wiredfool

A long while ago, I used to have a .sig line in my emails and postings.

Hope is a choice, Not a sum. You can have as much of it as you damn well please, regardless of the actual circumstances.

(From Matt Ruff, Sewer Gas and Electric)

It’s somewhat appropriate to resurrect it fo a day, or two, or two hundred.

Amazon has The Who. On MP3. For Download. Finally.

I’ve been keeping an eye out for some who albums that I’ve got on old vinyl (not really worth setting up the turntable and ripping, given the quality) and The Who have always been absent. (Along with the Beatles. Guess someone hasn’t shoveled enough money their way yet.)

Amazon has been a game changer for me, and I’m not really sure in a good way for the industry. I’ve been listening to MP3s pretty much exclusively for the last 5+ years, through iTunes and the Slimp3 player in the living room. Any music I buy has been CDs, since the iTunes store music doesn’t work on the Slimp3.

Now, I see the Amazon special deals all the time and while I’m buying a couple albums a month, the average selling price is more like $2, rather than the $15+ that a cd would have been. My concept of what an album of music should cost is dramatically different than it was one year ago. I buy music online. I don’t download. But having that value fall from $15 to $2 can’t be a good sign, since there aren’t that many more stops between $2 and free.

Shutting down the office. Yay. Fun. Guess it’s time for bed instead of replacing the electrical sockets in the spare room where we just finished painting.

Update:

It was out from 11pm to 1:15 am or so, when all the lights in the house came on. And now we have a good 6 inches of snow on the ground, and all the trees are looking very white and droopy.

…more than two centuries later a government of the people, by the people, and for the people has not perished from the Earth.

And now the real job begins.

It starts with an R
RRRRRRRRRRRRRR!
It ends with an R
RRRRRRRRRRRRRR!

Sorry. It’s talk like a pirate day.

Apologies to Jason.

The former Publisher of the National Review endorses Obama.

But I now see that Obama is almost the ideal candidate for this moment in American history. I disagree with him on many issues. But those don’t matter as much as what Obama offers, which is a deeply conservative view of the world. Nobody can read Obama’s books (which, it is worth noting, he wrote himself) or listen to him speak without realizing that this is a thoughtful, pragmatic, and prudent man. It gives me comfort just to think that after eight years of George W. Bush we will have a president who has actually read the Federalist Papers.

That’s an indication of just how far the ‘conservatives’ have gotten from their past.

Bloomberg reports that a money market fund has broken the buck due to the Lehman mess.

I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned it here, but one of my trailing indicators for how bad the mortgage/wall st./financial industry crapfest was if money market funds start breaking the buck. This is not one of those indicators that’s useful for further action, it’s one where if we pass this point, we really just need to hold on and ride it out. And it’s just happened to one fund which was holding 785 million of Lehman Brothers notes. Presumably, since they were leveraged out 20 or 30 or 40 times, there’s another bunch of billions of Lehman Brothers commercial paper out there.

I’d now like to request that I get 5 points back which where deducted from my engineering economics final back in college (1994 maybe?). There was a question where my answer was marked incorrect because I asserted that there were risks involved in investing in money market funds. I had noted that they were small, but that they existed, and the professor disagreed.

This is not my problem. This is your problem. I don’t really give a damn about your licensing service. Except, of course, when it messes up and I have to deal with it. Sometimes I can just close and reopen Photoshop, but it looks like this time I can’t.

This time though, It might be my fault, because I’m moving things to a new drive in the laptop. Though, I have to point out that it’s taking more time to deal with Photoshop than everything else combined.

You might ask why I tried moving, rather than reinstalling right out. Well, it took two calls to Adobe to get this installed in the first place, and I was trying to do this in the evening, when I have time, there are no kids awake, and I don’t have to worry about work. But. Adobe’s not open at night.

Gah. What a waste.

Fun, hot, less people due to a whooping cough scare, but the kids had fun.

Unfortunately, my digital rebel met it’s end, from a design flaw in the mirror part of the shutter assembly. A pin sheared off, and now the autofocus mirror blocks the sensor through part of the exposure. I was hoping to not have to replace it till I bought a whole lot of other gear, but sometimes the equipment doesn’t listen to the plan.

The last good image:

And one past the last good image:

So. June was a real mixed bag. Specifically, really cold and wet for the first half, trending to really damn hot for the last few days. The hot weather stuff planted early wasn’t exactly happy with the conditions, so a lot of it needed to be re-seeded, at least for fill in.

* The peas are just now starting to bear, we’ll have a harvest soon.
* The chard is nuts, starting to bolt in places. The salads, similar. Kale is well bolted by now.
* Potatoes are looking good, March and April are about neck and neck, with May’s significantly behind. The first two month’s worth are flowering now.
* The things that were seeded May 15 are somewhat happy, some of the carrots and parsnips came up, since reseeded to fill in.
* The bush beans came up (planted 5/15), were eaten by slugs, and then hated the cold weather. Beans that were planted 6/1 sortakinda came up when the weather got warmer, and now the ones that I planted as fill are coming up after being in the ground about a week.
* Squashes (summer, winter, pumpkin) mostly came up, needed fill planting on three hills, and are now all growing like mad with the warm weather.
* Corn. Didn’t like the cold. Reseeded, have been expecting it to come up, but it hasn’t been.
* Basil. Transplants didn’t like the cold, I should have covered them. Then the slugs ate them.
* Sunflowers planted 6/1 germinated well and really took off growing when it got warmer.
* Quinoa, germinated reasonably well and quickly in the cold. It coul dprobably do planted a bit earlier.
* Lavender seeds germinated, and growing really slowly. They probably should be done in little pots, then transplanted out when it gets hot.
* Tomato transplants went in 5/25 and stayed under row covers at night and during cold days. They look very happy with that treatment. The covers have been off for a couple of weeks, and they’re solid.
* Brassicas (cauliflower, broccoli, brussel sprouts, parsnips, turnips) have all had spotty germination, probably due to not keeping the seeds moist enough. (actually, that’s probably a pretty common issue). The ones that sprouted seem to be doing well, and the ones that didn’t have been replanted. They have a really wide growing season, so this will just mean that we’ll have a few ready to harvest a few weeks later.
* Onions probably need a lot more water than they’re getting. And they need to be protected from kiddos.
* I’m not sure that the leeks are growing as fast as I think that they should.
* The cilantro sprouted well, the sets we got are already well on the way to bolting. Basil hasn’t sprouted, it’s probably still too cold.
* Parsley has sprouted, and remarkably well, considering that the last time I did it, I got one or two plants total.

* We lost our one cherry. We still have 3 apples on one tree, and a couple on the other. The other three trees didn’t set fruit.
* The raspberries have set a bunch of fruit. The blackberries… a ton. We’re getting a few good salmon berries, and they’re far tastier than at the old place. Though, the kids get most of them.