Silicon Valley Redneck

Moon cakes

Joy got inspired to make a batch.  Tasty!

I'm a little unclear on the occasion; she said something about being late for August 15^th, but then said that was a mistranslation.  I would have thought July 20^th would be the proper day, but whatever.

The rate of egg consumption still exceeding local production, I guess we'll need to buy another carton of grocery-store eggs to tide us over until the backyard critters get up to speed.  Once they are up to speed, I'll probably have to go around knocking on doors trying to give eggs away.

(No, a moon cake is not the same thing as a MoonPie, nor is it traditionally served with RC Cola.)

Meanwhile in China

Spotted here:

The stay-at-home order lasts through Thursday. During that time, residents are only allowed to leave to take mandated "nucleic acid tests on a daily basis at designated locations, ...

Nucleic acid tests?  Are they having an outbreak of mutants?

 

Yeah, yeah, probably means PCR tests for viral RNA.  Which remains an inappropriate use of PCR testing, but whatever.

Confoozed, as usual.

Apparently Oz the Great and Terrible has challenged Uncle Festerman to a steel cage match, or a light-bulb-eating contest, or some such thing.

Oz is a humbug; Festerman is known to make inappropriate use of his blunderbuss.  I'm sure this will end well.

Oh, and it's now ableist to suggest that a candidate who's technically been dead for ten years might not be capable of performing the duties of the office for which he's running.  (Personally, I think most offices should be filled by dead people, or better yet dead skunks, but unfortunately this would allow the unelected portions of government to run amok.  I mean, more than they already are.  Remember, the Praetorian Guard has the power to remove Caesar and appoint his replacement.)

Time to return to things that make sense, or can be beaten into making sense.  This toaster spec is now within beating range; where'd I leave that rubber-faced document mallet?

Homophone trouble.

If you search amazon for a tow spreader, you will get results for toe spreaders, which are not at all the same thing.

The main search engines seem to be likewise developing a bad case of "but surely you mean _____" when one looks for something unusual and highly specific that could plausibly be a typo for some everyday thing.  I don't know if this is the search engines themselves, or if sites are now including lots of typo keywords, but it makes searches for some terms completely useless.

I remember when AltaVista allowed searching for words with exact capitalization, and when Google only looked for the exact words (or exact phrases, if quoted) in my queries.  Ah, those were the days!

Weather remains fickle.

Today's forecast evolves.

Yesterday evening: moderate amount of rain very likely, beginning around 1100.

Early this morning: 99% chance of rain, about an inch, with considerably more than an inch between 1300 and 1400.

Noonish: slight chance of rain (as we were getting some sprinkles).

Now: rain?  What's that?

Yeah, looks like a great big storm, but it missed us by several miles.

Oh, well.  Growing season is pretty much coming to an end anyway, so I don't need a bunch of ongoing rain.

 

Meanwhile, on the yard-equipment front: I really should acquire a tow-type spreader for fertilizer and seed.  Or, happy thought: the push-type spreader I have would function just as well being pulled rather than pushed, right?  So, basically a matter of replacing the push bar with a tow bar, and doing something about the gate control?

Looks like a conversion kit isn't a thing, and as a DIY project it'd be a bunch of work that I don't really have time for at this point.  So, guess I'll be buying a tow-behind spreader (probably 2 sizes larger than the spreader I have, though that's kinda overkill for my anticipated fertilizer usage).  Operating the gate may be a headache: the ones I see pictures of seem to be designed for towing behind tractor-style mowers or maybe small ATVs, rather than rear-engine mowers or actual tractors.  I suppose I'll come up with something.  Long-term solution might involve a largish RC servo to work the gate, which would give predictable control over how far it opened.

(No, I'm not spending the bucks for real, full-scale farm machinery.  If I end up expanding to multiple acres under cultivation, I'll presumably want the right tools for the job - but then it would be a job.  Anyway, real farm machinery nowadays is sized for hundreds of acres, not single-digit acres.)

Hay having been harvested, it's coming up on time to kill & till the proposed expansion zones - actually, kill, then apply fertilizer, then till.  Then till again, and maybe again, then apply clover and/or alfalfa seed before we get too close to winter.  Oh, and go over it with a roller to hide the seeds from the birds.

Are you pondering what I'm pondering?

I'm not sure if the goal was The Brain or a sort of murine version of The Cat from Red Dwarf, but:

Scientists Just Genetically Edited a Million Years of Evolution Into Mouse DNA

What could possibly....

Wasn't this the second or third iteration of an origin story for the Daleks?  Will the highly-evolved mice be scooting around in little Mk. III Travel Machines?

Some people can't math.

So, taking another look at that somewhat-promising-looking earth auger powerhead that's on deep discount at HD, but also sold out at the moment.

