Single ladies listen up!

Or perhaps I should say, read up: A girl's guide to geeks Highly inaccurate, but it's worth a few giggles anyways.

Green ham and eggs?

I just had to say it...

rain, wind and frustration

Brrrr... went for a walk this morning with the wind a cutting blast blowing down from snow covered hills. Rain just barely above freezing pelted nearly perpendicular to the ground.

My newest computer just fried its hard-drive so I'm a little irritated with technology right now. Gotta dig around in my scrap pile and see if I've got an old 6gig drive I can stick in there until I can afford a new one.

Everybody stay dry and out of the wind and be happy.

Most important issue in 2008 election

Sandmonkey has come through for me again, pointing out this salient and well focused piece of journalism on the biggest issue in the 2008 election.

Tech geek irony

Getting a smug chuckle from watching the G4 TV [channel 73 in the Rogue valley] coverage of the CES in Vegas. Here's a show entirely populated by geeks and techies at an industry event composed of nothing but cutting edge tech. But for some reason their audio feed is running about 2 seconds behind their video feed. It's like a really badly dubbed Japanese movie! Considering how often AOTS dogs on everyone else's inferior use of tech this is really quite funny.

Fielder Mt. snow

The snow stopped about 100 feet above our farm last night. What a lovely, cold, stark morning. The land and air washed so clean you could smell it, that crisp metal-y smell of nearby snow.

Modern education

This is what "outcome based education" will get you:
Flunked: 14 Signs of a Deficient Intellect

Did earthquakes trigger levee break?

There were 3 earthquakes ranging from 3.8 to 4.2 RS to the east of Fernley, NV about 30 miles (details) in the hours preceeding a levee break that has forced the rescue of 3,500 people.

The last quake was at 4:03am, just about 20 minutes before the levee failed completely.

A ghost blogs

If you have the courage, read this.

The death of advertising

I am getting so sick of the advertising on tv. It's bad enough what I've got to pay for the privilege on a monthly basis, cable, subscription, tv upkeep etc. I mean, I already pay to have the signal brought to my house.

I figure that in a given week I watch 2 hours a day for 6 days. 20 minutes of each hour (at least) is wasted on commercials. That's like, uhmm... 4 hours a week. At minimum wage that amounts to an additional fee of 29 dollars a week! 1500 dollars a year, and for me that's been at least 30 years. The advertising industry owes me $45,000 damn it! And the same goes for anyone else trapped in the insidious tv addiction.

I say we put together a class action suit and sue for it! It'd keep the lawyers busy at least.

Global warming fallacies

Found this interesting and revealing graphic on the placement of temperature stations around the globe. [click to enlarge] It is readily apparent that the majority of new stations in the last 50 years have all been near the equator. I'd be willing to bet that if you graphed these placements the resulting figure would look like a hockey stick. Anyways, one thing is for sure: if these additional sites are being included in the global average, that average would only appear to increase. In fact, any progressive comparison would be invalidate by the inclusion of these additional sites.

Spooky storm#2

Is it just me, or does this storm look evil:

It's put down almost an inch overnight.

Night-time animal conundrum

During a brief nocturnal sojourn I cross paths with an interesting animal.

Seen at a distance of about 30 feet in flash-light it looked sort of like an opposum. After it ran away into the shrubs I walked by where it had been. A distinct and pungent aroma of skunk filled the air there. And yet, that was no skunk. To add to the oddity was the way it ran off. In my 36 years of living in Oregon I've never seen skunk or opposum run away like that. I've walked up to within 5 feet of opposum before and he just hissed at me and waddled off. Don't need to explain why skunks never run off.

So what was that critter? Way too fast for skunk but smells like skunk, way to fast for opposum but looks like opposum.

Ahhh, the wonderful mysteries of night.

Warm winter evening

After a week of frost and ice this sub-tropical stuff makes me feel down right smothered. Times like this I can really tell my people are from northern Europe. Come on neandertal genes, mellow out! Gonna have to go tromping in the cold dark and kill me a mammoth. Well, an evening walk anyways.

Doesn't help that my American lifestyle means I'm carrying about 80 pounds of totally unnecessary flab. Sure, it turns on the ladies, but is it worth it?-)

Dreamt about my weird little ol' Amerindian friend Syd last night. She picked me up hitch hiking near the coast in her little red volkswagon. She used to live across the road from me when I was doing computer programming in Veneta. We lost touch a few years back because of an obviously stupid remark I unintentionally made. In my dream we went to the grocery store and got some chips, it was a sunny day and some young men were playing hackysack in front of the store and she joined in. Considering how poor Syd's health was last time we spoke this dream somehow makes me think she might have passed beyond. The boys she was playing hacky with resembled the son of a classmate who recently passed. I dream about the dead a couple times a year, it always freaks me out a little. Especially when it's someone I had unfinished business with. Sorry about that comment Syd, I didn't mean to offend just chose my words poorly.

