Category Archives: GeekWorld

Garden, GeekWorld

Gremlins or Demons or Bugs, oh my

Leave a comment

Summer                    Waxing Summer Moon

This morning the temperature has fallen back to 65.  Good garden weather for moving mulch and repairing netaphim.

Electronic gremlins have given me fits for weeks now.  Not strong fits, but sure annoying.  A while ago my computer refused to recognize my disk drives.  On a day to day basis this is not a problem, but on those days when I want to play a CD or reload software or look at photographs saved to disc, on those days it’s a total frustration.

Then, sometime after returning from the trip to South Carolina, Georgia and Florida my photoshop elements photo organizer seized up.  It opens with a large rectangle in the upper left of the screen and a smaller slice vertically to the far right.  Nothing happens after that.   Again, on a day to day basis, not a big problem, but when I want to manipulate photographs, something I do often, particularly to make them smaller so they’ll fit on this website, I’m shut out completely.

In all these cases and the one below I try to sort stuff out myself.  I have a pretty good, but not perfect track record at this.  I never could figure out how to set up our wireless router, for example.  Geek Squad.  I may have to take my computer over to best buy.

The last couple of days, too, I’ve been bothered by a diminished stream.  No, nothing that Flomax could cure.  I’m talking about irrigation system.  I’m very familiar with the amount of water that comes out of a given spray head.  When it comes out in a weak flow, something is wrong.  It happened last week and I called the well guy to check the well reservoir.  Works fine and he did not charge me.  Whoa.  Again, this morning a weak flow.  Hmmm.

Kate said, “I know why it’s weak.  The front sprinkler is on.” Now that’s just strange.  This should never happen, two zones on at the same time, unless two different programs are scheduled for the same time.  Nope.  I checked that, not the problem.  Zones run in sequence.  1 runs, shuts off, then 2 runs, shuts off, then 3 runs and so on.  Why this should happen, I don’t know, but I hope the folks at Rainbird can explain it to me.

Garden, GeekWorld, permaculture

Take That Hose And Grab It

Leave a comment

Summer                              New Moon

A bit of a disconnected afternoon.  A long nap followed by working for a while in the heat trying to figure which zone on our irrigation clock corresponded to which actual sprinklers.  This was necessary because we got a new clock and the guy joined the wires in roughly the same order as the old one.  Roughly.

The stimulus for this work came from Kate’s discovery that our new puppies get excited when the water comes through the netaphim line we just had put in our orchard.   By excited I mean grab the netaphim and run with it, chewing all the while.  Netaphim is a plastic tube about half the size of a garden hose through water drips onto plants rather than sprays.  It works great, but better without teeth marks.

Tomorrow I’ll put all the netaphim lines on a schedule separate from the rest of the sprinklers and start them early enough in the morning that their work will be done before the puppies get up.  That should solve it.

Art and Culture, GeekWorld

Decipher Hunt

Leave a comment

Beltane                      Waning Dyan Moon

My e-mail accounts have slimmed down after post-vacation bloat.  It always takes me a while to delete and save e-mails after a time away from the main computer.  Done now and feels good.

The whole pre-Raph show work has begun to heat up and I plan to do some library time on the paintings I plan to feature on my tour.  Not sure yet, but I’m leaning toward:  Awakening Conscience,  Sheep,  Mary Virgin, La Dolce,  Afterglow, Finding the Savior, Light of the World and Lady of Shallot.  As to theme, not sure yet, but something to do with sight, like New Sight, Clear Sight seems possible or symbol, Decoding the PRB, or Decipher Hunt.

Right now I’m trying to kick my weather console and its data-logger (internet link) back into consciousness.  Gonna  try it again right now.  Looks like its back.  I missed its linking to the national weather observer network.  Now it will get back on in a bit.

I have finally learned my cell-phone number.  My sons will be so proud.

GeekWorld

Do you linger?

Leave a comment

Beltane                     Waxing Dyan Moon

Lingering, an interesting article from the blog N+1, asks the question, is life richer with the internet?  The author answers in a mild positive, noting that the web satisfies curiosity and provides a platform for otherwise missing voices, but he also bemoans its time wasting nature, the fact that there is no such thing as sending one e-mail because one internet encounter leads to another and another.