Click link for user manual.  It's a scan of a paper document.  A good start, right?

Scroll down.  It requires synthetic 2-stroke oil.  And, ah: here's the mixture.  Supposed to have 2% oil in the fuel, this being a 30:1 mixture.

Well, 2% would technically be a 49:1 mixture, but who's counting?

I suppose this makes it impossible to comply - you either use too little oil (2%) or too much (30:1), and most people probably won't go looking for synthetic oil, so actual use must surely void whatever warranty it purports to have.  (My jug of husky varnish concentrate is a synthetic blend, and on the pricey side; full synthetic seems a bit of a stretch to require for a kinda cheap little engine.)

That WordPress glitch?

Seems it's not just WordPress.  My main bank's site now hangs if I try to log on using Chrome (either the current version or the outdated and non-updateable one on the old workstation).

I suppose some widely-shared JawaScript library has developed a Chrome allergy.  (Is that a thing?  Hexavalent chrome is carcinogenic or something, but allergenic...?)

Or perhaps it's an incompatibility with some browser extension I have installed... like some script hangs if it can't get to something that's blocked by Ublock Origin, maybe?

I didn't try turning off any extensions.  I did try using an entirely different browser, and all went as expected.

... I remember dire warnings on a jar of ammonium dichromate, back in the day - and I don't think they even included cancer.  They did include something about not setting it on fire, which is of course what people did with it back then.  Volcano!

Update:  The b0rkage has now spread to Typepad.  I think it's something to do with jQuery.  I can't get to my own comment page, while logged in, even if I disable Ublock for the site... which says either it's some other extension or jQuery doesn't get along with Chrome any more.  Definitely time for another Great Browser Migration (the last one was from Firefox to Chrome, several years ago, when Firefox was showing signs of being both technically and politically untrustworthy).

And, speaking of glitches

It appears that something has gone peculiar with WordPress, a few days back.

Lately, when I look at the main page of a WP site, all's well... but the moment I look at an individual entry (with Chrome, while logged in so's I could potentially comment) both the individual entry and the main page get wedged.  This applies to multiple sites, and I've tried it from two different machines.

Guess I should try it in a different browser, and, if that works, it's yet another incentive to switch browsers, even for everyday use.  (Chrome's spyware aspect is getting increasingly overt and creepy.)

Tiller ordered.

That intermediate-sized rototiller I'd picked out?  I'd been checking in every so often to see if Home Despot had scheduled delivery available again (which I think means local stock).

I checked in again this evening.  Still no scheduled delivery, just free shipping to home... but the price had come down.  A lot.

OK, I can live with ship-to-home on an uncertain schedule.  Looks like they'll deliver to the top of the driveway, so it won't be a matter of having to meet the delivery truck at the road with the pallet forks on the tractor.

Anyway, ordered.  Gonna be using it for some fall tilling... and a lot next year, for much of the tilling that really does need to be done after planting commences.  More notes for future gardening: leave room between patches for at least the new tiller and maybe even the lawn mower; leave room between rows for the mini-tiller.

Oh, and in the cool of the morning I should go dig up the onion and sweet potato patches and see if there's anything harvestable.  I ran the mower over them this afternoon, to remove most of the overgrowth.

Also ordered: some heavy braided fishing line to hold up the tops of overly-stretchy trellises next year.  A 300 meter roll, let's see, that's a bit shy of 60 rods, and I expect to be using a bit over a rod per trellis.  I don't have a lot of things that need trellising, so that should last me a while.

Not ordered: an earth auger.  Still haven't decided among the big-box brands and the Hazard Fraught offering.  The HF one has the drawback of taking 25:1 mixed fuel, like Grandpa's outboard motor, but it seems to get better reviews than the comparable products out there.  HD had a somewhat promising one marked way down, but 'tis out of stock.  I expect to be needing the auger maybe a couple of weeks out... getting on toward decision time.  (And I did buy a gallon of Husqvarna 2-stroke oil, so mixing up batches of extra-oily gas shouldn't be a big problem.)

Surely this violates one of the Seven Commandments.

If it doesn't, it should.

Sitting in a chair has to be right up there with sleeping in a bed with sheets, no?

'Nother egg.

Much like the first: brown, and quite small.

I assume once the hens are fully grown up they'll be laying full-sized eggs of many colors.

The reason for the season....

Harvest season is harvest season because it's the time of year ya gotta harvest.

Gathering of the last of the squashes was delayed most of a week, owing mainly to my being chained to my desk trying to catch up on toaster work.

In the meantime, most of them got seriously nibbled on by one sort of vermin or another.  Two squashes appeared salvageable, but one of those, on closer inspection, seems awfully soft at the bud end.

