van der Decken

According to the FAQ, each week's souvenir will be awarded on the following Wednesday. So this week's souvenir will be awarded on July 26.

Just a picture of an ordinary little red clover blossom that I'm very happy with how it turned out.

The problem (and the solution - delete and reupload now that they've fixed the problem) are explained here.

That's better, thank you. I deleted all the images I'd uploaded today and resent them. The log page images have returned to their proper sizes and quality and the images in the lightbox on the cache page look right too.

Something seems to have broken in the photo uploads today. I don't know if it's related to the changes that are referenced in this thread, but it was working fine a couple of days ago and now... To see what I'm talking about, look at my log for GC731WW. The "Additional Images" on the log page are the same size as the primary image, but they appear to be scaled up thumbnails. And the primary image looks to be horribly compressed too. And if you go to the cache page and look at the images there, they're displaying smaller (and appear more compressed) than images that I uploaded to GC72R1Z just two days ago.

The bear encounter was on the way to Maple Leaf in the Rocky Mountain Foothills - #55.

Almost overlooked this little one hiding in the grass amongst much larger beardtongues, buffalo beans, ragworts and vetches. This little starwort was barely 1/4" across.

On the new public profile page, the header portion of the page takes up the entire area of my monitor. I scroll down to the tabs and click on Gallery. As it switches tabs, it goes right back to the top of the page... hiding the gallery. I scroll down to the gallery, look at a few photos, and click on the Next> link. Once again, it goes right back to the top of the page... hiding the gallery. Again. So again I scroll down... do you see the problem? Every time I go to look at something, I get the header back again. Waaaaaayyyyy too much scrolling going on for my liking with the new design.

After submitting a Field Note (Draft), then there's a blue banner at the top of the resulting cache page that gives the option of returning to the Drafts page. There's also an option, in that blue banner, to view your log. That option will go to a webpage that's similar to what we used to see after submitting a field note, but unfortunately that won't have the link to go back to the Drafts page. Personally, I would prefer to skip the cache page with blue banner and go directly to the 'view your log' page with a link back to the Drafts page. Essentially what we had before. There's not even the blue banner if you're a Basic Member logging a PMO cache. You don't get the option to return to the Drafts page or to view your log. You just get the THIS IS A GEOCACHING PREMIUM MEMBER ONLY GEOCACHE message. That's not terribly useful. Please put it back the way it was before, where it took you to your newly added log, and included a link there to return to the Drafts page.

Using the current logging page (not the new one), it is no longer possible to log a find on a cache where I have previously logged a DNF. Please fix this.

The old link should still get you to your watchlist.

Here's a couple of wildflowers that I haven't been able to identify yet. Some sort of Arnica? Seen on Mount Lipsett two summers ago. I saw this one north of Golden BC two summers ago. It's a little like cat's ear but even ignoring the orange colour it doesn't look quite right.

I am constantly stopping on the trail to take pictures of things both great and small. That may help explain why I so often end up hiking alone; no one else wants to stop that much! But I think it's worth it. For instance, when I first started taking pictures of wildflowers I hardly knew any of their names. While many of them are now old friends, I still run across beautiful new strangers from time to time. All of these were taken with various digital point n' shoots. My venerable Canon AE-1 and its array of lenses have sat at home for more years than I care to remember! Raindrops on a conifer Prickly rose Sticky geranium Brown eyed susan Northern bedstraw Orange agoseris Checkerspot on spirea Variegated wind flower Pearl Crescent on ragwort

The old newsletter had a list of recently published caches near me. Last week, that was a list of 20 caches to look through. That was quick to look through and useful. The new newsletter has a link to a search of ALL caches near me. This week, that's 3,366 caches. It doesn't even filter out the ones I've already found. That's neither quick, nor useful. So I've turned off the newsletter. It's of no use to me anymore.

It's preserved at the Wayback Machine.

