wiredfool

Since it’s spring, its time to start doing things in the garden. This weekend worked out pretty well for the planting thing, but my hands are aching from all the digging.

It started with the removal of 2 Japanese barberry bushes — basically large prickly bushes that are interesting for their reddish foliage and their small thorns that easily poke through good leather gloves. These are the last two that needed to come out, we’ve dealt with all the others over the last few years. Then 3 rose bushes went in. Still prickly, but they should be a lot more visually interesting. And now is the perfect time to be planting them and pruning the other terribly overgrown rose bush.

We also added a row of sweetpeas along the porch railing, and some lemon thyme in front where we killed off a sage plant last summer. And on to the back garden.

In the space where we’ll have tomatoes later this summer, we now have a triple row of sugarsnap & other peas. They will be just about ready to die out from the heat when it’s time to plant the tomatoes. In where the basil will be later, we have spinach. This is all planning on a 2 stage system, where some stuff will be ready to be harvested and pulled in the end of May timeframe, just in time to add the hot weather loving things to the garden.

SUVs to the left of me
Trucks to the right
Here I am, stuck in the radar clutter with you!

Radar clutter can be very useful when you drive a little red sports car.

Signs of spring are popping up all over the place:

The Utensils are up early.

The squirrels are finishing off the crocuses.

And free wifi is in the air, in this case at 45th and Stone Way.

Downstairs, with a fresh coat of primer. Apparently this hall used to be a deep salmon color. I can’t imagine it, really.

Downstairs, with 2 fresh coats of off white. It’s really much more white than this.

Most of the new upstairs colors. They’re a little less saturated than this.

For Valentines day, we had a nice relaxing move out of the living room and halls. All in preparation for a painting and recarpeting spree. It feels so impulsive.

After a bunch of prep, the teal wall is now facing a termination clause.

The start of the new color with a bit of yellow on the backsplash wall in the kitchen.

Going…

Pretty soon, all the dirty off whitish walls will be Honey Cream, The stairs will be Ivory, and the other walls will be Sunbaked, Sundrenched, Yellow and off Yellow. We’re having a bit of a sun defecit here, which may be slightly influencing our color selection.

There are now two walls with solid color.

Anyway. The teal wall is gone. The little chili peppers in the kitchen are gone. The lion’s claw painted wainscotting in the downstairs hall is gone. A note to ourselves in the future — Not every wall requires a different color.

Spring is here! At least where spring is defined as two days of topless miata driving in a row.

(from slacktivist)

The benedictory conclusion of Gatsby remains heartbreakingly relevant for anyone who takes an honest look at the fiscal, social, environmental and international condition of this country after the incumbent president’s first three years in office:

I couldn’t forgive him or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified. It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made. …

So others are picking up on it now.

I need a link blog. Some place to store all the random links that I would otherwise bookmark on one of my many browsers and machines. It’s generally going to be public, but there may be a category or two that I’d rather keep private.

The most important thing is that it has to be easy to post from multiple locations/browsers with as close to one click as possible. I think that this means a RESTian interface for a javascript bookmarklet. The blogger api would work on the mac, since there’s the RadioService application that will post selected text from any cocoa based application. But that’s not going to carry over to Mozilla or the windows box.

It has to be accessible from all of my machines and likely locations. This seems to indicate that it’s going to need to live somewhere other than the laptop. This rules out Radio Userland.

I’ve got to host it. I’m guessing that it will wind up on the linux box, but the iMac server is a possibility too. I can use either filesystem, embedded db, or postgresql storage — MySql is out for now since I don’t already host with it. On the other hand, it could be a good learning experience.

Minimalistic is good — I’m expecting posts to be Link + Description, and maybe a Title. I should be able to get a lot of that from portions of the document with a bookmarklet. Google needs to be able to index the public categories. Don’t need comments, blogrolls, trackback, heavy duty navigation, much tempting, or anything terribly complicated. I’d like to keep it valid xhtml so that I can play with some of the more interesting searching, but that might tend to indicate that I want to be serving at least the public facing side of it using flat files.

I’d like to be able to edit online to add categories, but the permalink needs to be category independent. If I have to fire up bbedit to edit on the local machine, that’s not too bad, so long as I don’t have to muck with permissions. This is the drawback of approach #1, Blosxom + the RadioService + the Blosxom Metaweblog plugin. Since the webserver is writing filesystem files, they’re not going to be of the right permissions for me to edit them.

Blosxom is pretty close to the right solution but it’s not quite there. Knowing me, I’ll wind up using tiny bits of a massive system to do this.

Well, this explains the car salesman thing.
They aren’t supposed to shut up, and they do make things up. And it’s mostly the fault of the highers up.

Trying this again, with feeling this time.

• New PRAM Battery. No Change
• ‘reset-nvram’ in Open Firmware. No Change
• Hitting the CUDA button to reset the power manager. No change
• Disconnecting the internal drive. Still can’t boot 9.1 on the iPod. I can boot a firewire external 10.3 drive, which I didn’t try before.
• Trying a fresh install of 10.3 on a (firewire) partition that has never had OSX on it. No change. It seems to have trouble writing the startup disk setting though.
• Zapping PRAM a bunch of times. No change
• Tried removing one stick of memory. Left it with only 64 megs, wouldn’t boot at all.
• Tried removing the other stick, left it with 128 megs and it booted X but not 9.1.
• Tried blessing the 9.1 system folder. Still nothing.

I have uncovered that the powerlight issue is probably due to something in the manufacture of the computer, as the serial number indicates that there was a fix applied afterwards and models of this age need to be sent to an Apple center to be modified.

I’m pretty sure that the rest of it is due to either bad firmware or a hardware problem, both of which are beyond my skill as a healer. We will have to take this computer to Rivendell.