A very small thumb

One of the nice perks of my work is having garden educators as colleagues who are enthusiastic to share the garden with not only the kids who visit us, but the rest of us lowly staff folk. Last year, Kennet's Dad helped me make these flower boxes for our deck (with my broken elbow and all) and last year I killed a pitiful number of sad looking swiss chard and pea plants that never got bigger than my pinkie. This year I'm determined to turn things around, owing mostly to worm feces. How can you not love that? My favorite thing about this process is that I realized that since I've been carting our food scraps over to the worm bin at work in my panniers intermittently for a year now, I could reasonably claim that our old food scraps have come full circle to help nourish our new baby plants.

So here are parsley and peas, tied up with Hillary-esque orange string, lettuce starts, and some oregano and sage. Rachael also gave me some onions and some cilantro seeds- cool fact: Did you know cilantro and coriander are the same plant? Who knew.

Flock 643

A few months ago Hillary had a gallery showing of this piece that she's been working on at least as long as I've known her. She spent the last few years folding paper cranes out of receipts and atm slips and here is the final result. It was a fun event, with real wine and cheese and other arty people.


Click on it to make it bigger to see it better. It was one of the few pieces put up on this brick wall, which I loved. Very cool.

Old tech meets high tech

I have boxes and boxes (ok, small boxes) of photographs and negatives that came from my mom's parents' house. Many of the photos are from North Dakota, where my grandparents were both raised on farms before moving to Portland to raise my mom and her sisters in the house my grandfather built (below).

Now that we have a good scanner that also scans negatives, I'm slowly working my way through digitizing them 1) to preserve the images and 2) to find out what the heck is on all those negatives. (a light box might help too, but we don't have one of those.) So far, it's a relatively easy, but slow process. The pictures look pretty good on the computer, though, and I'm pretty happy to have them collected in one place. I have seen some neat projects that involve printing the pictures on fabric or iron-on transfers and then sewing them into things. My mom went through them with me and tried to do her best to identify the subjects, but some of them we don't have a clue about. Here are a few highlights. The quality has deteriorated, but you can click on them to make them bigger and easier to see.

































I particularly like these ones- I'm sure there is some technical name for the format, but they just look neat to me. The one on top is my grandfather, I would guess in his 20s, so late 1930s maybe. We think the bottom one has my grandmother on the right side of it, on the horse back in North Dakota.

The picture at the beginning has my great grandparents in it, Aquilinius and Clementina (or is it Clementine?). I'm pretty sure they're the two on the far right and far left. They were both born in Ukraine, where their families had moved from Germany. If the internet geneology people are right, they were married in Richardton, North Dakota in 1906.

Schadenfreude: road rage and instant karma

I think I chuckled steadily the last two miles of my bike ride home today. I saw something so funny, so beautifully scripted, that I could never have dreamed it up myself in a million years.

The I-90 bike path has a couple of pedestrian crossings: red lights in the middle of the block, with no cross street, just the bike path. The cycle is pretty long, so it's standard procedure for cyclists and pedestrians, even little old ladies, to look both ways and cross against the red. I should note here that simply looking both ways is not sufficient to keep from getting hit by cars. You also have to pay attention to what you see and behave accordingly.

When I got to the light, there was a pretty steady stream of cars. It was clear I was going to have to wait for the light to turn, no biggie. From the bike path behind me emerged a vile creature, a being made entirely of sinew, carbon-fiber, spandex and ego. Waiting for the light was not in the repertoire of this 2 wheeled thing from beyond. He looked both ways, saw the slightest gap between two cars, and sprinted through it. The oncoming driver slammed on his brakes and released a astoundingly civil little "toot" from his horn. This wasn't honking in vain. This wasn't a five-second burst on the horn with the volume turned up to eleven. This was the kind of horn blast that conveys no anger, just a reminder, "Hey! I exist."

Now this is where it gets funny...
The spandex-monster, who was by now on the bike path across the street, stood up in his pedals, craned his neck around, gave the driver the bird, failed to see the left bend in the path in front of him, ran off the trail into the grass, into a bush, and fell over in his clips.

...
I'm gonna let that mental image soak in for a second.
...

Now I'd like to point out that there were three bikers other than me patiently waiting for the light to change. Two were forty-something ladies out for a pleasure ride, and the third was an older gentleman who looks like he might've stormed Omaha beach, and is still in shape to do it again next Tuesday if he had to. All four of us laughed our heads off. "Señor macho" was still picking himself up off the ground when the older guy and I passed him (on the path, I might add), chuckling loudly. Hopefully he learned something today.

What can we learn from this scene? The data suggests that 80% of bikers enjoy watching irredeemable jerks get theirs. The other 20% of bikers might also enjoy watching irredeemable jerks get theirs, but he was too busy getting his to participate. Other than that, we can't draw any conclusions about bikers. Here's why.

Bikers are people. At any given time, all people are playing one of three roles: jerk, idiot, and decent human being. Everyone plays all of these roles at various times. Good people try to keep it skewed towards the third, but nobody's successful all the time. The Seattle PI has been running a lot of articles about Seattle's "Master Plan" for bikes. Inevitably, the PI's discussion boards are filled with angry drivers and bikers, hurling tirades about how awful the other group is.

Why must we phrase the discussion in terms of "bikers" and "drivers?" Why can't we phrase it in terms of jerks, idiots, and decent human beings?

Low-tech solutions to problems the world shouldn't have in the first place: part 1 of N

I've been receiving a truly absurd number of "phishing" emails recently. It appears Western Union really wants me to validate my account information. This got me wondering, what's the signal to noise ratio of responses to phishing scams? Put another way, how many people who respond to phishing scams, respond with valid account information?

Without any real data to go on, the cynic in me says that the majority, or at least a significant minority of phishing responses contain genuine account information. If that's the case, all we need to do is bump up the noise a little bit. What if every time you got a bogus email, you responded to it with some plausible but incorrect account info? Better yet, put a button on your email reader that'll do it for you?

The question now is, how time-intensive is it for a phisher to verify an account name and password? If they are doing it by hand, then it wouldn't take that many participating people to make it not worth a phisher's effort. If they're doing it via a script, well then bogus information would only be wasting computer time, and that's cheap.

Anyone who actually knows something about the world of phishing scams care to chime in? Has this approach been tried before? Are there any downsides? The thought occurs to me that by responding to a phisher, even with bogus info, you may be confirming that your email account is "live" which might result in more spam.