Silicon Valley Redneck

Stupid suburbanite trick #172

Mowing paths through an old hayfield on a windy day.

Especially when the field in question wasn't actually harvested last time, just mowed.  So there's a lot of uncollected hay just lying around being piles of dry grass clippings.

Mower operates as designed, chopping old and new grass alike into little bits and spewing them forth from the discharge chute.

Wind catches the dry bits, and... well, particles in my hair, particles in my eyes, particles up my nose, particles down my shirt... an emergency shower and a change of clothes were called for.

From the Unexpectedly! files

Seems Fry's Electronics has gone under.  (Via Insty.)

Fry's would have been one of those things I missed about Silicon Valley, except that it had been circling the drain for a great many years.  It was still a place to buy emergency replacements for power supplies, monitors, and such, but even for those it had gone sadly downhill.

Back in the day, now... I remember when the first one opened, in Sunnyvale - Oakmead Parkway, at Lawrence, I think it was.  The Commodore Amiga was a thing, or perhaps I'm thinking of the Atari ST.  One of those.  Anyway, they carried a diversity of personal computers, back in the days before Wintel took over.  And they carried lots of prototyping components!  I got my NS16032 parts kit there, and a content-addressable-memory chip, and sundry other exotica.

(Am I showing my age?)

Eventually, though, the stores (plural by then) were increasingly filled with ordinary consumer electronics, major appliances, office supplies, generic toys, and other non-geek stuff, crowding out most of the cool specialty items.

A commenter at Insty links to this, which seems largely right for a certain era.

So, let's see now.  Things I miss about Silicon Valley.  Trade shows (died of the Pestilence just after I left; now virtual, which is no fun, but it's no-fun I could have from anywhere with a 'Net connection).  Fry's (but not so much since a decade or so before I left).  The electronics-surplus stores, like Halted Specialties and Anchor Electronics (Anchor still seems to be in business, but Halted, as such, is now defunct).  Asian supermarkets like 99 Ranch (yeah, still miss that one; the Asian population around here is kinda sparse).  Various industrial suppliers (most of which had either gone out of business or moved out of the area in the past decade or so), but maybe I can find replacements around here, once we're out and exploring the area.  Maybe a few other things, which may or may not still exist.

Slightly productive yesterday

Well, the weather was nice - sunny, lower 60s in the afternoon, trees budding, frogs chirping.  A little windy, though.

So, what could I usefully do outdoors while either wearing a wrist brace or avoiding the sort of things that set the wrist off?  Oh, and wearing sandals, because putting boots on is problematic with my heel bandaged.

Grab a shovel and head down to the Annex.  Pick a spot on the proposed victory garden plateau, and commence digging.

The hayfield roots and the soil below are somewhat resistant to digging, but I got more'n a foot down without hitting clay.  Looks like a nice thick layer of brown silt loam, and no rocks that I noticed.  Yup, good place for a garden!

So, after I get the scheduled maintenance done on the tractor (change engine oil & filter, change both hydraulic-fluid filters, grease everything, inspect a few things) and the coming rainy time passes, I guess I'll hook up the tiller (and do spring maintenance on it), head down there, and make a first pass at tilling a good-sized garden patch.

Meanwhile, I fired up the mower (which was a mite sluggish, being wakened from its hibernation), gave the approximate target area (plus a path leading to it) a haircut, then made a first attempt at mowing the thick clumps of grass along the fenceline.  I suppose today I'll take the mower out again, clean its air filter, and mow the grass around the perimeter nice and short.

Rideshare. Subway. Villain from The Incredibles.

Or something like it.  My right wrist is decidedly unhappy of late.  Using the mouse, or even the keyboard, makes it worse, never mind using the reciprocating saw at awkward angles.

I had this sort of thing once before, a few years ago.  Didn't last all that long, but it was decidedly inconvenient.

Today, the wrist, per se, isn't in so much pain, but I keep having hand and forearm cramps.

I think I'd better cut way back on my computer time this week.  It's a good week for getting out in the yard... if only most of the stuff I should be doing in the yard didn't also involve using my right hand in ways that set it off.

