Cheerful Curmudgeon

I’ve got over 7,300 square feet of grass outside my house. Who knew? Not me, that’s for sure!

Yesterday, I picked up a bag of Concern Weed Prevention Plus from Worm’s Way in Olivette, MO. I did that because, almost a year ago, our lawn care company stopped showing up to care for our lawn. (Conveniently, they also stopped sending bills.) In between the vanishing gardener’s last visit and yesterday’s purchase, the lawn did it’s natural lawn-ish thing and I mowed as usual. We had a few more weeds by autumn but the sky did not fall and the world did not end.

Some time in late fall, I listened to a podcast on natural lawn care, featuring Paul Tukey, author of The Organic Lawn Care Manual. I liked what I heard. Tukey’s ideas jibe nicely with my ideas of how the world ought to run; little things like a lawn ought to be able to pretty much take care of itself, without the regular addition of lots of synthetic chemicals. As far as I know, darned close to 100% of the grasslands in the world got that way without man’s help. When I drive through Yellowstone and enjoy the pastures, I am quite sure that no one spread weed ‘n’ feed on them.

Tukey’s point is that you can have a gorgeous lawn by nurturing the natural eco-system in the soil. If you do that, you don’t need all of the synthetic fertilizers and pesticides because nature is really good at taking care of itself pretty much all the time. Our lawns require all the artificial chemicals because the artificial pesticides have killed off not just the pests but pretty much all of the insects and bacteria and fungi which used to live in the soil. Grass is just one part of a complex environment; it can’t live in bare dirt alone. So the choices are either artificially support the grass or rebuild the eco-system of which grass is just one component. Tukey went on to explain that, in the long run, natural lawn care is actually less expensive because the lawn needs fewer dollars of stuff dumped onto it, less watering, and less mowing. In that context, natural lawn care made a bushel of sense to me.

I borrowed a copy of The Organic Lawn Care Manual from the library and read it. Then I bought my own copy to keep. I read bunches of stuff from the University of Missouri Extension web site on natural lawn care. I learned about the benefits of soil samples and compost tea and corn gluten and clover and a dozen other goodies. I was all psyched up and ready to work magic on my lawn. There was just one problem: it was December. So I waited. My favorite pass-time. Not.

The weather finally did start to warm up, as it is wont to do, and that brought me to Worm’s Way, our local organic gardening store (and source of great beer making supplies, too). I stopped in yesterday, largely for information, and was tickled to see piles of both organic pre-emergent herbicide and organic lawn fertilizer. The clerk helpfully told me that the herbicide would treat 1,700 square feet and the fertilizer would treat 2,500 square feet. I’ve got a small-ish lawn so I bought a bag of each. I guessed that would do it for me.

Before I dumped the bag of herbicide in the drop spreader which has been mouldering on a top shelf of the garage for years, I did a little more reading. Just how was I supposed to know how to set the spreader and how much stuff I would need? The answer, doh!, was to start by measuring the yard, then set the spreader for a lighter setting than the herbicide’s instructions called for, and keep criss-crossing the yard until the appropriate amount of stuff had been distributed. That seemed much easier than trying to get the spreader set exactly right so that I would exactly run out of stuff exactly as I finished walking the yard exactly one time.

Candy and I measured our lot: 120′ x 100′ = 12,000 square feet. Whoa. That was a much bigger number  than I expected.

Then we subtracted the spaces which are not grass:

• Driveway: 1,000 sq. ft.
• Garage & porch: 861 sq. ft.
• House: 2,275 sq. ft.
• Etc.

When all was said and done, I learned that we have 7,384 sq. ft. of lawn. Believe it or not, in all the years that I have lived in homes surrounded by lawns, in all the years that I have owned lawns, this is the first time that I have known how much lawn I have to care for.

We went back to Worm’s Way. Between yesterday and today, all but three of the bags of Weed Prevention Plus had evaporated. Fortunately, I needed exactly three more bags so I bought them, hauled them home, and spread the contents on the lawn.

This post is long enough so I’ll stop for today. Look for more installments on natural lawn care as the adventure continues.

I got a frantic email from a friend this week. One of his subcontractors went crazy and trashed several of my friend’s clients’ web sites as well as my friend’s own business site. The police have been involved but much damage has already been done. I wish I had been hosting my friend’s sites. Had I been, I could have recovered everything from backups. As it is, all I could do was sit by and fume, wishing that his hosting company had had something to offer him in the way of assistance.

I know my friend’s pain. In the 30 years that I have been doing system administration, there have been numerous times when my own bacon has been saved by backups. I have been struck by the dread BUOD error (Bad User On Device) in which a glitch sitting between the chair and the keyboard has made the computer do all kinds of hideous deeds. The worst, early in my career, idled a team of a dozen programmers for three days. Why three full days? You guessed it: no backups. At the other end of the spectrum, a member of my team recently trashed a critical configuration file on one of our servers. This, however, resulted in no downtime; we simply grabbed a copy from the backups and continued on our merry ways.

