The Privilege of Labor

Spent a good part of the day working with Dad and Bro, putting in steel gate and fence. Digging post holes, mixing cement, holding tape or level. I always feel lucky when I get a chance to work productively with my family. Especially when we do something as attractive as the work we completed today. Here's a pic of the fence we put up:

Another night of autumn insomnia

Going to be helping my brother put in some iron fencing tomorrow so of course since I need to be well rested my insomnia has kicked in.

A few small showers have been blowing through. Only 1 degree above freezing so we can expect the surrounding mountains to be dusted with snow in the morning light. Should be lovely and nicely timed for the upcoming Christmas season.

Wishing you all a fluffy blanket of night and a bright, vigorous morning.

Cold work

The clear weather has been keeping me real busy.

Frost and fog turn the world that ghostly pastel this morning.

Wishing you all a comfy day.

Happy Gratitude

I was gonna go with "Happy Thanksgiving" but then I decided to be just a little weird.

Wow! it is frozen up outside. Frost has painted the world in eerie paleness. A flock of geese were hunkered down in the field below our vineyard. We had some white corn and assorted other stuff in that field, now disced down, so they should have something to fill their bellies (or crop or whatever) today too.

I want to thank everyone who visits here for my enjoyment of their enjoyment. One off reciprocal happiness as it were. May all of you be pleasantly stuffed and sleepy today.

Autumn Insomnia

Well, I can't sleep again. 1:42am, uhg....

Had a great day (yesterday) it was cold but clear all day so I got a lot of pruning done. Dad got a bunch of firewood cut up.

There's nothing good on tv late at night I have discovered. Adultswim used to be pretty good but they've lost their touch in laziness. Bring back SpaceGhost Coast-to-Coast and use some better tech to make the interviews more "live" and get better guests.

Oregon PBS is having a hearing about predatory loan practices. I'm so weirded out by that whole thing, an entire sector of our economy is committing suicide. All they need to do is stop foreclosing and give these homeowners a chance to hang onto their houses, but like the proverbial lemmings they just keep heading over that cliff. How about this, you bunch of idiots, take possession of the houses that are loaned against then lease them back to the occupants at a rate they can afford. That way you can show both capital inflow and real property value on your spreadsheets. Give people the chance to buy their houses back at a later date and they'd be sooo happy and your company(ies) could survive this disaster. But no, that'd make too much sense; why don't you just keep boarding up empty houses, putting families on the street and going bankrupt, that'll help everybody.

Well, gonna make another attempt at sleep. Hope y'all are resting well.

Deep thinking

There's more going on here then meets the eye. Literally. The human world's mass mind is connected in an unprecedented manner. Loose and free, messages flash across dendrites of glass and copper. Axons of human minds flutter in a quantum superposition of opinions. Histories and circumstances play like tree shadows flashing by on a sunny autumn drive.

Million gallon buckets of data deluge the net in the form of pictures, text, video and a plethora of other formats. Meta-minds layered high in the frontal cortex swim in deep seas of truth and fiction. A lightning flash of insight rumbles away into the distant, thunderous thoughts echoing off hillsides of adamant dogma.

Mixed metaphors splash across the canvas of our ideas like paint spilled by a child.

Another FINALLY! moment

I've been saying this for like, six years now. There are plenty of people sitting around America who would love a chance to do something as important as protecting our borders with some of their spare time and the technology to allow them to has been around for well over a decade now. I'm sure my friends and family have reached that "here he goes again" stage when I talk about it.

With a little open source cooperation from the public we could come up with ways to work in teams, accelerate response rates and filter erroneous reports. The stats totally support the fact that the public attention resources are there; 43,000 hits per hour.

Enjoyably busy Sunday

After a hearty homemade breakfast I lazed around for most of the morning. Watched the movie "Fantastic Four" which I had been told by friends and assorted reviewers wasn't very good. My respect for those opinions has been seriously damaged because it was a freakin' great movie. Terribly similar in style to the original comic books, with some great special effects.

Then I installed a dvd burner in the computer that my good friend Del gave me. Everything went smoothly in that operation and I've already backed up many gigabytes of my important files.

Used the afternoon to clean up, prune and study. The weather was unusually fine, in fact we set a record in Medford today, 68 is the new high last record was 67 in 1937. Huh, what do you know they must've had global warming back then too. I'm sure that after the rains we've been having mushrooms will be going nuts. At least for a couple more days until the temperatures start to drop.

Everyone be happy.

Rain and other eventualities

It is raining quite hard out there. Will be another day of clean-up and minor repair work. Gotta go get a hair cut (ick!) used to have a girlfriend who would drop by and cut my hair but that is long past. Quite a difference between having a lovely lady brighten up my day and having to endure another visit to the barber shop.

Nothing special to report from the dream realm and everything else I can think of is unworthy of blogging.

Wishing you all a fine day with good traction.

Technorati redux

Technorati Profile

This is the second time I've had to reclaim my blog at Technorati. Come one fellas, your right to the "Tech" part of your name is slipping...

A good tip for fellow bloggers

On a number of occasions, especially when I am offering gardening advice like "How to grow eggplants" or "how to grow tomatoes" my articles have been ripped off by other sites, a blatant violation of my copyrights. What really makes it irritating is that these are always vulture ad sites or some other gimmic pile of crap.

Dailyblogtips has a great idea about how to hurt those "scrapers" which use adsense, a most common advertising medium from Google. I'll be using this technique for sure and so should anyone else who gets ripped-off by such a-holes.