And, I missed the sweet corn, such as there was of it.  There's a moderate amount of meal corn, but an unknown portion of it will need cleaning up: I only found the opportunity to give it one dose of BT, and that not optimally timed, and certainly some of the ears got infested with caterpillars and maybe other things.  (Some of the ears appear to have gotten infested with crows, but that's another problem.)

The various legumes?  I'm not sure what's up with them.  It looks like maybe I missed the main crop, and now some of the plants are trying again.  I may get a few more green beans, and probably some soybeans and whatnot.

It's about 80°F out there, which wouldn't be that bad, but it's also 80% humidity.  Ugh.  Well, gotta run a couple of errands, and spend more hours in the air conditioning working on this toaster firmware.

Ponderment.

Why are marker dyes for use with herbicides always blue nowadays?

It's not like blue dye gives good contrast when sprayed thinly on green grass & weeds.  Come back after lunch, and it's really hard to tell what's been sprayed and what hasn't.

I wonder how red fabric dye would work.

Shipping screwup, or scam?

That package that went astray this past week?

USPS tracking now shows it having been delivered late yesterday afternoon.

To my mailbox.

In Atlanta.

It's not in my mailbox, nor is my mailbox in Atlanta.

So... was it shipped to some completely wrong address inadvertently?

Or: seller on Amazon advertises a moderately pricey item at a believably discounted price.  Customer orders item.  Seller ships something from China, to an address safely removed from the customer's area.  USPS reports item delivered.  Seller gets paid.  Actual recipient opens box, briefly wonders who sent that pair of cheap sneakers, and tosses them in the thrift-store bin.  Customer is, maybe, SOL.

Guess I'll have to see about contacting Amazon.  The fact that USPS reports delivering it to a different state from my shipping address should be somewhat of a Clue.

Meanwhile, on the work front

There was an occasional glitch.

Turned out to involve the logic resetting itself after a wedgie.

The wedgie, after considerable poking & prodding, turned out to be a race condition in a state machine, which resulted, sometimes, in one important variable getting set while another wasn't.  This was fallout from a clocking change.

It looks like synchronizing a couple of inputs may have solved the problem.  I'm running a wedgie test now, and haven't seen any adverse results in a couple of hours.  I'll leave it running overnight before declaring it good and cleaning up the test scaffolding.

Another one o' them mornings.

Little thunderstorm last night, contrary to the no-rain-any-time-soon forecast.

Comes vaguely-morning-ish, I look at the clock on my nightstand.  It's not lit up.  Nor does my phone show its lightning-bolt icon.

Nightstand came unplugged?  No.  And things plugged in elsewhere in the bedroom are also off.

The dehumidifier is running, and the outside lights are on.

Breaker tripped?

Stuff in my office does show signs of a power glitch.  Out to the garage, and look at the breaker panel.  The breaker marked "Master bedroom" seems to be in the ON position, but an unmarked breaker with the arc-fault feature looks tripped.  Reset it.  Clock lights up.

Somewhat later: clock is dark again.  Also - I hadn't checked this earlier - power to the light/fan fixture in the bedroom is out.  The unmarked breaker has tripped again.

Breaker gone flaky, or a wiring problem?  Maybe we need to get an electrician out here to investigate.  I suppose once Joy is properly awake I can try unplugging everything and resetting the breaker again.

Update:  Everything unplugged, light and fan off, breaker reset: power stays on.  Plug in my nightstand, the outlet strip under Joy's secondary desk, and the nightlight: power stays on.  Turn on the overhead light (which was off during the time the breaker was tripping, but whatever): light comes on and stays on.

So!  Either it was some weird early-morning glitch, or Joy's nightstand or something plugged into it is causing the problem.  We'll sort that out later, and calling the electrician can wait a couple of weeks (next week is climate control for the garage; after that, we can address a couple of minor electrical matters, and later on there'll be some major electrical / cabling projects).

Update 2:  Everything has been plugged back in since mid-morning, it's now evening, and the breaker hasn't tripped again.  Mysterious, innit?

Egg.

Well, looky here!

It's rather a small egg, but it's at least a fortnight before I was expecting any eggs at all, so it seems like a good start.

Gotta start checking the nest boxes daily.  Also, it's probably time to mix up a jug of official egg wash.

Bug.

Many of these on the sunflowers, but the light was better here.

This would seem to be a leaf-footed bug, Leptoglossus wossname.  I'm not much of an etymologist, but I think that means its tongue has half-integer spin or something.

The chickens ate a couple of them.  Something, whether bugs or tweety-birds, seems to have eaten dang near all the seeds out of the sunflowers.

Earworm.

Been stuck with it for a couple of days now, so I must share.  Them's the rules.