If you accidentally delete a file from your web site (or, in my friend’s case, all of the files), can you recover it? Does your hosting company provide backups and, if so, can  you recover files from their backup? In many cases, hosting companies’ backups are only for their use in cases of disk drive failure.

My company offers one (excellent, in my opinion) solution, Nest Egg Backup for Web Servers. There are many other alternatives. Do choose and implement one. When you go comparison shopping, ask the key question: How long are the backups retained? If only for one night, that means that your window of opportunity is extremely limited. If you delete a file at 10:00pm and wait until 8:00am to try to get it back, you are out of luck. You should have at least three days of retention, preferably more, preferably a lot more. Thirty days can give you a nice warm, fuzzy feeling of safety and security.

Lesson of the day: Back up your hosting accounts! And be sure to include everything (email folders, MySQL databases, PHP config files, etc. etc. etc.) The day disaster strikes is a day too late to start backing stuff up.

I just read a shocking article in the paper about a newly available intoxicant. It starts on the front page and continues for almost the entirety of page A8. That’s a lot of words for our local rag. Here are a few quotes so you can understand why so many people are concerned:

The clerk at the… shop called it a “slow night” Thursday but a steady stream of customer filed in to purchase [it]…. During one hour, 16 people purchased [it].

and

One of the customers Thursday night was Jeff Jacobs, a 50-year-old former Chrysler worker from Afton.

and

[Tom Neer, St. Charles County Sheriff,] said some people report it gives them a high, while others say it makes them dizzy or gives them a headache. “I have a concern about the product if it is determined that it can alter a person’s senses,” Neer said. “You get someone using it behind the wheel and it impairs their driving. Certainly, I’m concerned about it.”

Sounds like alcohol, no?

The article continues:

State Rep. Ward Frans, R-151st District, sponsored a bill that would place [it] on the state’s list of controlled substances. Possession would become a felony, Franz said.

Well it sure can’t be alcohol if the state is about to outlaw it.

But what’s going on here? Someone comes up with a new intoxicant and our government’s response is to make it illegal. The effects sound just like alcohol, which is legal. Is our government protecting us from a dangerous drug or from the need to take personal responsibility for what we put into our bodies? Is our government shielding us from the responsibility for our actions, regardless of what we put into our bodies?

What are the criteria for deciding to create another law? When was the last time that anyone, anywhere examined those criteria and held a frank discussion on whether or not our society is well served by them?

We just watched Around the Bend with Michael Caine, Christopher Walken and Josh Lucas. To say that it was way better than I expected would be a gross understatement. I  thoroughly enjoyed watching the family secrets slowly reveal, the characters slowly grow together, and the idiosyncrasies slowly resolve into sense.

There were moments when I chuckled at the thought of creating a situation like that for my kids. (Don’t worry, guys, I won’t really do it. Probably.) Mostly I left the film with a sense of gratitude for the closeness that we do have in my family. No, we aren’t the Brady Bunch but I think we do pretty darned well.

Joe Zemon with his sons

We do have our bits of estrangement in the family, though; my grandfather, Joe Zemon, being a case in point. Neither my father nor my uncle (the two dashing young men in the photo to the right) would say word one about him to me or to any of my four cousins, yet I’m named after him. Who was he really and, before dying young, what did he do with his life?

I do kind of wish there was still a way to take a road trip with my dad and sons. It’s too late to take my father along (moribund jokes aside) but I expect there will be more trips with the kids.

You’ll find Around the Bend on Netflix (both watch instantly and as a disc). Highly recommended.

I have dropped 24 pounds since last May, which makes me smile. Now, in addition to simply being smaller, I have two more reasons to smile. First, my last blood test for cholesterol levels came back with greatly improved numbers across the board. This means that I will likely be around longer to sponge off my kids (are you listening, guys?). Second, because of the lower cholesterol levels in my bloodstream, my doctor agreed that I could drop one of the two meds that I have been taking. Dropping the Zetia will save me $75 per month, an unexpected and wonderful surprise. I had heard and read that losing weight would have collateral health benefits. Now I have first hand proof.

My friend Jimbo sent me the following exercise program. I’m well along with it and, so far, it has been pretty do-able, even for a greybeard like me.

This seems a little daunting to start with but if you apply yourself you may find that it’s not as difficult as you think.

EXERCISE FOR PEOPLE OVER 50

Begin by standing on a comfortable surface, where you have plenty of room at each side.

With a 5-Lbs potato sack in each hand, extend your arms straight out from your sides and hold them there as long as you can. Try to reach a full minute, and then relax.

