I haven’t posted much about the garden lately. I guess it hasn’t seemed that interesting—just harvesting things and wishing it would dry out a little—but I’ll try to catch up on that soon. We did finish our garlic harvest, though, so here are some pictures of that.
I wonder if I could make this fit on the back of my business cards…. (Click on it to see the original full-sized at XKCD.)
Image from XKCD.com
When a foot doctor goes to his family reunion, he probably gets asked to diagnose someone’s scalp condition; and I always ask my tire expert brother-in-law about mechanical issues, figuring he’s more likely to have run into them before than I have. So I suppose it’s only fair that “computer experts” get the same thing. But if you ask me to fix your PC or diagnose a Windows error, be warned that I’ll be doing exactly what this flowchart says, while trying to look like I know what I’m doing.
We’ve been seeing some shiny slug trails on the patio lately, but when Pepper’s dog food was shiny one morning, I decided something needed to be done about it. There seem to be a lot of them this year, maybe due to the cool, wet weather. I suspect they’re also responsible for the holes in the cabbage leaves, since I haven’t seen any cabbage worms.
I’ve finally gotten the next Latin lesson up. This one’s #28, on the passive voice. It was a pain coming up with 20 good sentences in the passive for exercises, so it took a while. The next lesson will finish off the passive and add a couple things that go with it.
(Despite the title, this is a technical screed, not a religious one. You have been warned.)
I started using FreeBSD about ten years ago. A new client had it on his web servers, and I was impressed enough by it to start running it on my own machines, including my desktop. In the late 1990s, the various Linux distributions were like fraternities making floats for a Homecoming parade: they turned out some impressive work, but you had to put up with a lot of drunken brawling to get there. I bounced from one Linux distro to another, never really satisfied with any of them. The BSD community seemed more mature (I saw a poll once that said FreeBSD developers were ten years older on average than Linux developers) and it showed in the software. I liked the stability of the software and the release process and the way it was all designed. It just seemed like the free Unix operating system (OS) for grown-ups.
Sometimes I hate computers.
That probably seems like a strange thing for someone in my line of work to say, but it’s actually true. I enjoy software–creating it, debugging it, using it. But all I want the hardware to do is work, so I can do my thing with the software. If I’m thinking about the hardware, I’m probably cussing it because something’s stopped working.
We’ve answered the age old question: the chickens came first, in late March; the eggs about four and a half months later.
I didn’t know whether to expect to lose any weight this week. I’m still on plan, but it’s not unusual to stall for a bit after losing a lot at first. It seems like the body has to adjust now and then before losing more weight. Sometimes people report losing inches but no pounds for a while, as if fat is being shifted around before it is burned.