Free-speech-alicious

Here's a neat article and google-map. It lists all the countries where access to the internet has been restricted.

Classic Oregon Storm

Big, fat rain drops are rattling down on the roof of my barn. Been watching this slow moving amoeba of precipitation on the nexrad all morning.

Had a lot of weird, depressing dreams last night. Can't really recall more than a few snippets but definitely left me feeling, blah. Between bouts of cleaning I will spend a few minutes meditating-concentrating and try to expunge these somber reflections.

I'm trying to "beam" or channel some of this rain to our drought stricken fellows in the southeast. Rae, you might want to make a rain circle in your yard for me to tune into so I have a target.

Y'all have a funny, funky day now.

Pretty funny-15 Laterals

I don't know if this is, as they say in LA, fur-reals, and I've never been much of a football fan but it is quite humorous. Check it here.

Worth noting

Found an article at Slashdot that makes me say "Finally!" Some people have begun using modern tech to improve on the classic MRI. This is something which should be available in any home that wants it. No way an MRI machine is more complex than an Escalade or any other fully modern car so why should they cost so much more? With the removal of the dependency on enormous magnets I really hope this gets pushed directly into commercial production.

Rock Work

Of all the pics I took, only these two looked any good. The wall looks to good to do it the disservice of displaying it in an ugly fashion.

Sun shines through

The fog lifts early this morning, portend of a weather change.

Gold and red cherry leaves glow outside the high northern window of my barn.

The mountain fading green into brown.

Yesterday dad and I spent much of the day laying stone on a rock wall for his friend Terry Spencer. Yes we also do a little rock work now and then, it's sort of genetic; we're dutch. The wall we are working on looks really choice. My da is a powerful good stone juggler. We're supposed to work there this afternoon again and I'll try to remember my camera.

Hope y'all have a fine and laughing day.

75%

We are the water that knows.
The water that walks,
the water that talks.
Water remembers and water forgets.
In the sky we hide our heads.
Our reflections reflect themselves in puddles
which we see with eyes of water.
The wind blows in and out
of lungs of water.
The ripples of our thoughts
trickle through the deep parts of the earth
and are lost
in water.

Thought

More political mumbo-jumbo

I'm wondering if Porkbusters is going to have anything to say about this. Looks like Trent Lott is going to get to have bacon for breakfast after all.

Foggy morning

Lovely fog covers my world this morning. The air outside is perfumed like a giant cup of exotic tea. Probably from all the leaves on the ground.

Have come up against a number of consistent barriers in my programming so I'm taking a little time off and putting my energy into getting the rest of the farming tear-down under way. Was gonna say "done" but done is a long way off yet.

My biggest problem in programming right now is that winXP interferes with some of my install package. Keeps preventing me from installing files to the system32 directory so I'll probably switch to registering their location in Program Files instead. Which of course requires a complete rewrite of my install package. Uhg.

Hope you all have a fine day.

Hmmmm...

I've been trying to stay away from politics in my writings here because such discussions tend to bring on unreasonable vehemence in a certain sector of our population (which sector cuts across all political categories, by the way.)

However, this was a thought provoking article from the L.A. Times. Layers of deception wrapped in swathes of confusion under a heaping, steaming pile of mystery.

More than an idea

"A Modern Day Eerie Canal" by Jack Ulrich. Good stuff.

A handful of apple tree

Cold air, puffy clouds blowing by. The branches sway and bob as I pull myself up another notch.

The cloth and metal harvest bucket hanging from my left shoulder is already heavy with apples. But the best are near the top. I find a branch that will (briefly) hold my 250 pounds. That gives me a toe hold to the largest top branch which 19 years of pruning have tenderly developed into the perfect step. Rough lichens increase the friction of my grip, securing me almost like velcro.

Pluck, pluck, plux. The bucket grows heavier. A few apples have to be plucked with my right hand and dropped overhead into the bucket. The few bruises won't have time to darken before they are cut up and dipped in sugar water and cinnamon for the drier.

One last largish apple and I begin the gnarly descent. Not trusting the small branch quite so much on the way down, I quickly shift my feet through the intricate patterns necessary to descend the tree. Waves of energy wripple and surge through the noontime air and sun. With my hand closed tight on the biggest up-branch I set foot at last on the lowest 3-fold bifurcation of the trunk. Lowering my bucket to the earth, I close my eyes and breathe deep the air and sky. The smell of tree, the rough touch of bark and lichen. A shimmering curtain, prayer or meditation take your pick, envelopes the orchard with my love for these moments.

Wishing you all a day like this.

Pix Flood

Cynthia's recent comment reminded me, so I broke out the ol' hp digital camera and download all the pix I've taken.

Here's a small sample from the last 6 weeks or so...

Stressfully Lazy

It's another lazy Friday for me, and it really shouldn't be. Thus is stress produced, a difference between my expectations and reality. Rational consciousness imposes high fees for its use.

Will got out shortly and pick some apples or start cutting in the vineyard to relieve my concerns; albeit a futile gesture.

Spent part of this morning getting my WebBlazer software up and running on this computer. For some weird reason WinXP installs all but one of my components (Attach.dll) in the C:\Windows\System32 directory, so for the time being I have to hand install and register it to make it work. Nice to be able to shred through Wikipedia articles now, but I gotta fix that glitch before going public with this thing. Think I'll put out a demo model and then finish the microsiccade and image display functions for the registered version.

Hope you're all having a great day. A special shout-out to my lady: wherever, whenever, whoever; a smile for you ;-)