Spring with snow

A little light snow around noon today. Lots of frost this morning, 28 degrees F.

The almonds, peaches and plums are all in bloom but no serious sign of damage from the frost. No idea why. The frost seems to mostly have been at ground level so maybe higher up there it just didn't freeze.

Cherries, apples and pears are hanging back and waiting. Cherries will open next hopefully the frosts will be gone by then.

Loads and loads of plants sprouting in the big greenhouse. Many thousands. 5 kinds of tomatoes, 6 types of eggplants, artichokes, lettuce, cabbage, broccoli, 4 kinds of summer squash, cantaloupe, crenshaw melons, 5 kinds of watermelon and an assortment of Asian and European melons.

On top of planting and pruning I've been doing some web page design/repair work for my friend Mark. So blog time has been limited, sorry blogosphere.

The web page design stuff has been pretty frustrating but also challenging and interesting. It's been a couple years since I worked with javascript, CSS, Perl and PHP. Thinking in meta-layers is something I used to enjoy and it's neat to get back into that level of code and the mental abstraction exercise that goes with it. Unfortunately having to fix and redesign someone else's work is quite irritating.

Y'all feel good and be happy.

Otherside

Of the earth that is. I used Google's "drill a hole through the earth" function to find this small volcanic island on the opposite side of the earth (approximately) from Oregon. It looks really cool.

Check it out

Happy Easter

Rejoice in springs renewal.

It's ham and pancake breakfast here this fine Sunday. No egg coloring, thank goodness. But you parents out there better enjoy the ritual, only a few years and they won't be interested anymore.

Don't know what's planned for today yet (beyond the pancakes) probably mostly take it easy, I've got a lots of reading to do for some web design stuff I'm doing. Good day for that. It was supposed to rain today but no sign of it so far.

Y'all have fun and enjoy the sugar rush.

Change Congress

Lawrence Lessig has always impressed me with his insight. Check out this latest endeavor from the man who championed the Creative Commons license.

These are common sense ideas that anyone of sound mind can agree with.

Busy in the greenhouse

Well, not at the moment. But the last couple days we've been scrambling trying to get back on schedule. First couple thousand assorted plants/seedlings/seeded trays are hunkered down in the big greenhouse and making their strides towards spring planting.

First day of spring starts in just a couple hours. So hard to believe. Back in August I would've bet just about anything that I wouldn't be getting ready to plant another crop right now. But here we are again, figuring how late we can buy fertilizer and how much plastic mulch we can afford. With the big new contract for tomatoes our capital overhead has expanded quite a bit.

Rain has been really picturesque the last few days but I've been too busy to wield the camera. Really nice to stand warm and dry in the greenhouse filling pony-trays with seeds while the wind and rain whip overhead.

Y'all have a fine night.

David Mamet blows my mind

This article by David Mamet at the Village Voice is one of the best pieces on being open-minded that I've ever read. You will totally enjoy it, if you keep an open mind.

My favorite bit:

Prior to the midterm elections, my rabbi was taking a lot of flack. The congregation is exclusively liberal, he is a self-described independent (read "conservative"), and he was driving the flock wild. Why? Because a) he never discussed politics; and b) he taught that the quality of political discourse must be addressed first—that Jewish law teaches that it is incumbent upon each person to hear the other fellow out.

And so I, like many of the liberal congregation, began, teeth grinding, to attempt to do so. And in doing so, I recognized that I held those two views of America (politics, government, corporations, the military). One was of a state where everything was magically wrong and must be immediately corrected at any cost; and the other—the world in which I actually functioned day to day—was made up of people, most of whom were reasonably trying to maximize their comfort by getting along with each other (in the workplace, the marketplace, the jury room, on the freeway, even at the school-board meeting).

Busy catching up

Finally got the air-inflated greenhouse up this morning. Dad took off to help bro with a gate job. I've been busy trying to get some more pruning done quite behind schedule on that. Will go out to spray the peaches shortly.

Lots of interesting stuff happening in the world it looks like in the news feeds. Glad I'm too busy to concern myself.

Hope y'all have a fine day.

Weirdness Sunday

What a lovely day we had today! Stupid remnants of the flu kept us all just weak enough to barely be able to do anything with it. I got some cleaning done anyways. I suppose it's best to make this a day of rest anyways.

Been cruising a bunch of the transhumanist blogs this evening. What a fascinating group of people. Not exactly the most level-headed bunch but you've got to hand it to them for their optimism. Here's the last one I visited: betterhumans.com They also tend to make some really clean looking blogs. So you gotta give 'em that for style too.

What they've got me thinking about is how far our technology has come since I started in computers in high school. I remember arguing once back then with my dad that there'd never be enough storage space to make a list of every human on earth. That'd still take a lot of memory but a couple of half-terabyte drives at oh, 200$ each could do the job nowadays. It blows my mind that a gigabyte of flash is about what, 12$ or so? That's nuts.

And yet with all this memory and huge increases in processor power in the last 30 years or so the world really isn't that much different. You can still get a flame-broiled whopper at burger king. You'd think there'd be some sort of dramatic shift, but no the world is still largely a mystery; life is fleeting and precious.

Be happy!

Rainy Saturday

Mighty nice showery day out there. Glad I'm still recovering from the flu, I don't have to feel guilty about being slack.

Sure can feel spring moving our way though. I'm getting stir crazy, wanna run the plow and blow up the greenhouse. Won't be long and my blog posts will start to thin out. Dad's busy planting a 288 tray of tomatoes.

My stupid black cat is trying to get in on the typing here.

Y'all have a super day.