In honor of Saint Patrick’s Day, here’s a pair of leprechauns from Saturday’s St. Patrick’s Parade. That’s Leprechaun-Claire on the left and Leprechaun-Ron at the right.
And now, Leprechaun-Claire will demonstrate how to retrieve helium balloons which have drifted up to a high ceiling.
Monthly Archives: March 2008
Attention to Details
It should be quite plain to all that this is not a brown coat. It is in fact a brown shirt.
Oversights such as this undoubtedly contributed to the Alliance victory.
Growing Corn Chips
At the moment, my yard looks and smells like a giant corn chip. I haven’t tried it (nor do I intend to), but I wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn that my yard tastes like a corn chip too. There’s plenty of good reason for my yard to look, smell and (probably) taste like a corn chip. After all, I just got done covering the yard with a fine-layer of corn.
The weather’s been getting warmer the past few weeks and before much longer, the flowers will be in full-bloom. And once that happens, along with my allergies kicking into gear, the weeds will start to grow.
I used the Scotts company lawn care regimen for a few years; fertilizer and pre-emergent weed-killer in the early spring, fertilizer in early summer, and winterizer fertilizer in the fall. It worked wonderfully too — the weeds disappeared and the grass grew so thick and high that you could lose a dog in it. A few years back though, I read the warnings on the bag about how you shouldn’t use that stuff in the garden. That got me to thinking about how anything I used on the grass was eventually going to end up in the garden. Not only is the garden in middle of the yard, it’s also on the downhill side, so when it rains, the runoff is going straight into the garden.
So for the past few years I haven’t used any sort of lawn treatment. As a result, these days, I probably have just as much grass as weeds.
After reading a recent column on lawn care, I decided to try something new this year. Instead of putting down any sort of traditional weed preventative, I went out to a local garden center this afternoon and bought a 50 lb sack of Corn Gluten Meal. Spreading it was a familiar enough process, but this stuff comes out of the spreader in billows of yellow.
And so help me, it leaves the yard looking and smelling like a big ol’ corn chip.
Now it’s just a matter of waiting to see how well it works.
The Calendars of Penzance
Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance begins with Frederic parting company with the pirates upon reaching the age of 21. In a subsequent plot twist, it turns out that the terms of his apprenticeship are that he will serve with the pirates not until he reaches the age of 21, but until his 21st birthday. Normally, this would be one and the same, but the specific plot twist is that Frederick was born on a leap day and won’t reach his 21st birthday until 1940. (Evidently the decision to release him from his apprenticeship based on his age instead of birthday was one of those pesky clerical errors)
This means:
- The musical takes place in March. For some reason it seems to me like more of a summer thing.
- If Frederick won’t have his 21st birthday until 1940 (at which point he’ll be 84 years old), then he must have been born in 1856 and the events in the story take place in 1877. (According to Wikipedia, the musical premiered in 1879)
I don’t know why, but every time I’ve seen the play or listened to the soundtrack, I’ve found myself thinking about the dates involved. Today I finally sat down and figured out what they were.
Mathematics
I tend to forget about this every year until someone reminds me, so before I forget for another year…
Happy Pi Day
If I were a little more on the ball, I would have posted this at 1:59:26
Thanks to Z. for reminding me this year.
Anorexic Computing
It would appear that being too thin can be a problem in ways having nothing to do with your physical health. (Though I suspect the stress related to an $1,800 hit to my wallet might impact my physical well-being too.)
Three Phases of Technology Adoption
A discussion at work today turned to how my most recent project (currently in testing) may be the first one moved to dotNet v3.5 as a pilot for the 2008 versions of Visual Studio, SQL Server and Windows Server. Once we find out what it takes to move a simple project to the new platform, we’ll start looking at moving the more complex systems over.
One of the new technologies being considered is LINQ. None of us have any hands-on experience with it yet, but this conversation led us to realize there are three distinct phases all projects go through when adopting a new technology:
- Refactor the entire system to heavily overuse the new technology, especially in manners where it was never intended to be used and/or is completely ill-suited.
- Refactor the system again in attempt to remedy the problems caused by the previous refactoring.
- Refactor the system with the next hot technology.
The planning to assure that this will be the time you finally break out of that cycle is spread across all three phases.
Fark'ed
A few years ago, I discovered that several pages on MySpace were using images from the Shore Leave site as backgrounds. And then, every so often, someone would go and put one of the photos into a comment on a message board. But rather than copying the photos, they were loading them directly from the web site.
At the time, I talked with one of the con chairs and we decided that rather than “blocking” the images, we’d make some lemonade from the situation. Nowadays, if you view any of the archived photos on the site, you’ll discover that they have the site’s address embedded in them. (In effect, every time someone links to an image, they end up giving Shore Leave some free advertising.)
Looking at the server logs last night, I discovered Shore Leave had been getting a significant amount of traffic from Fark.com (the amount of traffic coming in via Fark in the previous 14 hours was about 4-5 times as much as what came in from from Google, Yahoo, and everyone else combined in the preceding 48). It turned out Fark was running a thread about a would-be robber who was armed with a spork. The fifth response in the thread included a photo of a very familiar convention hallway.
I’m taking the view that all those people (more than 1,000 as of 24 hours ago) seeing the archived photo of Spork Man is a wonderful way to get publicity at very little cost. And to keep myself amused, I’ve lightly edited the photo to say hello.
And who knows? Perhaps Slashdot will provide the next link! 🙂
Random Thoughts
One of the risks of going for a walk in an unfamiliar neighborhood is that other people don’t realize that it’s unfamiliar. It might be unfamiliar to them though, and then they’ll stop and ask you for directions.
That happened to me today. Amazingly, I not only knew the location of the Holiday Inn, I also knew that it was now a Crowne Plaza.
Yesterday was February 29. Assuming I ever get married, February 29 would be a good day for the wedding. That way I’d only have to remember the anniverssary one year out of every four, and all the “Leap Day” press would work as a reminder.
April 1 would be another good day, though it would also be a good day for a proposal. Any girl lacking the sense of humor to appreciate that date probably wouldn’t want to be involved with me anyhow.