I am so glad we are done. You have no idea Today’s events (with commentary):

9:00 am - Go out to tackle 100 plants and 200 bulbs.

later - finish laying out 100 daylilies on the ground. “Holy crap that’s alot of daylilies.”

a little later - finish laying out 200 daffodil bulbs. “Holy crap that’s alot of bulbs.”

11:18 - Finish planting all of the daylilies (they only get buried 1” deep). “Ow.”

1:30 - Finish planting all of the daffodils (they get buried 6” deep). “Ow. alot”

The final tally:

• 100 daylilies planted
• 200 daffodils planted
• 396 square feet of clay beaten into submission
• 5 blisters

I would attempt to make some witty story about today’s events, but I really am too sore and tired to even think of it, so there you have it, Fall Planting 2002.

When we last left our intrepid hero, the bed had been laid out, and the soil needed to be prepared.

Beaten into submission is more like it. Last Saturday, after we had lain out the bed, the Fedex man came by and deliverd our bulb planting tool from White Flower Farms. This is a tool that is basically a pipe with a handle that you push into the ground (with helpfull foot pedals if needed) and then make a nice round hole perfect for planting bulbs. After gleefully unwrapping the bright red instrument of destruction, I went out to try it out.

I placed the end on the ground and stepped on the foot bar. It slid into the ground about 2 inches and stopped. Hmpf. So I stood on the bar and twisted; Nothing. I then went back to the garage to get my shovel and examined the soil some more. What I found was disheartening. At the bottom of the hill, there is 2 to 3 inches of topsoil; at the top of the hill, there is approxiamtely ½ inch of topsoil. And all this topsoil is carefully spread over wonderful, hard, red, Virginia clay.

Great.

Sunday we made a trip to Mecca and I returned with my latest implement of destruction, the pick-ax. Thus began the weeks struggle of turning all the soil.

It is now Friday afternoon, and I have gone out every day after work except Monday (due to some blood in addition to the normal sweat and soil) and have completed ¾ of the soil in the bed. I should be able to finish tomorrow with two sessions.

This is good because all of the Daffodils and Daylilies (two units of the collection, 200 bulbs, and 100 plants) arrived today. I wonder what exactely Elizabeth and I have gotten ourselves into here, but I shall keep you informed.

Attached is a conversation I had this morning on IM. The names of the participants have been changed to protect the innocent. (Well maybe not innocent.) It provides an interesting insight into the mind of a techno-fiddler.

DP: have you tried RH 8.0 yet?

Jeremy Beker: ::laugh:: nope.

DP: I’m having problems with the CDs…I can’t get them to boot

DP: maybe my iso files are corrupted

Jeremy Beker: they should have MD5 checksums listed somewhere you can compare with

DP: how do I compute the MD5 checksum?

Jeremy Beker: md5sum

DP: ah…seems easy enough..haha

Jeremy Beker: I have also found that when discs are burned at high speed, they will take too long to be recognized by the cdrom drive and not be ready in enough time to allow the machine to boot from them.

DP: ah…I bet that’s it

DP: I think I only burned at 16x though

DP: so do I use: md5sum image.iso …

Jeremy Beker: 16 is very fast. I have had problems with CDs burned at 8x, I usually do 4x if I am having issues

Jeremy Beker: yes, md5sum

DP: hmmm….doesn’t seem to be doing anything

DP: oh well…I’ll try to burn at a lower speed

Jeremy Beker: it will take it a bit to go through 650MB

DP: hmmm…the software I’m using doesn’t go below 8x….so I’ll try that.

Jeremy Beker: ::laugh::

DP: I thinkI burned my 7.3 discs at 12x and didn’t have any problems

Jeremy Beker: did the md5sums match?

DP: its still cranking away

DP: yes…checksums match….must be the burn rate

Jeremy Beker: also if you can set your machine to only boot from CD, you may be able to force it to load.

DP: yeah…this POS model that I have only allows you to set the “first” drive to try

Jeremy Beker: oh

DP: it starts to load, ,but then I get an error

Jeremy Beker: make a boot floppy

DP: something about linux trying to wing it

Jeremy Beker: the images should be on the CD

DP: ….I might have to do that…I don’t think I actually own a floppy

Jeremy Beker: ::laugh::

Jeremy Beker: there is that

DP: I’ll have to go to staples and probably have to buy them in packages of like 150

DP: ah…CD is done…I’ll try this new one

DP: hmmm…same error

Jeremy Beker: kernel error, or redhat error?

