Category: General

Garden, May 31, 2009

Sad news about the Angelica

[replanted angelica]

Sunny and I went to look at the garden after our morning walk,
and the angelica wasn’t there. There was a shallow hole
instead.

I looked in the compost bin, and there it was, but all the
flower stalks were broken or smashed. I put it back, and gave
it compost and water, and maybe it will survive, but I would
guess there won’t be flowers this year.

It was looking happy after being transplanted, but of course I
dug it up carefully and took as much of the roots and soil it
was used to as I could. The vandal who put it in the compost
bin didn’t bother with that.

Here’s the email I wrote the condo association:

In the minutes to the last owners’ meeting, I wrote:

Nobody in attendance requested any changes to the existing
plot assignments.

Secretary’s note: this means that the plot formerly assigned
to Mary and Jeff is currently unassigned. I put a couple of
things there last summer when I was cleaning out my deceased
friend’s house and garden, so if you want to put anything
there, feel free, but please ask if you want to take anything
out.

Someone pulled up the angelica plant which I had carefully moved from my
deceased friend’s garden in Salem, and which was about to burst into
bloom, and put it in the compost bin.

I have replaced, it, but the bloom stalks are broken, so I don’t have
much hope for it at all, and none for this year. I am really upset; I
was looking forward to having that plant.

I think it would make sense to assign that plot, so this sort of thing
doesn’t happen in the future. If someone else wants it, I will move
both the angelica and the lavender, which is also about to bloom.
Otherwise, I will take it, and please, nobody else pull anything else
up.

I don’t understand this vandalism. Why would anyone not want a blooming
angelica in their back yard?

[angelica flower stalks]

Upset was actually putting it mildly. I was weeping
hysterically for most of an hour, and I still tear up when I
think of it. Of course, it being a condo problem, I also
started thinking about all the other things I’ve been mad at the
possible suspects about, but I’m trying to control that.

I’d probably be upset anyway, but it being one of the things I
took from Bonnie’s garden makes it worse.
That was something she put a lot of herself into, and I wanted
to save as much of it as I could. Other friends took things
too, so even if the vandals pull up both the angelica and the
lavender (I think the daylilies I put in the front yard are
already gone), there will still be some, but I won’t have
it.

Lavender

On a more cheerful note, the vandal(s) didn’t pull up the
lavender, which is also about to bloom.

[lavender]
[lavender buds]

Roses

The roses are blooming.

[roses]
[rose]

Iris

The iris and the Siberian Iris are blooming their heads off; I
cut two stem of iris for my tall blue winebottles.

[iris]
[Siberian iris]

Overall view

You can see from this that the Alliums and the lillies of the
valley are over, but there’s still a brave little pansy. I forgot
to take them, but there are drumstick alliums with buds.

[garden]

Vicky Cristina Barcelona

This
movie is pretty typical of what Woody Allen is doing these
days — Beautiful music and photography, good writing and acting,
an interesting location, characters a bit more individualized than
he used to do.

I’ve only spent a few hours in Barcelona (between trains), and
it was a cloudy day, so I’m not that good a judge,
but it certainly seemed like a good depiction of what the city looks
like. Not the loving detail of the New York brownstones in Interiors,
but probably as good as the London in Match
Point.

As far as the acting goes, Penelope Cruz stole the show in a
fairly minor role, but everybody was pretty good. They seem to be
well characterized without the irritating mannerisms of the
earlier Woody Allen.

The topic of the movie is the characters’ choices between
settling for the comfortable and getting burned by passionate
romance. The most intriguing interlude is the one in the middle
where the two Spanish artists form a ménage à trois
with the American dilletante. Not especially believable, but a
good fantasy, and it doesn’t last long.

So if that sounds interesting, you’ll probably enjoy this
movie. I don’t know of anyone who’s been as consistently as
interesting over as many decades as Woody Allen.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=B001DJ7PR8&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=0792846087&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr
http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=B000EQHXNW&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

Roasted vegetable potato salad

I had lots of ingredients but limited time to make a contribution to a
cookout last Monday.

So I decided to just roast all the vegetables and then put them
in a salad.

