Vanderbrew

Ryan rose slowly, feeling the music crash over him as he sized up his opponent and considered the insult he had been dealt.

Blogs are funny things. They can be even funnier when you use a web analytics package to track traffic and search terms for the site…

I use Google Analytics and one of the things you get is a report of what search terms people are using to find your site. I check it out every day or so just because I’m curious what interest is driving traffic to my site. As I mentioned before, there’s been quite a few hits from various gardening and pest problems. There has also been some hits due to interest in Ruby on Rails and various locations where I’ve been hiking and/or camping.

So, I was looking over the terms the other day and one of them jumped out at me - “how to kill someone with a cucumber”, huh? Two things:

1. Why would someone be searching for this…
2. Why does it lead to my blog?

Well, number 2 is much easier to answer than number 1 (which I’m not really sure I want to know…). A simple Google (the verb - should it be capitalized in verb form?) to see just where it appears and, hey! what do you know? I’m the first hit for that particular set of words…and, it’s a mix of my Boondock Saints post which discusses killing someone, and my garden post, which discusses cucumbers…

As I said, blogs are funny things. I supposed that my First Lines just make it even worse because I can get some odd words thrown in there for no reason. I imagine that with themed blogs or sites you get more consistent hits. I’ve read things in the past where people were concerned that blogs would pollute and ruin search results because of the randomness of the content. While I don’t think it’s really happening yet, it’s very interesting to see a real example how you can get a “false positive” hit like this.

Yes, you read it right[1]. I’ve got a cousin studying engineering and he and two friends designed and built one. Check it out. Nice work, Jonathan, it looks really cool!.

[1] I know it’s poor grammar, but I liked the alliteration.

Alas, the battle goes against me. I have just returned from the front and have dire news to report. It appears that we will almost definitely lose one basil plant and another may not last through the morning. I shook the poor seedling to scatter the blanket of earwigs that were covering it, then crushed as many as I could while they scurried for shelter. My weapon you ask? At first a rock and I crushed them against the soil. However, this packs the soil and I worry about disrupting the structure and making it even more difficult for the plants to grow, so I took a cue from a Shaftoe and “show[ed] some adaptability”. Did you know that earwigs are really pretty fragile? You can simply flick them and the force of your nail pushing them into the ground is enough to crush them. Oh, and their guts are green by flashlight.

The slug population is greatly diminished and I don’t think that they’re a problem anymore. Neither sowbugs nor pillbugs seem to be bothering the vegetables. No, it seems that the last enemy I must overcome are the earwigs. And, it’s essential that I do so before the marigolds and parsley (round two) begin to emerge.

Since my own weighty tomes haven’t offered up a satisfactory solution, it’s time to consult my advisor. The Magician Go Ogle. He has a great deal of knowledge and almost all of it is easily available. You just have to know how to ask and be able to sift the useful bits from the drivel.

Sorry that my posts have been irregular lately. Work’s been pretty busy and I’m trying to get up earlier in the mornings. This puts a damper on my blogging because generally blog at night and I need to go to bed earlier to get up earlier.

Ok, now that excuses are aside, I’ve got some cool juggling videos to show you. The first one has been making the rounds online and you’ve probably seen it. The second one will probably grow in popularity pretty quickly as it’s a sort of a one-ups-manship of the first video (5 balls vs 3 balls). Oh, and be sure to watch through the end of the second video, it’s worth it!

Chris Bliss Juggling
Jason Garfield’s Response

Just a quick note that Amber and I will be keeping a log of what goes on in our garden at http://garden.vanderpol.net/blog.

It’s mostly for us so we can compare notes from year to year, but y’all are welcome to see what we’re up to there.

So I just had a really incredible customer service experience.

I use TextMate (a fantastic text editor for OS X) and I’d been having some trouble running a particular set of commands. I hit the correct key sequence, but nothing happened. I’ve been just ignoring it for a while and getting by with other stuff but finally I decided to try to find out what was going wrong and how to fix it.