On that creepy note I'll wish you all a loving, life filled night with no misunderstandings.

You could be a TV critic too!

Or for that matter so could your pet monkey.

Troy Patterson over at Slate.com holds forth on last night's Leno and Conan return to tv without writers. Considering the content of his column, it's easy to see why the world is getting on fine without any guild writers. I can hardly think of a better example of shallow elitist drivel; really makes me sad that I was too tired from working to stay up and watch Jay and Conan. I bet they were actually pretty good standing on their own two feet again.

Wouldn't it be super if Jay and Conan let some bloggers write for them? I bet they'd be way funnier than tired ol' WGA writers.

Storm #1

It is just raining down out there. The ground was still frozen at 6am but it's about 43 right now and raining even harder than it was when I started typing.

NWS says this is the first of 3 storms and that tomorrow's will be even worse. Won't be much pruning going on but I've got plenty of other work to do. My barn is still a huge mess and I've got like 20 other projects that could all use my attention plus whatever I manage to do with the computer. Maybe I'll summon the courage to write that pruning guide now. If I'm really courageous I'll tackle a neat MAKE project I saw and cobble together my microscope and an old webcam. That should satisfy both the geek and scientist in me.

Lots of weird stuff going on in the news. We're all gonna be so sick of hearing about the campaigns by November, uhg I'm totally saturated on Iowa already.

Everybody keep dry and happy.

Pruning endurance

Standing on a twelve foot ladder holding a ten foot pole pruner can give one very sore shoulder muscles. That's been my major chore this morning and the brisk air is the only thing keeping the job from being truly irksome.

I keep hoping I could marshal the time to post a rudimentary pruning guide up here that I was putting together earlier but there always seems to be some other chore stopping me.

Mom's running errands in town and dad's putting a new faucet in the kitchen sink. Like always, that's more work than the words make out. 1945 built house has some crummy piping in it.

I've started getting a line on boxes for this years tomato harvest. Next week dad will contact his friend Dave at GreenLeaf Industries to see if they can provide about 3000+ tomato plants this spring and early summer. I've already found sources for a couple miles of support wire and that just leaves finding a stick mill for the stakes. We used to get tomato stakes from the Meur mill on Redwood highway but they got bought out by Albertsons and bulldozed shortly after.

Wishing you all a comfy, safe winter day.

Pause before the push

Today was another slack day, with the ground hard frozen and the air sucking moisture away from everything.

I suppose it wasn't really a slack day, just felt that way to me. I did plenty of work today; cleaning up, pruning, writing software, working on assorted high tech and low tech machines. But in my mind there is a creaping and insidious awareness of the recently turned season.

The days are getting longer now. Bit by bit, even under the frost, plants are beginning to swell. A faint vibration in their osmotic attentions.

This year's growing season promises to be especially hectic. You see we've made arrangements with a local grocery store chain to start providing our high quality locally grown tomatoes to their produce departments. This will at least triple the amount of tomatoes we have to raise. Since tomatoes are something we do especially well demand may even be higher than that.

So my subconscious casts days like this in the light of a surging urgency. Only a matter of time until time will be the only matter.

Hoping you all are getting a fine and frisky start on this freaky 2008.

Feedburner Frustration

Been struggling with Feedburner and RSS for the last couple of hours, trying to get my blog posting to update correctly. Unfortunately, at least for Google Reader, I seem to be up Stuff Creek. I'll probably be forced to write my own XML page for RSS of the material or something, I suppose. For some reason Feedburner doesn't accept the validity of the XML currently being generated (by blogger I guess.)

Come one folks! Blogger, Google Reader and Feedburner are all owned by Google. Company with 16,000 employees many of them millionaires and they can't get a simple range of interoperability working. Cheese!!

Frog buloney on the web

The Uk's "the telegraph" is demonstrating just how bad journalism has become. They have a panic article about "Virus threatens mass extinction of frogs" but don't specify what virus. When I ran a search down I got articles going back to Feb 17, 2007 describing the same "Amphibian Ark" project but in that case it was a fungus not a virus. Still no definite explanation of which fungus or virus or trans-dimensional frog hunter is leading to the extinction of frogs.

We had frogs and toads serenading here well into mid-November, several weeks later than usual.

This project just strikes me as one more special interest boondoggle. Don't get me wrong, I care deeply for the environment and frogs. So much so that I actually work to make sure my farm is nature friendly.

What bugs me is how often we are being poorly informed or just plain misled by the media and so-called specialists. Exactly how many amphibians are dying? Not just "might die" or "could lead to the biggest mass extinction since the dinosaurs" Heck, that'd be like 10 times the number of amphibians that there are in the world. Where are we gonna get these extra frogs from before we can extinct them?