I sliced a bulb of fennel, quartered an onion, added a pound
of potatoes, slathered all of this with olive oil, put them on the
broiler pan in a 500 °F oven until the potatoes were done.

Then I let them cool, cut the potatoes into halves or thirds,
and put it all in a covered bowl to take to the picnic.

At serving time, I added some of my tofu vinaigrette.

Tofu vinaigrette is basically like regular vinaigrette, except
you blend in some tofu. If you’re buying the tofu specially for
this purpose, you get the silken kind, but whatever you keep
around works.

There was a nice roasty flavor, and the tofu vinaigrette is a
really pleasant dressing. It isn’t overly acidic, but still has
flavor.

Several people took seconds, and my mother took most of what
was left, so I had only a small contribution to Tuesday’s lunch
when I got home.

I’m reading a PDF book

I posted a
couple of days ago about my difficulties in reading PDF files
on the Nokia
N810. I also started a thread on the maemo-users
list, which you can read here.

The upshot is that I discovered that although the interface is
quite misguided in a number of ways, if you pull your stylus out
and fiddle with it enough, you can in fact read a PDF.

I still think it’s odd that a program that’s called a “reader”
doesn’t present the user with one button that always moves to the
next text to read. The way I actually have to read is to stroke
the stylus up and left to move the page around on a screen, and
then tap an invisible button on the right side of the screen to
move to the next page.

If they wanted to call it a “viewer” and not a “reader”, I
could understand this interface — it actually does let you go to
any part of the PDF file and view it at a wide variety of sizes.
But to me “reading” means going continuously through the text, and
this “reader” just doesn’t seem to be designed for that.

Another interesting point about that thread is that at least
two of the four people who participated (I’m one of them) were
interested in the problem because we were trying to read the
packet of Hugo award nominees which you can get by going to the Anticipation
website and joining. Without joining, you can read or download
(but not vote on) a large number of the nominees from the Hugos page
on the anticipation site.

Although you would expect Hugo nominated Science Fiction
writers and publishers to be more interested in how to implement
mobile technologies than the average publisher or writer, a large
fraction of the material is provided as PDF’s formated for the
printed page. No matter how good the interface design on the PDF
reader, a reflowable format is always going to be more flexible
for being read by a wide variety of people on a wide variety of
devices.

If you’re interested, the book I’m reading is Zoe’s
Tale by John Scalzi.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=B000EUGX70&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

Reading PDF’s on the N810

I’m working hard on setting up the Serpent Publications
site, so you’re getting an email I wrote to a list on
something I’ve already goofed off about.

I’ll let you know if I get a useful answer.

Subject: pdf reading?

To: maemo-users@maemo.org

Date: Sat, 23 May 2009 13:36:26 -0400

I’m finding the interface on the included pdf reader on my Nokia
N810
pretty unusable.

My impression is that people on this list have mentioned that evince
might be better, but I can’t install that.

At least one of these problems must be fixable. So here are my
questions:

Included reader:
The file selector dialog (not only here but in the file manager
and other apps, but not FBReader) doesn’t allow me to select
from the external memory card (mounted as /media/mmc1), although
it does from the internal memory card (mounted as /media/mmc2).
Is there a way to fix this? I worked around it by opening a
terminal and copying the file I wanted to see from external to
internal, but there has to be a better way than that.
As far as I can see, the way to page down is to open the case
and use the down button on the pad. Is there a way to configure
it so that the +/- switch on top (preferable) or the buttons on
the side page up or down?
I have it zoomed to a size where the text area of the page is
the width of the screen, that is, the margins are off the
reader. But when moving down gets to a new page, the reader
resets the position of the page so that the left edge of the
page is at the left edge of the screen. Is there a way to tell
it not to do that?
evince:

This is generally true of a lot of the apps I try to install
from the application manager. It’s listed in “Installable
Apps”, but when I try to install it, it says, “Unable to install
evince. Some applications packages required for the
installation are missing.” When I click “Details”, it says,
“Application packages missing: libhildonfm2 (>=1;1.9.49)” Is
there a way to work around this?

If I do install it, will I have the same problems I do on the
included PDF reader?