DP: isolinux: Loading spec packet failed, trying to wing it…

DP: isolinux: Failed to locate CD-ROM device, boot failed.

DP: but the 7.2 and 7.3 discs I have work just fine…and I made them on the same burner

Jeremy Beker: oh. do you have a funcky cdrom drive?

DP: same drive I used to load 7.2 and 7.3

Jeremy Beker: and you haven’t dorked with the hardware since then

DP: I think that this is RH’s plot to make me replace every piece of this machine one upgrade at a time

DP: I replaced the video card…

Jeremy Beker: that shouldn’t make a difference.

DP: since the new and “improved” drivers didn’t work with my old card….

DP: even though the old drivers worked

Jeremy Beker: that is what you get for upgrading

DP: haha…yes…I suppose so

Jeremy Beker: (which is why I never “upgrade” a working system without a very good reason)

DP: I have a good reason

DP: …I need bluecurve

Jeremy Beker: um. that is the new window manager look, isn’t it?

DP: ximian is getting old

DP: yes

Jeremy Beker: ::sigh:: that is not a good reason

DP: well…when I have to look at it all day…a new desktop is like a vacation for me

Jeremy Beker: uh huh. you just can’t stand to leave something alone without fiddling with it

DP: well….why should I leave it alone when I can make it better, faster, stronger…like the bionic computer

Jeremy Beker: given your current success rate, I think older, plainer, and working might have been a better choice

the saga continues. After laying out the borders of the new bed last weekend, we started putting in the brick edging today. We have most of it in, but we will need to get a few more bricks.

Strangely, as I was starting to turn some of the soil, I found a cinderblock burried in the hill. I have no idea what it is from. Weird.

I have posted some pictures of the early work on the Our Garden page of my website. More to come

This is an image a friend of mine sent me. Look carefully.

So it is time again for our fall plantings (actually again is too strong a statement. This is our first fall planting. We had a spring planting this year.)

Read on for the beginning of the fall planting saga. The front lawn is my enemy. Grass will not grow on the low hill in the front lawn. I have tried since we bought the house to no avail. Not that I really like lawn, but I hate plain dirt. But the dirt won; this time.

I’m bringing in the big guns now. FLOWERS! ha ha ha!

Elizabeth laid out a flower bed that is pleasantly curved and encomposes a large portion of the “dead zone.” We have been planning this area for quite a while and settled on a wonderful package that White Flower Farm offers called Daffodils & Daylilies, a Collaboration of Color. It is made up of 100 Daffodil bulbs and 50 Daylilies. Given the size of the bed, we needed two of them. Wow, that will be lots of planting.

We also have a lattice wall that I built in the back yard that surrounds the two air conditioning units outside. We wanted to get a flowering vine to grow up it that would attract butterflies. After researching the subject, we settled on Sweet Autumn Clematis (Clematis paniculata).

So I placed the order today and the flowers should be shipping within the next month (they start shipping items in Spetember starting with the coldest climates and working south).

I will make status reports as things progress.

It has been mentioned to me that when working as root, you do not actually make more mistakes, it is just that when you do make a mistake, it has larger consequences.

As a note to other sysadmins, changing the permissions on the /etc directory to 644 is a bad thing.

Just performing my social duty by warning others.

::sigh::

the Belief-o-matic

Click below to see what I am and post your results. I was listed with 100% confidence as:

Secular Humanist

This really does say it so well.

(An entry so people don’t think I’m dead.) Last week I watched the Apple keynote from Seybold. It wasn’t a Steve-note, but Phil is pretty good at giving a show. He didn’t show anything new, but he spent a time covering a significant number of the publishing features present in OS X. One of the biggest issues I think Apple has in “selling” OS X is that it is hard to talk about all of the interesting new features.

Phil spent considerable time talking about fonts. Given my graphic artist lustings, I like fonts. And Apple has shipped lots of really nice ones as part of OS X. So I spent part of this weekend playing with them and modifying my website to prefer those fonts. Unfortunately those of you without OS X will not be able to see them, but I know the OS X people will have fun.

I made some minor tweaks to the layout of my main journal page. I’m not sure I am completely happy with the changes, but I will keep tweaking them.

There is also a new section that I am just starting on my main site to provide support for users of my server. It is small now, but will grow as I write more. Shoot me an email if you have any suggestions.

P.S. Do you think I put enough links in this entry? I’m not sure.