Snoopin’ with the Snoop

1. Japanese Beetles like to eat my:
   • wild rose brambles
   • rose of sharon
   • lemonbalm
   • rhubarb
   • Hey! Japanese beetles love the taste of Bindweed leaves!
   • velvet leaf
   • okra
   • sunflower
   • purple thistle

   Beware of using traps, as they tend to more often attract the beetles:

   A question I am often asked is whether Japanese beetle traps provide control,” says Jones. “Unfortunately, research has revealed that frequently many more beetles are attracted to a trap than are actually caught. So, using traps can have the effect of increasing your beetle problem, rather than eliminating it. (University of Illinois, “Japanese Beetles: A Real Pain for Everybody”)

   And though the same article says that the damage is more localized than widespread, that statement totally depends on your field of reference. Sure, if you’re a corn or soybean farmer with hundreds of acres of fields, then yes, their damage swath is localized. It’s much harder for the small gardener to consider lost plants as localized damage when the plot total equals a handful of plants.

2. Margined blister beetles¹ love(d) my Tiger-Eye Amaranth. They devoured the plants until, back in the beginning of August, I uprooted a stand of three-foot grass on the edge of the garden, which happened to be about five feet from the T-E Amaranth. They disappeared immediately, and I didn’t see them until weeding out more grass on the other side of the garden yesterday. My T-E has since recovered, though each plant is still only about 6 inches tall. I haven’t seen the blister beetles munching on anything else since they deserted the amaranth, but apparently they’re still in the garden.
3. Monsanto.
4. Not a garden pest, but we have moles in our yard. Sigh. Their foraging tunnels look like mini-chaotic-crop circles all over our backyard. I have flooded their tunnels (which according to the article merely forces them to the surface but does not get rid of them); however, given that they eat bugs and grubs, I’d like to keep them around, but know that is probably not acceptable to anyone but me. If only they didn’t cause grass root damage.

1. Blister beetles are beetles (Coleoptera) of the family Meloidae, so called for their defensive secretion of a blistering agent, cantharidin. Wikipedia. [↩]

I upgraded my wordpress installation to 2.9 this evening, and it locked me out of my uploads folder (meaning that I could upload files, but could not view either through wordpress or by typing the address in the bar – 403 error). After hours of searching for a fix, I created a new uploads folder, transferred everything into that folder, deleted the uploads folder, recreated it, and transferred everything back in.

And it works…

2 inches of rain 2 weeks ago, 3.5 last week, and 2.75 so far this week, though they say it’s supposed to dry out now.

A creek is behind the cornfield

While reading the passport application and explanation documents at travel.state.gov, I came across the following question:

Won’t this chip violate Americans’ privacy?
There will be no personal information written on the electronic chip itself. The chip will have only a unique number pointing to a stored record contained in secure government databases.

So the chip itself does not violate Americans’ privacy, but the secure government database does?

Three cheers, or more, to HP and the Pavilion dv4000. Back when I bought the laptop in 2005, I was obsessed with Linux, but not to the point of installing it. Three years later, I have finally gotten rid of Windows as a host system, and am running Ubuntu Hardy Heron (8.04) on my Pavilion laptop with the GNOME desktop environment. I have not yet missed anything from Windows. Well, since I found VirtualBox that is. I was pleased with Unbuntu/Gnome except that my genealogy program is only for Windows (TMG). So I tried setting it up in WineHQ and failed miserably, though there are users who have managed to make it work. I kept getting a VisualFoxPro9 error when it tried to launch my project after loading the program. I fretted over HAVING to have windows only to run my program, and I did not want a dual-boot system.

Then I found VirtualBox. VirtualBox is not an emulator; I actually installed Windows with my CD and went through the entire process required as if installing it as a host system. I had a bit of difficulty figuring out the Guest Additions inside VirtualBox in order to get the mouse, etc. to work, but it’s been breezy since. You can install any OS in VB (I assume), and following a tutorial I found on the net has provided me with an awesome way to have a portable media editing environment as opposed to installing everything on my hard drive (which by today’s standards is a small 55 GB). I haven’t yet figured out how to access my printer wirelessly in the XP Guest, though I can surf the internet just fine.

