OK, I’ve had my Google Wave account for a few days now, and played around both by myself and with a friend. Here’s what I’ve discovered.

The first time I used Wave, it wasn’t obvious that adding someone to a wave makes that wave show up in their in-box. Maybe I’m just too used to having a “Send” button, but I’d like seeing feedback that relates my actions to older ways of doing things. Video games frequently have a “training mode” with lots more feedback about what’s happening, and give you a way to take off the training wheels as you begin to understand the idioms.

What’s the best way to IM someone? I guess each participant is supposed to keep adding new blips. Two things that don’t work are having each participant keep updating their own blip and having everyone update a single blip. Both of these work, but aren’t very usable: The former makes it hard to pair statements with responses (especially after the fact), the latter makes it hard to see who said what. But adding new blips all the time seems inconvenient. I guess I’d like a mode where hitting the Enter key opens a new blip at the bottom of the conversation. Is there a gadget for that?

How do I send someone a URL to a wave? Yeah, it’ll be sitting in the Inbox when they look, but some people don’t want to spend every waking moment within Wave. I’d like to see something that I can email or embed that other people can click on and be brought immediately to the conversation. Maybe Wave has this already and it just isn’t obvious. Let’s run a test by dragging something frfom the inbox into this blip: Four Things I Hate About Wave OK, that creates a pseudo URL (googlewave.com!w+4n77V6MDF) that I don’t think can be used anywhere outside of Wave. Fail!

I can make a wave public, but only by allowing the world to edit it. Again, maybe I’m just old fashioned, but I’d like to be able to use Wave as a blog platform. I’m like to make this blip editable only by myself (and maybe a few co-authors), while allowing the possibility of other people making comment blips that are only editable by themselves.

Last year, I “enlarged” my herb garden to include a tomato plant in a pot. I learned a lot from the experience, most of it things not to do. Today, I was getting ready for the new growing season, and learned a bit more.
This weekend, the Webster Groves Herb Society will be having their Annual Plant Sale. Last year, I purchased a single Box Car Willy, and later I bought a 14″ azalea pot to hold it. One thing that I’ve since learned is that tomatoes aren’t self-fertilizing. I’ve assumed that this is one reason why my plant flowered a lot, but didn’t produce many tomatoes. This year, I plan to have at least two plants, which means I’d need another pot.

Last weekend, I went looking for pots, but didn’t see any at my usual haunts. So, this morning I went Googling, and found this:

GARDENING : Planters, Pots & Flower Boxes : Choosing Pots : DIY Network

The standard pot is as wide as it is tall (figure C), so one with a 6″ diameter is generally about 6″ tall. A standard-shaped pot is a good choice for most plants.

Another option is the so-called azalea pot, which is wider than it is tall (figure D). Azaleas have shallow root systems and thus don’t need deep containers.

Azalea pots are inherently stable because of their low center of gravity and thus less likely to tip over. And because less pot is visible, the plant makes more of a visual impression.

A rose pot is one-third taller than it is wide. It’s used for plants such as roses and tomatoes, which have deep root systems.

It’s that last paragraph that attracted my attention. When I bought my azalea pot last year, it wasn’t because of any research I’d done, it was because I wanted a pot with a low center of gravity. I did buy the largest azalea pot I could find, because I knew how large the plant could grow, but now I’m wondering if some of my problems were due to it being root bound. Time for more Googling:

Tomato Container size? – Container Gardening Forum – GardenWeb

Tomatoes can, if they’re in the ground and soil conditions permit, get roots up to 6 feet deep! So obviously just about any container isn’t going to be “big enough.”

Crikey! So, how many gallons of dirt do I have in my azalea pot?

how do you convert gallons to inches? – Banana Forum – GardenWeb

Generally a 1 gallon pot is about 6″ dia and 6-7″ tall. You can use something larger.

So, the volume of a container increases by the cube of it’s diameter, so a standard 14″ pot will be (14/6)**3=12.7 gallons. But, azalea pots are only three-quarters the height of a standard pot, so mine is roughly 9.5 gallons. However, a little further down the page, I see a more precise chart:

a 14″ pot= a 7 gallon

That would make my pot closer to 5.25 gallons, which several people said is the minimum size that they would use. So, another possibility for last year’s lack of production is that my plant was stressed.