My own experience is similar.  Anyone with curiosity finds this and that, then a bit more with the news and blogs and video clips.  I know the path people take is not the same because friends locate items I would never find, some of them interesting, some of them not, but it does show that others wander the web from time to time.

Quite a while ago, maybe as long ago as 15 years, I knew a sociologist from Macalester College who had done a study of time wasted on the computer.  This was before the internet was as big a phenomenon as it is now.  His results suggested that computer use in and of itself lured users into acts extraneous to their original purpose, acts such as reading an e-mail from a friend or sending on something interesting, perhaps checking the calendar or writing a brief note about this or that.

It may be that some web users are like me, my main outlet for manual dexterity is typing.  A secondary outlet is chopsticks.  The opportunity to type, in and of itself, draws me to the computer and sometimes keeps me there.

GeekWorld, Travel

A Lazy Morning. Kindle.

Leave a comment

Beltane        Waning Flower Moon

A breakfast buffet and finishing a novel.  That’s all I’ve done this a.m.

The gray line folks have a six hour tour of Savannah.  I booked it for tomorrow.  I find grayline a good way to get a quick overview of an area.  After that I can explore more what I find interesting.

The gothic side of the south has always appealed to me, as if it contains the nation’s shadow–which it may.  The part of me that delights in horror and dark fantasy gets revved up in Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina and Mississipi, Louisiana, too.

This trip promises to be fruitful from a creative perspective.  I’m doing what I can to expose myself to as much of it as I can.\

The Kindle, Amazon’s electronic book.

Yep.  I bought one.  You would not believe how much it lightened my baggage.  I have 12 books loaded on it right now and have finished two already.  It has already become my most appreciated possession.

When I finish one book, I just move the cursor up the menu and click on the next one.  Like having a portable library right along with you.  Plus, books are cheaper in electronic form.  About half what they are in printed form.  That means a reading junkie like me will easily save back the cost of the device.

Still rainy and chilly here.  Good for atmosphere.

Art and Culture, GeekWorld, Humanities, Hydroponics, Weather +Climate

In the Merry, Merry Month of May

Leave a comment

Beltane                      Waxing Flower Moon

Beltane marks the beginning of the growing season so fertility is the essence of the celebration.  In a pre-refrigeration, pre-food preservative (except salt and drying) culture fertility during the growing season carried with it survival, for animals and humans.  Thus, anything to encourage the land and to safeguard the animals that could be done, would be done.

This holiday, Beltane, used to separate the Celtic year into halves, the other half coming six months later at Samhain, or Summer’s End.  Later the Celts adopted the solstice and equinox celebrations of other peoples and added Imbolc and Lugnasa to make an 8 holiday year.

Beltane, Lugnasa, Samhain and Imbolc are cross-quarter holidays.  They occur between the quarter year events of Winter Solstice and Spring Equinox–Imbolc,  between Spring Equinox and Summer Solstice–Beltane, between Summer Solstice and Fall Equinox–Lugnasa and between Fall Equinox and Winter Solstice–Samhain.  The cross quarter days were the occasion for markets, festivals/fairs and certain seasonally observed matters like short term weddings, labor contracts and preparation for winter.

The fire jumping and making love in the fields at night preserved and magnified fertility.  The May pole which you may have gaily stomped around as a child in elementary school symbolizes the male aspect of fertility while the young maidens with May baskets symbolize the feminine.

The choosing of a May queen carries over the honoring of the goddess in her maiden form, when she can become pregnant and bear children.    This tradition has almost died out in this country and I don’t know whether the selection of a mate for the May queen ever crossed the pond.  At certain points in Celtic history the May Queen’s mate was king for a year and a day.  Over the course of the year and a day the king received all the honors and trappings of royalty.  After the year finished, however, the king died at the hands of his people.  His blood fertilized the soil.

Today we have much less feel, if any, for this holiday.  It has faint impressions on our culture with May Day celebrations, sometimes with construction paper baskets for paper flowers.

As we have distanced ourselves from the land and the processes that bring us food, we have also distanced ourselves from the celebrations that mark seasonal change.  We can let Beltane pass by with no bonfires, no cattle purified, no holiday related love making in the fields.