Truth be told, I like the Fluxbox Windows Manager better than the Gnome Desktop Environment (what’s the difference?), with the exception that I haven’t figured out how to access the wireless network in Fluxbox. (My brain has turned to mush being pampered by desktop environments like Windows (and Gnome) since Windows98. I never liked Windows95 and preferred DOS. Further, I hated Windows 3.1 for Workgroups and logged in as little as possible. 98 I liked though and drifted away from DOS at that point.) On the other hand, I can’t play Secret Maryo Chronicles in Gnome, though it works perfectly in Fluxbox.

I installed Opera instead of Firefox on the XP guest, just because I prefer Opera, though I choose to use Firefox3 regularly. I prefer Opera because of their trashcan (allowing one to bring back to life tabs accidentally or carelessly closed). Perhaps a Firefox3 user has developed an extension or add-on to duplicate this luxury, but I have not found one or one to my liking. [Update 16 March 2009: By accident, I found that Ctrl+Shift+T opens the last closed tab. But I have not yet found out how to open the 5th previously closed tab without opening all of the previous. Opera offers a dropdown list of closed tabs.]

Firefox3 is my browser of choice because of Zotero:

Harnessing the Zotero extension for genealogical use is the next challenge. I played around with it awhile back, back when I was in Vegas and wasn’t really focused on applying any free time to genealogical research and organizing my life. I didn’t get it much then, but I also wasn’t looking for organization, which it seems to provide. My only hesitance is that if I depend on it and my collections somehow get corrupted or mixed up, where will I be? I also need to study how and if (which) files are saved on my hard drive.

I’ve been looking for a manager for regular text, doc, pdf, &c files for quite a while. Plenty exist as music and photo applications, but I’ve not yet uncovered one geared for non-media documents. It would most likely use a database structure and would look not unlike the applications that law offices, for example, use to manage their cases (like Amicus). My want stems from organizing my files and retreiving them: say that I am doing research on the town of Pontiac, NY, and in a history book on the geographic area, one paragraph of the chapter I’m reading mentions Anson Bassett, my ancestor who died there. Since the pages I’m printing (to a pdf file) deal with an area in Erie County New York, I’d like to save them into my Places folder. In Windows, I got started placing shortcuts in my specific Surname folders when this situation occurred (and vice versa). I’d be nicer to have a visual organization and the ability to tag files with description as is allowed in many photo/music applications. (I just tried a new search string: “document management” instead of “file management” and seem to be on the right path.)

I read something the other day that said the Christians control this nation even though they’re the minority; that the candidates for President and/or elected office bend over backwards to impress the Christians so that they will be elected. Whether that is true or not, certain towns have succeeded in making Halloween on the week or weekend before the actual Holiday. I don’t know if that is an effort to avoid crime and pranks, or if it is an underhanded move to erase All Hallow’s Eve. Either way, I think it’s silly.

A package came from China today containing a watch that tracks two time zones. Said package launched a discussion of a European chess tournament. Said discussion resulted in my telling a coworker that a computer had finally beaten a chess master at his own game. Then came comments regarding the end of the world, computers taking over, and all that hoo-hop and what-not.

But what about intuition? said I. Computers who win chess games are based in logic. Intuition is a human feeling, or, so I’ve thought for most of my life. The other day, I read an article, or part of an article that expressed an opinion that intuition was based in sensory perception. A part of our mind constantly monitors our surroundings, and when something that we ourselves are not aware of is off, that part of our consciousness picks up on the change no matter how small, giving us the feeling of intuition.

If this is true, would it be possible to program a computer to recognize these miniscule miscues, and create an “intuitive” computer? Now, I’m not saying it’d be an easy task to catalogue/program/input into a database the minor exceptions that create a snag in the fabric of a perfect day, but I believe it is possible nonetheless.

I’m sure there’s much scientific research that delves far deeper into the issue (and probably from decades ago, too!). But I haven’t read that, and this is what I was thinking today.