Each day you’ll find that you can hold this position for just a bit longer.

After a couple of weeks, move up to 10-Lbs potato sacks.

Then try 25-Lbs potato sacks and then eventually try to get to where you can lift a 50-Lbs potato sack in each hand and hold your arms straight for more than a full minute. (I’m at this level.)

After you feel confident at that level, put a potato in each sack.

Remember, nothing is more valuable than your health. Get the best quality potato sacks that you can!

David, my younger son, co-organized the St. Louis Saab Convoy last weekend. Despite miserable weather, the St. Louis Swede Speed club got about 25 people to bring a dozen cars out for the St. Louis Save Saab Convoy, urging GM to sell Saab rather than close down the line.

Fox 2 News even covered the event. Click the photo to watch Fox’s video.

David promotes Saab on Fox 2 News

Great job, David! Maybe your next Saab will have a Spyker engine hiding under the hood.

As anticipated on December 22, today I made it down to 199 pounds for the first time since, well, since heaven-only knows when! To the groans of all, I celebrate with another six word story:

One hundred ninety nine pounds. Yipee!

Back when I administered VAXen running BSD UNIX at FileNet, “just” 25 years ago or so, we didn’t have a high speed internet connection to use in transferring files between computers. I used a bank of Racal-Vadic 2400 baud modems to run UUCP and shuffle email and usenet articles around. With five modems in the bank, felix the VAX 750 grew to be a modest UUCP hub in SoCal. Today we measure our internet connections in megabits or Mbps, millions of bits per second, instead of baud. I am typing this on a cable modem connection that just achieved 11.4 Mbps downloading data and 1.7 Mbps uploading data. By comparison, felix the VAX had about 0.0024 Mbps of bandwidth, and downloading did not go any faster than uploading.

10.5" magnetic tape

We used to say, never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of magnetic tapes. With just 0.0024 Mbps of bandwidth available, it was completely impractical to transfer large files across “the net.” Instead, we would write the files to 10.5″ reels of magnetic tapes and drive them to their destination by car.

DEC RM03 disk drive

It would take several tapes, and several hours, to “back up” a single 67 MB, washing machine sized, RM03 disk drive. Once the  tapes were written, we would bundle them into  the nearest car and take a road trip across town to where they needed to be. Then would begin the (usually slower) process of reading the tapes into the new computer. It was way faster to move data by “station wagon” than pretty much anything else.

Flash forward to 2010. On Tuesday, I had 62,000 MB of files on a computer in a datacenter in Houston that had to be moved to a new computer in a datacenter on the east coast. I live in the middle of the country (St. Louis) and do not have ready access to either datacenter. Through the miracles of the internet, I logged into the Houston computer and typed one command:

rsync -az /backup/htn/ root@newmachine.com:/backup/htn

About eight hours later, with no intervention from me, all of the files had been replicated onto the new machine. I had just moved 1,000 times as much data as one of felix’s entire disk drives in a fraction of the time and with virtually no effort.

Yup… life is good.

Imagine it’s one of those lazy mornings when you don’t feel like doing much of anything. You woke up and shrugged into a comfy old shirt. You left your cuffs unbuttoned. The left half of your collar sticks up, since you never bothered to look in the mirror. As for the buttons down the front, you probably missed one or two. But the sun is shining, your morning cup o’ tea has been exquisitely tasty, and all is right in the world for you to slide through a long, lazy day, the perfect sequel to your lazy morning.

Mystical Judaism has the belief that our souls return to G-d when we sleep and G-d sends our souls back when we wake. We have a morning prayer which begins, “Thank you, King, for mercifully restoring my soul to me.” The belief shows up in Christianity, too, and pops up in the children’s bed-time prayer, “Now I lay me down to sleep. I pray the Lord my soul to keep….” I am sure that the belief is much older than either religion, since sleep looks so much like death and since dreams are so other-worldly.

What if your soul returns to your body one morning and doesn’t feel like doing much of anything? What if it shrugs your body on like a comfy old shirt? What if it doesn’t bother to button up all the buttons, to straighten out the collar, to check the mirror to be sure that everything looks right and proper? How are you doing today?

Today, I celebrate. Since I began exercising and eating less on Memorial Day, I have lost 20 pounds! First goal achieved.

Next goal, which should be pretty quick if the gods of metabolism cooperate: Weigh less than 200 pounds. I cannot remember the last time I weighed less than 200 pounds.

After that, I think I’ll head for 180 pounds. (There! I’ve put it in writing.)

To mark this momentous occasion, I return briefly to that briefest of all genres, the six word story.

Five months. 20 pounds. Woo hoo!!

and

Help me celebrate. Eat some chocolate.

and

Should I replace my website photo?