This is my weblog... clicky on the linkies

Today I went on my lunch break and picked up some plants for my garden.

I was going to plant them after work and take a picture of them in the ground, but it took so long, there was no light left to get the photo. 

Then I was going to try to just draw a diagram, I fought with some diagramming software, then I said, "this is dumb, I can draw a picture", and by the time I drew the picture and annnotated it, it still didn't look great. So I decided to just explain what's going on with words. 

I have a garden plot that is 40 feet by 9 and a half feet. There is a 20 foot chunk in the front that is straight dirt. Then a 10 foot by 9.5 foot chunk that is the old tree stump that is slowly decomposing. Then another 10 foot by 9.5 foot chunk that is the back half of the garden. This back half can't be plowed, so I do hand tilling only.

I have a small asparagus patch back here, and recently I have been planting garlic. This is nice because I can plant the garlic in the fall, throw a bunch of leaves on it, and occasionally weed it, and it all works out, it's a lot easier than trying to hand till the whole thing for tomatoes or something. Lots of thistles grow back here, after we got a bad batch of compost that mostly made it back to this corner of the garden only.

The thistles are deeply annoying. I used to try to get them out by the root but this part of the garden is far more clay than dirt, the slightest tug and the thistles break off just under the soil surface. So I would have to get a shovel because they form a root 14 - 18 inches down. It just meant massive, massive holes in the garden, hard to deal with once you have established plants, and it took a while to get everything out. Recently I switched to just aggressively hoeing the whole area. It takes a lot less time, and maybe I can slowly starve the roots out. I made the mistake of missing one plant a couple of years ago, so there were a bunch of seeds that escaped so I think I'll be dealing with these for a while.

This year I have some onions around the stump. I might plant some things on the stump, we will see.

With a 20x9.5 foot space, I have experimented with lots of layouts. Zig-zags, gentle curves, grids, but I generally come back to three rows, with two paths between them. Here is what I have planted so far, mostly so I can go back to this later when I have forgotten what is what.

The northernmost row is row number 1, going from east to west (from the entrance to the stump); all plants are 18-36 inches apart.

Row 1:

2 basil plants

8 peppers. The label at the farmers market said "Sweet Cayenne (Jimmy Nardello)", I don't know how accurate it is because I got these from the local Hmong market, and as English is a second language, I've had mixups before. I'm 95 percent sure these are a sweet pepper, but I've gotten "Sweet Cayenne" from this same seller and they definitely were not Jimmy Nardellos in the past. So I'd say 60 percent sure they are real Jimmy Nardellos. 

2 red sweet peppers. These had a picture and she said they were sweet peppers but I didn't write down the variety. I think it's Corno di Toro maybe.

Row 2:

6 Sweet 100 cherry tomatoes

3 Federle tomatoes (these 3 tomatoes were the only seeds I started that actually made it and didn't die due to a misadventure with a rough cold stnap right after transplanting them into larger containers)

4 Early Girl tomatoes

2 Striped German tomatoes



Row 3:

4 sweet green peppers. I didn't write down the exact variety, all I know is she said they were delicious when roasted, and that I should pick them when they are green. I think, after some googling, it's Shishito.

2 pickling cucumbers (to grow against the south fence)

4 Bishops hat peppers (supposed to be a thin walled medium hot red pepper)

2 white cucumbers to grow against the fence)

2 Jalapeno

4 Habenero

2 Ghost peppers

I still have 2 Corno di Toro plants that I need to find a place for, and 4 Thai hot purple peppers. 

This year, the kids decided they didn't want to grow Carolina Reapers and Dragons Breath peppers, after two of them tried eating a Dragon's Breath pepper raw with no milk. Didn't do well with ghost peppers last year though, a deer came and grazed the plants to the ground. Hopefully that doesn't happen this year. 

Every time I get mad or frustrated about AI, I post something to my website. Or edit one of my existing pages, or make some progress on one of my in-progress articles. 

I’m only a few days into this but it seems to be working out.

Sometimes I just post photos. A lot of times I sit there, in front of an empty text box, not knowing what to write. But hey, if the machine can write crap, I can write crap.

Against my better judgement (I’m not feeling well) the kids lured me out to go fishing at the nearby national wildlife refuge. Now I’m sitting here getting bit by mosquitoes, listening to frogs as a plane takes off from the nearby anirport every few minutes.

Geese just flew overhead. There is a muskrat that keeps swimming around. And there is a great blue heron I didn’t even see until it majestically took off 20 feet away from me.

Addendum: on the way home, one of the boys found a frog.

This weekend was the city wide garage sales and my kids all kind of went nuts. They did some chores and spent money and did more chores to get more money, and one kid even did a koolaid stand to get even more money. 

One sale went down to "25 cents for everything" and they had a whole bunch of giant plastic kid toys so now my house is filled to the brim with giant plastic things. Workbenches and race tracks and what looks like an aircraft carrier. 