(A wrist brace helps avoid setting off the pain, but also prevents getting work done.  Such is life.)

Anyway, probably light posting this week.  And maybe light reading, too.  Reading time may be the out-on-the-lawn-with-a-book type.

Sunday morning music can become an adventure

So I'd ordered this CD...

Backstory, short form: a week or so back, Alma Boykin had a blog post regarding the Uffington Horse, and referenced the eponymous song by the eponymous band, whose existence I'd somehow managed to forget... though the song (but not the performance) seemed remarkably familiar, and very Heather Alexander indeed.

Okay, so that band was an early-noughties thing; the Enchantment CD is from 2004.  Before Heather went off to dance in the circle, like; not from back in the audio-cassette era.  How do I not have a copy?  I ordered a copy via Amazon, for delivery February 26th or so, assuming that this would cause a still-in-the-wrapper copy to appear by magic among my misfiled office clutter.

Well, it arrived yesterday, having apparently been somehow expedited by the Great Central Freeze.  This morning, hm.  No actual CD player handy.  Stick it in a DVD-RW drive plugged into the old workstation.  Select "Play Audio CD with Amarok."  Amarok commences playing some .mov file, while scanning tracks, and re-scanning, and re-scanning... in short, Amarok ran Amok, causing the computer's entire UI to become wedged.

OK, so reboot.  Try again, sans Amarok.  Open the CD with the file manager: aha!  It has a bunch of computer-oriented content, in addition to the audio tracks.  Try using grip to pull the audio tracks?  Hm, no grip; it seems to have disappeared from this (old) version of Debian (library issue?), assuming it was there to begin with, however-many years ago.  How about k3b?  Sure enough finds the audio tracks, but CDDB lookup doesn't appear to be working.

Oh, well.  Try playing the audio tracks with vlc: that works.  I definitely hadn't heard this CD before, though many of the songs are familiar from Heather's solo gigs back in the day.

Another day, I'll rip the audio tracks to MP3 so they can go on my lawn-mowing playlist.

Multiple owies

Various scratches from various yard work, including a blackberry scratch from this morning that warranted coming back indoors for a band-aid.

Then, comes time to fix dinner... fetch stuff up from the basement.  Decide I also want some triple-ginger teriyaki sauce, whereof there's no bottle up, so back down to the basement for that.  On the way down, scratch the back of my left heel, badly, on something stair-related.

Argh.  Remove sock.  Wash heel, and allow to bleed for a while.  Dry with a paper towel.  Apply a large band-aid goobered with antibiotic ointment.

Sometime soon I guess I'd better inspect those stairs.  Getting them finished properly was originally on the pre-move-in list, but got postponed until after we got moved in, then everything got postponed....

Commerce appears to be recovering

from the big winter storm.

Several of the delayed Amazon items turned up today, and there's finally plausible-looking tracking information for the others.

New orders from Amazon and Walmart are still showing extended delivery times, though.

A note regarding "anti-racist" math

(Keeping in mind that "anti-racism" is the most virulent form of racism....)

Seems that part of the purported justification for the current push is that the language of math puts the Intersectional at a cultural disadvantage, and because culture and race are inseparable (I said this was racist, didn't I?) it must therefore be racist.

And what's the language of math?  Well!  For the New Generation, it's Common Core.  Which, as I noted many years ago, hides the actual math behind at least one layer of impenetrable, made-up, baby-talk edu-jargon.

So if kids are having trouble getting past the Common Core jargon to the underlying (objective, culture-independent, race-independent) mathematical principles, it must be the fault of the principles themselves and the white people (and Asians, and Arabs) who derived them, so the principles must be regarded as invalid.

Ergo,

And if you disagree, you're denying my lived experience.  Or somebody else's lived experience.  Or imagined experience.  Or what some guy on the TV told me I experienced.

Afterthought:  Back when I noticed the jargon thing?  I figured it was (if not merely the result of innumerate, mal-educated, word-salad-oriented education majors setting the agenda) at attempt to reduce inequality by making it difficult for numerate parents to help their kids, inhibiting intergenerational knowledge transfer.  In which case, the newly-discovered language barrier to math is the result of the previous generation of Progressive "reform."