I’d been thinking about trying some sort of raised bed gardening this year, and those plans just moved into high gear. I’d been procrastinating a bit, because the “best” place in my yard to put a vegetable garden is covered in small gravel, with a plastic sheet underneath. I removed the rock and plastic from about half of it the first year I owned this house, and it was back-breaking labor. I guess I’m going to have to do it, though. Wish me luck.

My family moved around a lot while I was growing up. I was born in Mississippi and lived in Texas and Florida before I started kindergarten. It’s in kindergarten that you’re first expected to memorize your home address and phone number, and (for me at least) it’s the only address I still remember from my childhood.
That address is 802 Tipton, Dyersburg, Tennessee. According to Zillow, the house was built in 1957, covered 2,249 sq.ft. and has 1.5 baths, which mostly agrees with my recollections. The house sits on the corner of Tipton Avenue and Moody Drive, and really the only neighbors that had kids my age were on Moody; George and David in the house next door and LuAnn who lived kitty corner, if that term can be applied to a tee intersection. On the other hand, Moody was a fairly steep uphill climb from Tipton, so everyone would play in front of my house.

Besides the ice cream trucks, one of my frequent summer experiences was the weekly passage of trucks spraying DDT to
combat mosquitoes.  Every kid on the block used to run
behind the trucks “playing in the fog”.  Long term effects have occasionally been reported by others, but no one that I knew had any ill effects.  I’m pretty sure that all of the parents knew what the kids were doing, and didn’t mind.  They probably felt that it was good for us.  My own father would routinely add a bit of DDT to the bucket when painting the exterior of the house.  He said that it repelled gnats, keeping them from landing in the wet paint, getting stuck and ruining the surface.

My personal belief is that the proven benefits of DDT far outweigh any imagined negatives.  The massive amounts ingested by myself, my siblings, and children across the southern US should have shown some side effects by now.

Two of my kids and I took our first hike of the year along Grant’s Trail last week. We started at the eastern end and walked a little over a mile to Trailnet’s office. On the way there, we surprised a flock of turkeys.

This picture shows the last three members of the flock. There were six or seven altogether, but it took me a moment to get my cellphone out of my pocket and the camera turned on.  The picture is small, because I used to “zoom” function.  The camera normally snaps pictures that are 640×480, but when you zoom in on something, it only saves the center 320×240 or, in this case, 160×120.  On the other hand, the picture is fairly clear, unlike my next one.

The rest of the trip was pretty uneventful, but when we got back to the car, I decided to snap another picture of the kids.

In this case, I wasn’t using the zoom, so I’ve got the entire 640×480 image.  On the other hand, this shot was made 48 minutes later and the light levels were starting to drop.  This causes the exposure time to automagically increase, making it much easier to get a blurred picture.  In fact, I had to snap this shot three times before I was happy with it.  And even then, I apparently jiggled the cellphone near the end of the exposure, causing the bottom third of the image to be blurred.  Oh, well, you get what you pay for, and in this case the camera was effectively free.

The NYT has an article on the discontinuation of the Bill Blass collection. I’m not all that interested in the world of high couture, but I was intrigued by the black-and-white photo of Mr Blass that accompanied the article.

When I first looked at it, I had a strong sense of the face floating in front of the rest of the image, like a poorly done stereograph. Closer inspection reveals a reason, that the face is in focus but the shoulders aren’t. I wonder if the pose was perfect but badly focused, so the face from another picture was cut out and pasted on the body. Or perhaps the subject was thrusting his face forward. That seems somehow unlikely. The chair, the table, the subject’s arms are in perfect focus, but it seems impossible that the face could be in that same plane.

I must make a confession here: I tend to choose my doctors based on their ZIP code. My insurance determines their “reasonable and customary” fees based on the same criteria, so I generally owe the same amount no matter whom I see, but I hope that the more expensive doctors are better. They definitely have better bedside manners.

I mention this because I wind up spending time in waiting rooms that have, not old copies of Time or Newsweek, but magazines that cater to the upper income brackets. I’ve read ads for artists who will fly to your home and paint a portrait of you or your family; your daughters in taffeta gowns, or you on one knee in a field with shotgun and dog as ducks fly past in the background. At such times I occasionally daydream about commissioning a similar heirloom, perhaps from a student at a nearby art school. Then reality reasserts itself, and I realize that any such portrait would wind up gathering dust in a storeroom until it is inevitably sold in a garage sale or, more likely, consigned to the trash.