GET OUT...and enjoy the outdoors #3 - The Point: There were whitecaps on Lower Kananaskis Lake this day, but on the Upper Lake, there wasn't a breath of wind.

A quick clone retouch later and...

So for the next 17-27 days - or longer - the "updated in the last 7 days" filter won't return the expected results. Any PQ that uses that filter will be full of caches that shouldn't be there. That's really unfortunate.

So from now until 7 days after this process finishes, the "Updated in the last 7 days" filter is pretty much nonfunctional. That's unfortunate. When is this update expected to finish? I'm assuming from what you said that this is going to eventually affect every cache in the database.

TL;DR version: it looks like every cache placed before 2007 is suddenly showing up in a PQ with the "Updated in the last 7 days" filter checked regardless of whether or not they have really been updated. Much longer explanation: I noticed that suddenly some of my PQs were hitting the 1000 cache limit, when they hadn't been anywhere near that big in the past. I also noticed that a lot of old caches that hadn't been visited, DNF'd or had a log in years were showing up in them. Upon digging into things a bit, I discovered that every cache placed before 2007 appeared to be showing up. Pick an area with a small number of caches. The Yukon Territory in Canada works well for a test as it has fewer than 1000 caches overall and so there's no issues with hitting the 1000 cache limit in the PQ. Create a new PQ, selecting Yukon Territory in the State/Province dropdown and check the "Updated in the last 7 days" filter. Click the Submit Information button and then the "preview the search here" link. Sort the list by clicking on the "Placed" until the earliest caches show up at the top of the list. Notice that none of the caches have been found recently. If you open up any of the cache pages, you won't find any recent notes, DNFs or other logs either. Now compare this list to the complete list of caches in the Yukon, sorted by placed date. Here's the link. It shows exactly the same caches. Advance to the second page of results in both the PQ and complete lists. It's the same too. It's not until you get to the 3rd page of results and start running into caches places in 2007 or later that the lists diverge. I saw the same result with several different provinces. What's happening? The "Updated in the last 7 days" filter is really handy for keeping on top of cache activity, but with all the old caches being included, it's not. PQs are maxing out, meaning that cache activity is being missed, and it's hard to separate the wheat from the chaff in what does make it through.

I saw this on geocaching.com a day or so ago, but it's cleared up today. I haven't seen that happen on the forums though. In fact, I'm not seeing any icon at all in the forum tabs right now.

Having spent most of my working life on the "I'm the one who has to fix this bug" side of things, I know just how annoying an "I saw it happen once but it hasn't happened again and I don't know what I did" report can be. Just going back to the cache page every 10 minutes or so and downloading the GPX file again is enough to get another different language in the waypoints. No visits to the account settings, no logging off and back on; just come back ever so often and click.

Over the past few months I've been noticing a problem with some GPX files that I've downloaded. Finally I've figured out how to reproduce it - if not exactly what's going on. 1. Go to the cache page of a cache that has extra waypoints. I'll use GC6BQJ0 as an example as it has a few different waypoints. 2. Download that cache by clicking the "GPX file" button. 3. Open the GPX file in a text editor and look at the <sym> and <type> tag contents in the waypoints. They'll be in a random language. 4. Go to the Preferences tab in your Account Settings. Change the preferred language from English to anything else. Save that setting. Change the language back to English and save that. 5. Return to the cache page and download it again by clicking the "GPX file" button. 6. Open the GPX file in a text editor again and the <sym> and <type> tag contents in the waypoints will have changed back to English. 7. Wait a while. 10 minutes is usually more than enough time. 8. Download and open the GPX file again. The <type> tag contents will have switched to another language. 9. Wait another 10 minutes or so and try the download again. The <type> tag contents will have switched to yet another language. If that's not bizarre enough, downloading the same cache as part of a pocket query doesn't exhibit the same problem. The <sym> and <type> tag contents are always in English. Any thoughts? Has anyone else stumbled across this?

Ghost 5-5: Walking across the ice on Ghost Lake on a snowy New Year's Eve.

It appears so.