It’s slowly dawning on me that I’m flying to burbank tomorrow evening, and I haven’t done anything about packing to get ready to go. I leave a little early from work, and I don’t think I’ll have a lot of time to come home and all that - I’ve got a 6:30pm flight.
At least this time I’m not flying into LAX. Thank god. That just sucks - at least when your ultimate destination is Burbank and the north hollywood area. It’ll be a short trip - I’ll be back on Wednesday evening, but I still need to do something about clothes and luggage and all that crap.
The worst part is I’ll be missing Nathan’s concert. I think most of the local gang is all going to be there, so I’ll have to hear second-hand how the whole thing came out. Break a leg Nate!
Before the planting.. patio in place
Planting in process
And some pics from the front today:
Yeah, a BIG pile of compost. And that’s half gone…
All the plants going into place
Ok, I thought I was done at 3pm today.
I mostly was. I came back inside, laid down and iced up my neck, and took it easy. About 5pm, I checked on Karen and she looked like she was winding down - planting the variety of green critters we purchased today in our plant shopping trip. So I took some more ibuprofen, laid down and passed out for a while.
When I got back up, it was 7:30 and Karen wasn’t around. I checked outside and she’d continued to churn away and was pitching compost again. She had finished the planting and laid down paper and burlap over 2/3 of the slope, and she was dragging… So I slipped on some shoes, grabbed a shovel and we made quick work of slinging around a bit more compost together to cover the paper and burlap (I’ve been told it’s a weed barrier). It does look pretty damn good, I have to admit.
Just picking up the shovel again to sling some light compost made me realize that I will be paying for all that shovel work in the very near future. Karen, I think, will be paying twice what I’m going to - at least for putting in nearly 7 hours of solid work out there today.
I’m not sure where the sun was - it certainly didn’t make much of an appearance, but the cool air was nice for the hauling and shoveling. And it didn’t rain - which we’re expecting for tomorrow.
There’s still a fairly large pile of compost on the front corner, spilling into the sidewalk. I expect this week will include periodic bouts of shifting that about and covering whatever else Karen does with the whole paper and burlap weed barrier thingy.
Four cubic yards is a LOT of compost. I was offering it to any neighbor that happened by until Karen glared at me once to often. I suspect we’ll have more than enough for anything that we need…
at 9am this morning, we received 4 cubic yards of compost. “chicken and chips” is what Karen called it. At noon, I began spreading it.
It’s now 3pm, and I’m done. I’ve spread half of the load - and let me tell you that 2 cubic yards is a hell of a lot of compost. Me, a shovel, a wheelbarrow, and a rake. All the while, and continuing now, Karen’s loading around the stuff to the smaller areas on top of the patio in buckets. Buckets and buckets.
Apparently the game plan is to plant the additional green things we bought today, lay down newspaper and “staple” those to the ground, and then spread the rest of the chicken and chips over the newsprint.
Holy crap this is a lot of work.
Already May, and the 5th of May at that. Yeah - its one of those worthless posts where I state the obvious. Like that Adobe sucks.
Dear Adobe,
I think you suck. Or more specifically, I think your activation mechanism for the product called “DreamWeaver” which you acquired with the equally sucky MacroMedia (since they dreamed up this feature).
If I have a valid serial number, and I wish to transfer it to another computer - then I should be able to. Telling me that the software was sold “to my platform” is unacceptable. I bought the software and it was sold as a universal CD. So why the hell can’t I migrate that license to a PC?
To top it off, your instructions for contacting customer support are wrong, and they lead the customer into an endless cajoling maze of doing things that simply will not benefit them. The “telephone activation” system doesn’t work at all when transfering a license, and yet you made me spend 10 minutes listening to your voice system cajole and annoy me when your instructions of “hit 0 for an operator” simply resulting in RESTARTING THE WHOLE DAMN THING!
I doubt you’ll ever even see this post, but it makes me feel better. You suck.
Love,
Joe
Before I get too far into my geek-work for the day, I wanted to scribble something down here. I was listening to an IT Conversations podcast from something that Tom Malone did entitled Perspectives. His thesis that I gleaned was that the lowering cost of communications has enabled huge tranformative properties in history - in particular, he pointed out governmental structures changing towards from decentralized bands to centralized power to democracies (although I think there’s some worthy debating of if we’ve really made the move to a democracy in the classic greek sense of it.) He was making a similiar point towards the changing structure of business - from the “mom & pop” to the larger corporate structure - and now something new, a “democracy” for business. It’s a leap that I’m not sure I’m buying, but still sent my mind off in an interesting jag…
Now we are seeing the “success” of wikipedia, and it is becoming more common to see collaborative development of online documentation, where can we go from here? PHP’s documentation set being the earliest example I remember, but the most recently useful was Django documentation (where the comments have been invaluable). Django’s set of documentation has been supplemented by a wiki - which I view as mostly successful, but it has drawbacks as well - primarily being difficult to find the relevant tidbits, or even realize they are there (the mailing lists reference the wiki quite a bit, but the internal docs don’t so much).
What can we do to encourage online documentation? Is there some variation on the form of a wiki that would enable better tutorials? Some combination of locked and editable pages that could make it easy to develop documentation and/or tutorials? Communities are forming around technologies - how can we most effectively leverage that? It has been mailing lists, usenet, wikis - is there something more we can do to make the learning process easier to encourage folks to pick up what we’ve learned and love?
My alma mater Mizzou is embarking on an interesting run… From an article that a friend pushed my way, they’re going to be engaging in a trial of using windows live webmail for all the students - basically outsourcing the email to Microsoft. The article has more details, but it’s definitely interesting.
I’m not sure myself what I would think of that. For a short while, I even ran the mail system there - it ran on my unix machines before they made a whole-hog migration to using exchange for students. Its no easy task, there’s no doubt.
For all the lockin potential, I suspect they won’t get all that much business over a longer period of time. They’ll be competing with Yahoo and Google - and frankly already are. I expect almost every student has a seperate email account simply because of the administration’s policies and the student’s desire to “do their own thing”.
I’m looking forward to seeing how it works out though.
