Green Thumb Up My Nose

Garden Report for 120514

The weather is warming now, and the gardenizing is kicking into high gear.

The Wednesday night 31F prediction actually happened on Thursday night — I brought the four tomato pots inside, put plastic water bottles over the tomatoes and squash in the KHG, and covered that with a tarp. After watering for about 20min. Everything survived.

Friday, I put in some more squash, some walla walla sweet onions, bok choi, and daw gauk beans into the KHG. Put up another hanging basket with cherry tomatoes in it. Planted a 36x4x4 tray with a mixture of French greens, and another one with some buttercrunch and baby romain lettuce. Potted two more tomato plants. It’s hard to know when to stop. Last year we got the equivalent of one tomato for every seed I started.

Sunday I reserved for putting in some Swiss chard and some daikons, peas, and more lettuce. I also went out and bought a Sweet 100 at the local hardware store and planted it in a biggish container.

Now, there’s nothing to do but weed and water and wait for mid-June.

MJ harvested some of our Unkillable Rhubarb™ and cut it up and boiled and stir-sticked it to make a quick rhubarb BBQ dipping sauce. Very good. Was heavy on the brown sugar, with yellow mustard, so I guess it’s like a South Carolina sauce. The leaves went into the compost bin (the one I’m filling up to put into Section 2 of the KGH). I looked on the Interwebs and they said it was OK, despite the oxalic acid — they wouldn’t let them put it online if it wasn’t true, would they?

Droid X Power-Off Issues – Update on the Update

So, it looks like Motorola has finally fixed failed in their purported attempt to fix the ‘independent power on’ problem.

When the OS upgrade came out, I thought it was fixed. So did everyone else. I tried it a couple of times and it worked — when I powered it off, it stayed that way. Then, this week, I started noticing a few hits on the topic here.

I hadn’t been paying much attention, because I’ve been using the phone as an alarm clock (Passing of Time is a much nicer way to wake up, and why don’t alarm clock makers add an mp3 option?), and so rarely turn it off. Last night I did, and five minutes later it came back on. In another month or so I’m elegible for a phone upgrade with Verizon, and I think I might just go with a non-Motorola model.

Microsoft Strikes Again

As I have been forced to admit on a number of occasions, I still have a Win XP machine. It’s a refurbished Dell Optiplex, and I keep it around because there are some things that can only be done on a Win box. This is deliberate. It’s called vendor lock-in, and the civilized world moved past that idea sometime in the last century.

I keep the WinBox religiously updated and patched, and run an active AV program. It has, so far, met my simple needs. Until today.

Last Tuesday was, of course, Patch Tuesday, a day most sysadmins prefer to spend under their beds. As usual, there was a monster download, and as usual, it required a reboot.

Reboot, wait, get a flash of the Win logo and Intel logo and the BIOS instructions, get a flash of the Win XP logo and progress bar. Then all is blackness. Monitor still getting a signal. HDD chattering its little heart out. Nothing on the screen.

Reboot doesn’t help. Power cycle doesn’t help. Reboot with f8 doesn’t help (subliminal flash of the boot choice screen with the choice bar near the bottom, then nothing). [insert several hours of increasingly frustrated efforts]. Nada.

Interestingly, the printer function still works, and I can print from my Linux box to the printer attached to the XP machine. So it has something to do with the display.

So, I broke out a more modern monitor than the one that came with the Optiplex (both are VGA, though). And it works. Why doesn’t the other one? Who knows? If one were given to conspiracy theories, one might think that Microsoft has found a way to trash older setups, so that we will all be forced to move to a new computer with Win 7 (or even Win 8, AKA Vista 2). You know, in their proud “the job isn’t done until Lotus won’t run” tradition.

Either that or they just don’t care.

Two hours out of my life that I won’t soon see again. Thanks, Microsoft. You’re a princ.

Cheesy Oats

Experiment 1: Chicken stock, basil, and Safeway Primo Taglio Provolone. This is a block cheese, not a shredded topping. I diced it and put it on right after I put on the potato flakes.

Result: good. The provolone melts down into a stringy mass of connective goo, which said strings hang off your spoon while you eat. I probably could have put on more basil, but there was just enough to make you aware that there was something else there. As RR say, “it makes you go ..hmmmm.”

Experiment 2: Beef stock, glug of red wine, and Safeway Primo Taglio Provolone. I decided to finish up the cheese, so it turned out to be more like a third of a cup…or more.

Result: Oat fondue. Too much cheese. Too much red wine, also. I am coming to the conclusion that red wine has to be handled like an herb — used in tablespoon measurements, not fractions of a cup.

Sasameki Koto – The Anime

Sasameki Koto (Whispered Words) is a lightweight, enjoyable, slice of high school girls life anime that faithfully follows the source manga — and that’s the problem. It’s a 13 episode one-shot series from 2009 that covers the first 12 chapters of a 40+ chapter manga. Despite the fact that every episode is exceedingly good, there’s no closure, no resolution, no conclusion.

The Girls Club

I picked it out of the lineup at Crunchyroll (my latest fad) based solely on the cover art. I had no idea what was good in the offerings, although I knew there were a couple of programs I wasn’t interested in. I was looking for artwork that was realistic, with no mechs, boobs, lolis, or spiky hair (So, why does he even bother to watch anime?). I was hoping for another Hanasaku Iroha, or maybe even another Chihayafuru.