This is somewhat frustrating, because people who don’t read
books on a mobile device do tend to assume that PDF is the way
to electronically distribute a book, and I could in fact read
them on the Nokia if the interface were a little bit better.
That is, for the book I’m trying to read, if the screen tries to
show both the printed area and the margins, the type is too
small for my 58 year old eyes, but if I can zoom it to where the
print area is the size of the screen, it’s readable without
glasses. But the designers of the application don’t seem to
have considered this usage pattern.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=B000EUGX70&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

Making the machine go

I’ve been spending more time than usual the last few days on just getting my
desktop computer to run.

Graphics card

The problem I was trying to solve was that it would slow to an
unusable crawl if firefox had been running for more than a day,
especially when the automatic backup kicked in every 4 hours.

One thing I thought might help would be to run the monitor off
of an NVIDIA GeForce 7300 SE/7200 GS graphics card. The network
know-it-alls on one of my mailing lists laughed their heads off at
this idea, but it still seems reasonable to me.

Unfortunately, it fixed the problem of firefox taking over the
whole computer when it had been running for more than a day,
because with the nvidia driver, the whole X system would freeze up
in much less than a day. The nvidia driver is a closed-source
product of the Nvidia corporation; there’s also an open source
driver called nv, but when I tried that, it would only let me run
at very low resolution.

Monitor

Then a small number of days later, I got home after midnight
and went to check my email before bedtime and the monitor died.
(The little light was yellow, and instead of turning green as the
screen came back to life, it went out and wouldn’t come back on no
matter what I did.)

So I hooked up the old heavy 17″ CRT that I replaced because it
got jittery and was giving me headaches, and ordered a new monitor
for pickup from microcenter. I use
microcenter (which is less than two miles away) for anything I
need fast, for anything that might have a problem with linux
compatibility, and for anything with a motor in it. They sometimes
cost a little more than buying online, but they’re really good
about taking returns.

I bought this
Acer 22 inch wide monitor.

I had to boot it several times in order to get it configured
right. It seems that with the nvidia driver, you have to run both
envyng and nvidia-setup, or some such to get it to recognize that
you have a different sized monitor.

And it ran for most of a day, but this morning when I got up, X
was frozen again.

So I googled some more, and found a different open source
driver called “nouveau”. It figured out the right resolution and
size to run the screen at, so it looks good so far. It’s only been
two hours, though.

If you’re running ubuntu and have an nvidia card, you just have to “apt-get install
xserver-xorg-video-nouveau” and then edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf to
say “nouveau” instead of “nvidia” or “nv”.

Browsers

I’ll tell you some more about the browsers I’ve been
investigating later. The current situation is that the google
chromium-browser is great when it works, but has serious bugs,
like not displaying this blog at all and the “copy link address”
not copying. So I’m currently using that as well as firefox,
which is still what my mail program opens links in.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=B00193QFFG&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

Last Chance Harvey

This movie was a disappointment. Obviously
anyone who’s a huge fan of either Dustin Hoffman or Emma
Thompson is going to want to watch it. I won’t say we’re
wrong to want that, but really, there are better ways to spend
an evening. It’s slow-moving and in spite of a lot of really
good acting, not really a very convincing plot. You do believe
that they’re attracted to each other, but not that they really
convince themselves to give up their whole lives for each other
in less than a week.

I have a subjective reason for disliking movies where Dustin
Hoffman looks old — I graduated from high school the summer The Graduate came out, so I basically think of
him as my age. This is an oversimplification — the character
in The Graduate has just graduated from college,
not high school, and of course Dustin Hoffman was quite
a bit older than the character he was playing. So he’s actually fourteen years older than I am, but I still think of him as
a contemporary.

I no longer have the problem I had for quite a while after
reading Heartburn by Norah Ephron. Because he
played Carl Bernstein (Ephron’s ex-husband) in All the Presidents’
Men, I kept thinking of him as the person who was so mean
to Norah Ephron. But since the movie of
Heartburn came out, I now know it was Jack
Nicholson who was so mean to Norah Ephron, and that’s really an
easier fiction to sustain.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=B0015OKWKS&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr
http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=B00000F798&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr
http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=0679767959&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr
http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=B001LL9YRM&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr
http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=B000CEXEWA&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

Homebrew club newsletter

I’m late today, so I’ll just tell you about how the homebrew club newsletter I mentioned last week
turned out.