It may not seem like much, this cultural dementia, at worst a mild symptom.  It might, though,  reveal a more severe underlying affliction.  As we forget the world of fields and cattle, the oceans and their wild fish, cattle ranches and dairy farms, the subtle body may die of starvation or dehydration. Continue reading In the Merry, Merry Month of May →

Asia, Cinema and Television, GeekWorld

Indian Princes and Japanese Peasants

Leave a comment

Spring               Waxing Flower Moon

Another computer problem averted by cyber wizard William Schmidt.  If you had tried to access the files from February 2005 to October 2007 in ancientrails, you would have been met with a not found error message.  An e-mail to Bill and he not only had the problem managed, but helped me relocate the files on my own computer.  I knew they were here somewhere.  Thanks again, techno-mage.

Morning workout, a bit of legislative blogging for the Sierra Club and lunch.   My movie of the moment for my workouts is the continuing saga, the Maharbarata.  I’m on disc 7 of a lot more.  Each disc has six episodes.  This is one long story.  It interweaves gods and humans, demi-gods and demons with the history of India, providing along the way morals and folkways.  Just today, for example, Dhorydan, a contested crown prince, got this wisdom from Bhisma, “No.  Just because you are elder does not mean you will become king.  In India merit is most important.”

Yesterday I finished an early Kurosawa film, The Hidden Fortress.  It featured a running gag with two peasants who act almost as clowns.  It was crisp, the copy, a Criterion Collection dvd, pops.  The story involves a period when Japan consisted of warring kingdoms.  A princess of a defeated people escapes with a loyal general.  Their adventures as they try to leave their home territory for shelter elsewhere constitute the movie.

Faith and Spirituality, GeekWorld, Myth and Story

Hermes, the Psychopomp

Leave a comment

Spring        Waning Seed Moon

As the pace of physical activity picks up, I find my melancholy of a couple of weeks ago beginning to subside.  It triggered a yearning for a return to full time writing and an investigation into agency and its role in my regression, so it gave me a valuable perspective, one I had lost.

James Hillman says we meet the gods in our pathologies.  Hermes has guided me into the psyche of my past and then, Ariadne-like, also led me back to the present.  Now Brigid inspires me–the garden, the writing.  She is my domestic goddess (and not competitive at all with the fleshly one in my Kate).

I’ll light a candle for her at Beltane, not long from now, and dance around an ash, one that grows tall in our vegetable garden.  When the work moves within me and I follow its rhythm, it is Brigid who holds my hand.

Aging, GeekWorld

The Weekend

Leave a comment

Spring               Waning Seed Moon

Another weekend come and gone.  A fellow Woolly, I think, told me that retired folks he knows still view the weekends as special, different from the weekdays.  I sure do.  Weekends have more latitude, more stretch and give, where weekdays still bring for me an expectation of things accomplished, deeds done, seriousness of intent at least entertained.

This one had some of that flavor, some not.

The not came partly in reference to this computer, the older Dell, not the new Gateway.  My disc drives have dropped off the cyber map.  When called upon, they sit there, quiet.  Non-violent resistance.  Nothing.  I’ve tried many, many things to convince them to come home and go back to work, but nothing appeals to them as yet.

If I need to, I’ll shift my images to the Gateway and use it to burn cds and print color images, reserve this one for writing and the laser jet.  I’m not going to give up quite yet, I want to search a few more tech sites, see if I can come up with something.

GeekWorld, Weather +Climate

Snow and Bytes

Leave a comment

Spring          Waxing Seed Moon

“All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.” – Galileo Galilei

The snow has come and now melts.  I have installed a monitor for the gateway which means I have two up now.  This seems like too much, but screens have become cheap.  This new one cost $179,  a 20 inch high def flat-screen.

The next phase of all this work is to split the load between the two computers and connect up the exeternal hard-drives in a way that makes sense.  I’ve looked into partitioning the large drive in the Gateway–640 gigs–and the 1 terabyte Seagate external, but have not decided on whether I want to go that route or not.

My other hard drive was full and the external, Maxtor drive, has filled up, too.  This makes the Dell slower and more cranky.  The Gateway came in at $500 even, so adding a new computer was not a big cost plus its faster and has a much bigger hard-drive than the Dell.  Right now I’m loading Starry Night Pro Plus onto the Gateway.  I’ll be able take its 11 gigs off the Dell once its on the larger hard-drive.  This will  make this machine quicker and more responsive.  That’s under way as I write.