea of me being shy, but deep down I still am. Anyway, here are a couple shy-style photos from the bar. Maybe someday I’ll post pictures of actual *people* from the bar.

Check out the ice in my glass… it had a lot of personality. We talked for hours.

This shotglass was very friendly. Right now it’s going to the local community college, working on its Associate’s degree in liquid containment.

Most web sites look great with a browser width of 800. Yay! Good job, most web designers!

Most people don’t run resolutions lower than 800×600, and most people who do run 800×600 probably run their applications maximized, because 800×600 is so tiny.

There are a few sites (like Tucows), pushing the browser width envelope. I assume they’re thinking everyone runs at a resolution of 1024×768 or greater, which is probably practically true (except for people who browse from mobile devices), but they’re also assuming that people run their browsers that wide. That’s where their assumption breaks down. At 1024×768, people probably maximize their browsers, but I run 1920×1200, and it just doesn’t make sense to run a full-screen 1920×1200 browser.

At 800 wide, Tucows (I’m picking on them, although there are other offenders) looks like this to me:

Well, actually it’s much larger than that, but you get the idea.

To navigate, I have to choose between the following unappealing options:

• Continually scroll left and right (not fun at all).
• Resize my browser (which will change my default browser size).
• Maximize my browser (which wastes space and still looks bad).

Here’s what Tucows looks like with my browser maximized:

If you want, you can make a web site look reasonably good at a variety of resolutions — for example, the web site for Silkthread, my business, looks like this with a width of 800:

It looks like this at 1920×1200:

I admit, it doesn’t look great at 1920, but most people running 1920×1200 probably don’t use a maximized web browser. Amazon doesn’t look great at 1920×1200 either, but they do make use of the available space.

Microsoft uses a different (and also reasonable) approach. They actually detect the browser resolution and generate different HTML based on your resolution. At 1920×1200 they don’t completely fill the browser, but it looks better than if they did.

So, whenever I encounter sites that expect a browser wider than 800, I choose one of the unappealing options I listed (maximizing, scrolling constantly, or resizing my browser, risking changing my browser’s default width). As a result, my experience is less positive, and I get a bad feeling about going back.

It’s usually in the best interest of web designers to appeal to their users, so if you happen to be a web designer, hopefully you’ll agree that it’s reasonable to make your sites work well with a browser 800 pixels wide, even if many of your users will be running 1024×768 browsers.

It’d probably help to have some browser size statistics… maybe I should compile some.