The photo of Bill Blass, however, inspires me again. I don’t even need a studio, just my face, properly lit and photoshopped onto a perfect pose.

This is a very approximate recipe, as I wasn’t the cook.  We made it during while brewing beer a week ago.
It started with a whole frozen chicken in a big pot of boiling water.  After about an hour, the chicken had thawed and cooked until it was falling off the bones, most of which (all we could find!) were removed.  Then a bag of lentils and a box of wild rice got stirred in to simmer with a black pepper and other spices.  After a while, we added chopped celery, carrots and an onion, and quartered new-potatoes.  Several cans of diced tomatoes and green beans were added, as was a bag of frozen corn.  Two pounds of venison was browned and added, and a half-cup of flour was used to make skillet gravy, which got added as a thickening agent.

Then it was time to clean out the freezer.  Some squirrel meat got thrown in, along with a catfish filet.  There were some left-over onion-mushroom from a frittata recipe, and a box of mini-shell noodles.  It then cooked for another 45 minutes, until the potatoes were mostly done.  Half of it disappeared a bowl at a time, and I took home about six bowls worth, which my kids loved.  Anyone finding a chick bone was deemed “lucky”.

Now my daughter wants to make it again.

A few years ago, my friends John and Dave decided they wanted to brew large batches of beer.  So they built a really big rig.  Every time they brew, they invite a few friends and neighbors to help out.  I’ve been coming for a few years now.  This time, John explained everything to Glenn, a first time visitor.

Every so often, I get invited to a friend’s house to brew some beer.  Being a good guest, I try to bring an interesting gift.  This time I procrastinated until late the night before, then ran to Friar Tuck, a local beverage store.  Wandering the aisles, I finally found some Bourbon County Stout by Goose Island Beer Company.  This is a seriously good beer, at a serious price.  A four-pack was almost $20, but I have to say it’s worth every penny.  The first sniff confirms what the label tells you, that this beer was aged in bourbon barrels.  And it’s so thick and dark it makes a Guiness look like an ale.  Buy one of these, you’ll not regret it.

Two years ago or so, I bought a Kensington Bluetooth USB adaptor for my Dell laptop.  I probably bought it from Best Buy, but geeks.com is the only place I can find it online these days.  It was working a few weeks ago, but when I needed it today, I got this message:

—————————
Bluetooth Setup Wizard
—————————
Bluetooth device not found.
Please verify that your Bluetooth device is properly connected and turned on.
—————————
OK  
—————————

I can see the LED blinking when I plug it in, and the device manager claims that the hardware is functioning correctly, but the software keeps thinking that nothing is plugged in.  Since then, I’ve tracked down a more recent version of the drivers, but the only change is that I now get a blue screen of death (BSOD) a few minutes after booting that says that there’s a problem with btaudio.sys.  Removing that file prevents the BSODs, but I still get the same message.

There’s a pizza place that I love in North County. I used to live near it, but once I moved to South County, it was a bit too far to drive to on a regular basis. Being an independent retailer, they buy generic to-go boxes from some supplier. The boxes bear a map of Italy (or “Historic Italia”), and I’ve often daydreamed about spending a year in Italy and visiting the 26 cities, islands and volcanoes that are listed.

This weekend, the family and I were in the neighborhood, so we stopped by to get a couple of pizzas. As I looked at the box, I remembered those daydreams, and sadly realized that I would likely never be able to live them. It’s a realization that’s been hitting me a lot lately, and let me say that it hits hard. I guess that this is what a mid-life crisis is all about. I’m almost certainly past the mid-point of my life, and there’s so much that I meant to do. Looking at the average US life expectancy for white males, I’ve only got 1,144 weekends left to me. I can expect a few more, as I’ve survived this long and am in fairly good health, but really, I’m probably past the two-thirds marks.

(In case you’re wondering, the sites in Italy are: Milan, Venice, Turin, Bologna, Genoa, San Marino, Florence, Viareggio, San Remo, Perugia, Pisa, Siena, Assisi, Rome, Cassino, Bari, Naples, Ischia, Pompeii, Capri, Stromboli, Palermo, Termini, Reggio, Mt. Etna, Calabria, Catania, and Agrigento.)