Wonders of modern technology

I bought a couple of dinky little $11 GPS modules, just because.  That's $11 including the little antenna pucks.

Tried one out this afternoon, indoors.  It found enough satellites fairly quickly, and settled down to reporting a location that was pretty close to where Google Earth thinks its actual location was.

It did wander considerably at one point, roughly corresponding to the time I was away from my desk to fetch the mail.  Perhaps my presence between the window and the antenna affects the RF paths.  Maybe I should really be testing it outdoors, or at least right next to the window.

Anyway, I'm pondering setting up a solar-powered DGPS reference station or two, and playing around, just to see what I can do with really cheap hardware plus a reference point and communication.

Afterthought:  Earth to Google!  Earth to Google!  Not everybody's GPS is connected on /dev/ttyS0.  Please consider updating the "GPS/Realtime" menu in Google Earth to include port selection.

Update:  After I moved it to the window, it couldn't find satellites.  Well... the humidity in my office remains alarmingly low, I don't have proper ground mats on desk nor windowsill, and I sometimes come down with Sith fingers in here, so, yeah, probably fried the RF end with ESD.  Good thing it was only an $11 gadget.

Counting the snow

Something for a cat to do on a winter's morn:

(Pogo reference in title.)

A stroll around the Annex

Yes, there's a little water in the very bottom of the pond.  And the drainage ditch that crosses the driveway is running.  So, time to go see where the drainage runs, relative to the regrettably-floody good soil downhill.

Turns out that there's a vestigial drainage ditch in the Annex, leading to a little culvert that crosses the property line and connects to the ditch across the neighbors' lawn.  It doesn't extend very far... and it looks like there could be a terrain issue with trying to drain the real bottom land.  This may be a project for sometime when I can rent a baby excavator, or even hire somebody who does drainage projects.

But!  There's a large area, several feet above the lowlands, that feels decently level (as in, I'd have no problem driving the tractor, with tiller, across that area).  The USDA soil map (hey, the imagery is recent!  Like, within the last year; actually, I think it's from last April) shows it as being "Waynesboro loam, 6 to 15 percent slopes, eroded", with maybe 5 inches of loam above the clay loam.  So... guess someday soon I should go poke a shovel in it, and see how far down the topsoil actually does go.  USDA thinks its usability is erosion-limited, but it feels fairly level to me, so I think I won't need to worry too much about the soil washing away downslope, at least for a moderate-sized garden patch.

So.  A little soil probing, some measurements, and I gotta come up with a plan, and make sure I'm sufficiently supplied with fencing materials and weed-barrier fabric.  Actual tilling probably happens sometime in March or early April, depending how the weather goes.

Let's see... I have 300 feet of good-quality fence mesh, bought last spring.  A quick sketch in Google Earth suggests that I'll want around a 200 foot perimeter for an appallingly large garden patch.  (For reference, my entire lot back in Sunnyvale had a 300-foot perimeter.)  I have quite a pile of pressure-treated wood posts, and a pile of T-posts, plus a (manual) post-hole digger, a T-post driver, and a big bag of clips.  Have to do something about a gate, but that shouldn't be a big deal, as long as I plan ahead.  Gate has to be big enough to drive the tractor through, though I hope I won't need to use the tractor on the garden patch after the first year, if I make appropriate use of weed barrier and cover crops.  Hope not being a plan, the gate must be wide enough....

Once things dry out, I'll have to start mowing the walkways again, including new ones through and around the Annex.  The new, expanded perimeter path should add up to just about a mile!

Glom of Nit was unavailable for comment

Well... looks like a lot of my Amazon orders are trying to come from places like Nashville, somewhere-in-Kentucky, and somewhere-in-Texas, with the result that they're currently stuck in the rain, snow, and plague of dogs with orange eyebrows.  (I'm sure Mrs. Cake will put in an appearance at some point, most likely in Texas if the last few days are any indication.)