The youngest child now has no less than five Elmos, two of which are Tickle Me Elmo, because the older kids kept buying him Elmos. 

A block down they had a "Guy Sale" instead of a "Garage Sale" with fishing lures, tools, all kinds of manly things (there was a sign for it on the corner by our house. But because of work, and other commitments, I wasn't able to get down to it until the last hour. The lures were all fairly picked over (which I know because my kids came home with some great stuff on Friday) and there were no knives by the time I got there.



I did get 8 bucks worth of lures (one of which has already nearly caught a fish for one of the kids) but the star of the show was an external frame backpack (7 dollars, it's in great shape if a bit outdated) and a free gas grill. I was just looking at the backpack and they wanted 10 dollars for it and I was waffling but she said make an offer so I offered 7 and they took it. When I got home I looked it up, it's a Kelty Trekker, but there are a bunch of models from 100 - 250 bucks new. It seems in good shape. 

Today I took the backpack to the Aldi's near the house and came home with 35 pounds of groceries (I weighted it on the new scale that one of the kids got for 50 cents). I just was putting things in the cart but it wound up completely filling the backpack and I had to carry the bread home in my hands (didn't want to squish it). 

And the grill was cheap, cheap, cheap, they wanted 5 dollars, but I was waffling on it and they saw it and said, look its the end of the sale, why don't you just go home and take it (I had 5 of the kids with me and a stroller so I couldn't just take it home.)

Found a spot in the back yard for it. It's my first gas grill. I already did hot dogs and burgers on it and it's a grill, it works, I gotta get used to it instead of charcoal, and it's going to need a deeper cleaning than the first wipe down cleaning I've given it already. But it's so freeing to just fire it up instead of waiting for the charcoal. 

Wow, I typed up a whole post, and went to add a photo at the end, and the browser on the phone deleted my in-progress post while I went out to get an image to add at the bottom.

ah well. These flowers were my companions this morning as I sat on the landscaping wall across the street while I was waking up and thinking. 

Mom said get some Afrin and use it the day before you’re flying and the day of. Keeps the eustachian tubes from collapsing (I had that problem last time I traveled.) Two puffs in each nostril.

Well I did it. After 15 minutes I turned to my wife and said “my nostrils are so open I can smell God!”

A while back I made a "deconstructed sequencer" out of logic chips. Its funny to go back and read that post because the post says the sequencer is "awaiting repairs", and that is definitely still the case.

It's not that I haven't tried, I have, it's just that I get as far as taking off that first clock panel, looking at the big ball of tape holding everything together, and then I kind of retreat back and say hang on a minute. I even re-designed the circuit from scratch (I lost my original schematics, no idea where they are, and it's possible I never wrote them down anyway) and started constructing a new one in its place, but you know, this is one tiny sliver of one of my hobbies and I only got as far as "half of this is wired up on a protoboard", so certainly I don't have anything functional. 

At the moment, however, I would like a sequencer. And when I say "at the moment", I mean, I decided I wanted one a few days ago. It doesn't have to be great, "barely functional" would be fine.

So I figured I would code one into an Arduino Micro. 

I've got a user interface, on paper, I don't think it's going to be very good but all of the features are there. I mean, lets be totally honest, I am far better at building synthesizers and cigar box guitars and other weird instruments than actually using them musically. So I don't know how well it will work, in part because I don't even know what I'm doing.

The deconstructed sequencer has a very big chunky tactile user interface with 16 switches and 16 knobs. This one is not going to have the same kind of physicality. It's going to be a "set a note, advance to the next beat, set the next note", etc. I don't know if I am going to like it, but I suppose I should use it before I knock it. 

However, it occurs to me just now that I could decide to, after I get it mostly up and running, make a couple of quick modifications and then insert the Arduino Micro into the deconstructed sequencer, and kind of bodge them together. Then I could have a functioning sequencer, with the chunky UI for pitches, but the Micro being the brains, then I could extract and remove the original front end of the deconstructed sequencer entirely, and unwind that massive ball of tape, and maybe make some progress on it. 

Anyway, as far as the Arduino Micro Sequencer goes, I've gotten as far as "it has.a free running loop at a fixed tempo, and it advances through all 16 steps and outputs a different control voltage for each step". Next step (ha ha thank you brain for bringing that pun to my attention) is going to be making the LED visualizer for each step. Or maybe I'll do tempo changes next. Also I need to go through my junk pile and find a prototype VCO of some sort (I have a few generations worth of 8-bit VCDO circuits laying around somewhere, I'm sure I can pluck one up and dust it off and get it working). A few months ago I very nearly finished a new cigar box amplifier, so that's ready to go for the most part. 

Then I'll have a working end-to-end synth again! It won't be much but hopefully I can make a lot of beeps with it.