You can see it on the club site.

I’ve done quite a number of these newsletters before, but I’m a lot more
fluent now in some of the relevant LaTeX, like boxes
to associate a picture with its caption. (The LaTeX built-in
figure capability is designed for a book or serious article, not
for an informal newsletter.)

It’s still a bit of a pain using Latex, instead of a program
designed for that kind of publishing, but I’m so used to the way
to do things in LaTeX, and how good the results look, that I just
do without putting several articles on the front page and flowing
the continuations onto later pages, and such features.

If there’s interest, I could upload the source so that people
could see how you do such a thing. For now, just email me if you
want it.

The major energy drain doing this was that the club isn’t any
longer used to having a newsletter come out, so a lot of the
resources I needed weren’t on the web site, or hadn’t been used,
so they had problems. For instance:

  • The new logo adopted last month wasn’t yet on the site.
  • The link to the archive of beer-related images hadn’t been
    checked since the website redesign a year or so ago.
  • The list of officers wasn’t current.

Unfortunately I ended up doing most of the work over the
weekend, when a lot of the people who could have helped with these
problems weren’t available by email. And when they returned on
Monday, it wasn’t clear that some of the newer officers really
realized that they needed to support the editor of the
newsletter. So I ended up pretty crabby
by the time I got the masthead edited to as good a state as I
could get it into.

But I think it turned out pretty well, considering. Some of
the people on the informal newsletter committee whom I asked to
help proofread said good things about how it looked. No real
feedback from the membership yet.

Garden, May 18, 2009

Time for another set of garden pictures. It changes fast this
time of year.

Alliums

[Giant Alliums]

They’re in full bloom now.

[single allium]

It’s not a good year in terms of
numbers; I often dry them and put them in vases, and last year I
had two tall winebottles full. You can see I espouse the “buy things
neat bottles from discount stores” theory of interior decorating.

[dried alliums in two tall wine bottles]

Roses

All the roses in the back yard (which is fairly shady) are
still in tight bud, but some of the ones in front (southwest
exposure) are starting to bloom.

[roses]

Angelica

The Angelica has buds.

[angelica]

Iris

Both the iris and Siberian iris are budding.

[iris]
[Siberian iris]

Rhubarb

The Rhubarb continues to look healthy, but I don’t see any new
leaves coming in. If it were later in the season, I would say
that meant I should harvest the largest of the current ones, but I
thought you didn’t harvest rhubarb until June. On the bright
side, whatever was eating the leaves might have stopped.

[rhubarb]
[no new rhubarb leaves coming]

Woodruff

This doesn’t really look much different from last week, but the
picture of the flowers last week wasn’t very good, and I wanted
one for the homebrew club newsletter.

[woodruff]

Mental Health Day

This has been a bad year in this part of the world for people
with pollen allergies. I’ve been singing O bother the
flowers that bloom in the Spring vigorously and frequently. On Thursday
night, I was congested enough to be having real trouble sleeping.

I realized on Friday morning that while I was almost certain it
was the pollen, I was actually hoping for a bit of a fever, so
that I could spend the day in bed.

Then I realized that since I work for myself, I didn’t really
need the thermometer to validate a day off, so I declared a mental
health day, and went back to bed after posting to this blog.

Two hours later, I woke up feeling refreshed and much less
congested. I took the dog on a walk, and hit the money machine
and decided to eat lunch on the patio at the Cambridge Brewing Company.

[Cambridge Brewing Company]

Then I went home and fooled around instead of practicing and
watched a lot of the baseball game and then watched other TV all
evening.

Results

Of course, what you hope about a day like that is that you’ll
wake up the next day invigorated and get lots more done than you
would have if you’d kept your nose to the grindstone both
days.

I won’t claim to have set the world on fire yesterday, but I
did some good practicing, solved a couple of problems on the blog
(note the Most Read
Posts section on the sidebar), and took the computer apart
to put back a video card.

I did spend more time watching TV than I sometimes do when I’m
getting a lot of work done, but it was TV I wanted to
watch. The Kentucky Derby had been a good enough horserace that I
wanted to watch the Preakness, and I had a movie from Neflix that
I’d been looking forward to.