What I got was K-On for big kids.

The plot is typical anime romance: A loves B but is afraid to declare. B is oblivious and has a crush on C in disguise. C loves A, who exploits the situation. D also loves A, and is horrified to learn about B. E and F are in love. G enjoys hanging out with friends. As you might have already guessed, everybody but C is female, and he’s a cross-dresser.

Green Thumb Up My Nose

Garden Report for 120507

The weather continued cold, windy, and mostly rainy all week. It actually tried to snow on the 2d of May, but only graupled. It did clear up on the weekend, so that the temps could plunge to freezing.

Friday was one of the two days each month that the city sells compost. We went down and bought two garbage cansfull, dumped them on the keyhole garden, and then went back and got two more.* The first section of the KHG is now complete.

The complete, but unplanted, Keyhole Garden (looking South).

My plan was to start planting on Saturday, but Friday night was forecast to be down to 33F (my thermometer said 35), and Saturday night to 32F (mine showed 33), which I thought a bit much, so the planting got delayed until Sunday. I planted on Sunday, despite the fact that a low of 39F was in the forecast, because otherwise I wouldn’t have a chance to put them out until next Thursday — I’ve been hardening them, so they should be OK.**

The planting went OK, except

Save That Sauce!

We had beef Tuesday night. Beef with a special sauce that MJ made — purple carrots, onions, and mushrooms in a mirin beef stock. Very nice. Of course, there was some liquid left over, about a third of a cup. I used it in Wednesday morning’s oatmeal, along with 2/3 of a cup of plain old beef stock. Rounded it out with a couple of teaspoons of potato flakes and a topping of cheese. Very good. Then I found the half a cup of the actual sauce, with the chunkies in it, that was also left over. Had that this morning. Very good also.

One of the things I am learning is that leftover sauce, any leftover sauce, in fact, any leftover is likely to make a good basis for an oatmeal breakfast. And it doesn’t have to be a lot of sauce. Even pan scrapings will do, if you dissolve them in a little stock and save them for the next morning.

US does a Wikileaks on Al Qaida

The US has just released a batch of documents recovered from Bin Laden’s hideout in Pakistan. Middle East expert Ron Cole has commented. What Cole points out is that we’ve been lied to in the press about the AQ/IR links and the alignment between AQ and the IR government, not so much in official statements (which as far as I can tell have been cautiously dismissive), but in press reports of supposed leaks from reportedly official sources. The implication is that there is a group within the US government that is pushing for war against Iran. It’s ironic that the best way to dispell the myths and lies is for the government to do what they condemn Wikileaks for.

They Hate Us for Our Freedoms 10

A friend of mine made this comment on an earlier entry:

I have a loose knit hypothesis (aka notion) that the purpose of the TSA is not to stop terrorism directly but to increase the fear or irritation level (and thus volume and amount of discussion) so that everyone is worried about their relative or cor-worker, or that guy on the bus and report him. Which is one of the real symptoms of a police state–where we self-police out of fear as a by-product of irrational rhetoric.

One of the purposes of brainwashing is to break down the social ties that hold a group together. I used to have a tape (R2R) of a talk by one of the psychologists who dealt with returnees from NK prison camps after the Korean War, one of the people who developed the Code of Conduct. On it, he said that the returnees never talked to each other. “You could walk onto the ward at any time of the day or night and there was silence. They’d talk to the staff. They’d talk to us. They wouldn’t talk to each other”. This unwillingness to communicate within their own community of former POW camp inmates was a direct result of a long and skillful program on the part of the NK military, direct heirs of the Stalinist era. This was the true ‘brainwashing’, not some Manchurian Candidate project. The goal was to break down trust, to inhibit communication, to isolate each soldier within their own little shell. This made it possible to guard their POW camps with one tenth the number of guards that normal doctrine calls for.

Police states like this approach,

Green Thumb Up My Nose

Garden Report for 120430

Nothing much done on the garden this week. Weather was ugly the first part of the week, and I was out-of-town the second part (which didn’t keep the weather from continuing ugly). Did lay down a good infusion of coffee grounds, which seems to be working in keeping squirrels out. Not totally effective — it looks like there was a little bit of digging done while I was gone.  I probably jumped too soon with putting out seeds and plants. The weather has stayed in the rainy mid-30s /upper 40s all week, and it looks like we may have had a bit of air frost, because the tomato in my hanging basket is now…hanging.

I’ve started a compost can using a 20gal garbage can set up on the keyhole garden, with holes drilled in the bottom. That’s where our scraps will go until we get the next increment of compost (this coming Friday). Then we’ll spread the scraps and cover with compost.

Only about half of the seeds I planted in the seed sprouter actually sprouted, mostly the squash (of various denominations). I have reloaded those cells that didn’t sprout with a second round of seeds. In the empty cells, I’ve planted zucchini, yard-long beans, and a Brandywine tomato variant.

If I get a chance before Friday, I might plant out some asparagus and blueberries. They’ll go in kindof shallow, but then be covered up with the new load of compost.