Seems the coming-today-via-UPS package is something originally scheduled (if memory serves) for a few days hence, but arriving early; it's coming from Chattanooga, which is upwind of here in the general weather pattern and apparently hasn't been clobbered.

Here, well, we got nearly an inch of rain between bedtime and early morning; when I went out to fetch the paper (after waiting for the rain to taper off), I found quite a bit of frozen stuff on the ground - not so much snow as sleet, or what we called "hail" back in the Bay Area.  Currently barely-thawing out there, and not raining.  Rain is supposed to resume mid-afternoon, followed by late-night/early-morning snow.

What with things being wet, I should maybe take a walk through the Annex and try to spot where the drainage runs.  Not going to try to do anything about it just now, but perhaps I can mark a good course for a drainage ditch before things actually flood, and dig the ditch in spring.

Update:  Here it is Friday morning, almost noon, and Amazon is still extremely vague as to the status of everything that was supposed to have arrived this week but hasn't yet.  A supplier in Missouri says my current order is likely to be delayed.  A supplier with warehouses all over the place says a new order should get here from the Atlanta warehouse Monday, so I guess things are normal out there.

Another thing you'd think would exist...

Waterproof, sticky-back labels for putting on pesticide sprayers to identify what sort of pesticide they've been used for.

Maybe sold as an assortment, including a couple stickers each of a few broad categories: INSECTICIDE, HERBICIDE, BRUSH KILLER, GLYPHOSATE, DORMANT SPRAY, that sort of thing.

Because using the brush-killer sprayer for dormant spray would be unfortunate.

Oh, well.  Guess I'll have to use paint markers.

(Yeah, just came back in from spraying the trees.  The new-last-year apple trees seemed to have a touch of fungus last summer.)

I felt a great disturbance in the commerce.

Various deliveries from Amazon are running late, and package trackage seems to be almost entirely broken; the status has little or no connection to where the packages might actually be.

Mouser informs me that my order has been delayed because no parcel companies are currently operating in their part of Texas.

Looks like the middle of the country, as far East as Nashville, is not only quite a bit colder than here but also getting snow and ice.  Very inconvenient for transportation, or indeed for anyone in the affected areas.

Hm.  At least one item delayed in transit is somewhat freeze sensitive.  Oh, well: if it's damaged by freezing the damage will be obvious, and I'll attempt to order a replacement supply.

Update:  Amazon package trackage appears to be entirely FUBAR at this point (Wednesday evening).  Local postal delivery seems to be normal, at least in terms of stuff turning up in the mailbox sometime during the afternoon.  Parcels from Amazon, well, it looks like Amazon is out of sync and can't account for where the shipments are and whether they've been handed over to the carriers.  UPS brought two packages from Amazon today, but I think at least one of those was supposed to have been scheduled for yesterday, and one that was scheduled for today (what with it being Prime Day), I think is the one UPS is telling me will arrive tomorrow.  Various shipments via USPS, supposed to have been delivered Monday, yesterday, and today, seem to be in limbo, and it's not clear whether Amazon actually handed any of them over to USPS yet.  Maybe they're on trucks coming from the West, though the ice storm?

And, Amazon keeps showing some items as "Arriving today before 9:00 PM" or whatever, when they apparently haven't actually shipped yet.  The order status has been obviously a little flaky for quite a while, but this is getting ridiculous.  I mean, unless they're planning on an emergency late-evening drone delivery or something.

Oh, well.  It's not like I was counting on any of this stuff for tonight's dinner.  Speaking of which, it's time to figure out what is for dinner.

Second-hand weather

Temperature this morning is in the low 20s, chillingly Fahrenheit.  There are scattered snowflakes drifting on the wind.

It's not technically Texas leftovers; looks like this came South through Missouri, then East, seriously freezing Nashville along the way.

This does seem to fit a general pattern; the really big weather happens elsewhere, and is pretty well attenuated before it gets to this particular spot.  Something to do with distance and mountains, I think.  It's one reason I didn't consider a more coastal location (nor a flat one) when first pondering the big move.