I jumped onto the #textmate channel on IRC and started describing my problem to see if anyone else had experienced anything similar. Allan (yes, the Allan) responded and he worked with me to try to figure out what was going wrong. Turns out it’s a bug related to how keystrokes are sent from laptops and how TextMate interprets them.

Allan updated the Rails bundle (a package to extend TextMate functionality) on the subversion server and I just pulled it down and all of my Ruby on Rails-related commands are working correctly in TextMate.

Recap:

• Matt has a problem with some software not working as expected.
• Matt is able to communicate with the software developer (Allan) immediately, in real-time.
• Together Matt and Allan determine what is going wrong.
• Allan updates the code in version control to provide a minor fix until the next release.
• Matt is able to download the update immediately.

I love this stuff!

A cold, hand-(and self)crafted brewskie, music (Ani right now) and hacking on a project in Ruby on Rails.

I’m curious if anyone else out there subscribes to their own RSS feed. I’ve done it for as long as I’ve had a blog and an aggregator. It just plain makes sense to me. At first Amber thought it was odd, but I think that she’s come around to my way of thinking now.

It just makes sense:

• You can tell that your RSS feed is working
• You can tell how frequently you’re posting compared to the blogs you read
• It’s harder to forget to publish a post *cough* Charlie *cough*

So, here’s your opportunity to offer up your views. Do you or don’t you?

Why is it that what is acceptable is tied to the medium it’s presented or viewed in?

I read a fair amount of science fiction. In the books I read I have no problem with obviously artifical limbs with metallic skin, special jacks in your neck to make it easier to connect with computers or special hardware inserted in your spine which records all of your life experiences and allows your memories to be transfered to a new body when your current one wears out - and yet, I have trouble with these bluetooth cell phone headsets.

I’m sure you’ve seen them. They’re these little plastic devices that people have clipped to their ear so that they can talk on the phone without taking it out of their pocket. I saw someone wearing one a while back and it stuck me as a ridiculous and obscene piece of technology. I mean, why does anyone need to be that connected to their phone? And then it struck me, given my preferred reading topic as well as my career choice and one of my main interests, why is this such a big deal? It’s just applied advances in technology right? Isn’t this what I want? Wouldn’t my ideal world provide the ability to plug a computer into my skull so that I can work without needing to type or move a mouse? Without being held back by the limitations of “meatspace”? Hmm…

I’ve thought about it off and on for a few weeks and maybe I’m not as ready for these technological advances as I thought I was. Maybe it’s ok to read about them in a book - to take a brief journey into another reality - but I really don’t want to live that reality. It’s odd when you think about it. Those little phone things are hugely less invasive than many of the things that I read about, but they struck me in a much more forceful way.

I suppose that it’s just the dichotomy of reality and fiction. What’s acceptable in the medium of a story is not in the medium of real life. On the other hand, I’ve read that Science Fiction, at it’s deepest core, only takes issues that are a part of today’s world and extrapolates them out. When we read science fiction, we get a view into the world as it could (perhaps will?) be. Maybe in 10 years we’ll all have a mobile phone in our ear with an induction mike pickup in our jaw. We’ll be able to sub-vocalize our phone calls and just dial by touching a tooth (wasn’t that in Spinal Tap?).

Maybe in 20 years we won’t think anything of climbing into an antigrav vehicle controlled by a central computer which whisks us off to a job where the first thing we do is receive an injection of a special pharmaceutical cocktail designed to allow us to focus on nothing but work for a 20 hour period before going home to a pill that let’s us live enough to interact with our family before getting 2 hours of compressed sleep (they’re working on slimming it down to 1, but the test patients keep going insane after 3.7 weeks of treatment) and waking up to a specially formulated energy drink designed to provide all of the nutrients, minerals and calories our bodies need to keep going (better living through chemistry, neh?) day after day after day, always moving forward, always reaching, never stopping to think about what we’re actually reaching for or why we’re doing it.

Maybe I’m pretty happy with the way things are.