Sunbeams illuminating a coastal forest in Port Orford, Oregon

Chuggnutt!

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  • Sod

    Ever think about sod before? Yeah, me neither, until recently. Always seemed like such a boring topic—yah, grass, lawns, yawn. But I’ve been thinking a lot about sod lately, since we moved into our new house and had landscaping done. It turns out sod is quite a bit more interesting than I initially thought.

    Watching the sod get unrolled out and pieced together to form our new lawn, I realized that I had no idea where the stuff actually came from: were these neat rectangular rolls of grass turf just carved out of somebody’s pasture somewhere? Somebody’s yard? Who’s letting that happen? And wouldn’t you start to run out of the stuff pretty quickly if you’re poaching it? I mean, even though grass is a renewable resource, it still takes time to establish a yard strong enough to start cutting chunks out of.

    And then realizing the amount of sod that must be going into new lawns around here every day, I realized the inefficiency of this and went off in search of answers in my trusty Lawn Care for Dummies.

    Turns out sod comes from sod farms. No kidding. (Blindingly obvious in retrospect.) There’s actually people running vast farms that do nothing but grow grass for lawns. Not livestock, not grain or vegetables, but lawns. And the best known sod farm in this area? McPheeter’s Turf.

    Here’s a Bend Bulletin profile on McPheeter’s Turf.

    We work long hours, we just get really tired sometimes. We start at 4:30 or 5:00 in the morning and I’ll change water at 9:00 or 10:00 at night. But it’s so good to go to bed tired at night.

    I know farming is truly hard work and long hours, but still, that seems like a hell of a lot of time and work invested in just growing grass.

    Now, I just have to see a sod harvesting machine in action. What? You didn’t think they cut and rolled it by hand, did you?

  • Coke Alert

    My wife pointed me to this article today, and I thought it was funny.

    Specially rigged Coke cans, part of a summer promotion, contain cell phones and global positioning chips. That has officials at some installations worried the cans could be used to eavesdrop, and they are instituting protective measures.
    …
    “There’s things generals should stay up late at night worrying about,” he said. “A talking Coke can isn’t one of them.”

    Somehow I doubt the GPS-enabled cell phone Coke can will make it into the next Bond movie.

  • American Beer Month

    Interesting. Apparently July is American Beer Month. Website and all.

    July is American Beer Month, a time when every American should celebrate the season by exploring the wonderful flavors of American Beer. No matter what kind of beer you like, there’s one that’s perfect for your tastes that’s made in America.

    One of the sponsors is Deschutes Brewery. Right on.

  • Friendster goes PHP

    An item I saw yesterday but forgot to blog about: Friendster goes PHP. Pretty cool.

    Finally on Friday we launched a platform rearchitecture based on loose-coupling, web standards, and a move from JSP (via Tomcat) to PHP. The website doesn’t look much different, but hopefully we can now stop being a byword for unacceptably poky site performance.

    I haven’t had much of a chance yet to use Friendster to see if it truly is faster, so I can’t personally comment on that aspect. And predictably, this is going to bring all sorts of people out of the woodwork arguing over the relative merits of Java/JSP (which was old Friendster) versus PHP… just look at the comments on the link above to see it already happening. And while debate and disagreement can be healthy and productive, how about a quick reality check to everyone:

    PHP is good. Java is good. Both have their merits and disadvantages. Loudly complaining that [Java|PHP] is the only true way and the other is crap is boring and uninformed.

  • Oregon Trail Diaries

    Here’s a site containing links to the texts of diaries from the Oregon Trail. Interesting stuff; it would be worth collecting it and turning it into a Palm Reader ebook. (If I can find the time.)

  • Finding Invisible Men

    Totally wacky article on Kuro5hin: Using Quantum Cryptography to Find Invisible Men:

    But is it truly a myth, or do invisible men walk among us? And if an invisible man were to be created, how would we detect him and track his movements?
    …
    Invisible man detection has gone a long way, from the clumsy mob actions of a hundred years ago to the sophisticated mob actions of today. The time has come to step into the 21st century with a quantum solution to a threat you’ll never see coming.

  • Greyhound quits Bend

    As reported on Bend.com, Greyhound is leaving Central Oregon:

    It is eliminating 260 stops, leaving 99 in the 13-state region.

    In Oregon, the list of 35 communities losing Greyhound service ranges (alphabetically) from Albany to Zigzag, with Bend, Klamath Falls, La Pine, Madras, Redmond and Warm Springs among those in the middle.

    Too bad. I suppose it’s a bit odd to lament the loss of a transportation service that’s in decline and is (let’s face it) mediocre at best, but I have some fond memories of Greyhound. For instance, growing up, every year my grandparents in Portland would ship our Christmas presents in a big package via Greyhound. And they were the best presents; they always got us the cool toys and video games.

    (Strange in this day and age of UPS and FedEx everywhere that people would send packages via Greyhound, of all things, but there it is.)

    Or the time my brother, when he was still living in Portland, made a surprise trip to visit the family on his birthday. I was in on it; he made an evening call and had us pick him up at the bus station around 10:30 that same night, and then surprised everyone the next day. That was a helluva lot of fun.

    I even remember when the Greyhound station was downtown on the corner of Greenwood and Wall—when they had an actual station instead of sharing a gas station somewhere (as they’d been doing the last few years).

    Ah, well. It’s a shame.

  • Shed

    Costco Apex ShedSo I put together a Costco shed today, with help from my dad. Part of our grand plan to outfit the new house with all the bling bling, you know. It’s a nice shed, but it was a pain in the ass to get set up. Actually, the shed itself wasn’t that bad, it’s all plastic and rubbermaid-type material. The worst part was setting up a “foundation” for the thing on a slightly-sloped part of the yard that backs up to the fenceline. We found some sturdy pallets in the dumpster across the street that fit the bill, after levelling them off with cinder bricks, flat stone and two-by-four shims.

    Yeah, we did some dumpster diving. But it’s the big construction dumpster for the development we’re in, filled with lots of usable scrap wood and stuff! That makes it okay. :)

  • I’m still here!

    Yeah, I’m still here. Just haven’t found the time or energy to post much lately. So, quick one-off tonight with an interesting site: Lulu.com. Free self-publishing of books, which they will print on demand and ship to the purchaser. Sort of the CafePress of publishing.

  • Stuff

    Still continuing to settle in to the new house. This weekend we cleared out the storage unit, and it never ceases to amaze me just how much stuff we’ve managed to accumulate over the years. Of course, it doesn’t help that I’ve got a packrat personality and it’s actually hard for me to get rid of stuff. But—wow. How does this happen? You’re puttering around in your daily life, happily oblivious, then one day you turn around and BAM!—where did all this stuff come from? And yes, you remember getting that, and yes, those have a story, and then you realize the true culprit:

    Time.

    Time: you lose track of it for even a moment, and it will sneak up on you. Your kids will grow a few more inches and start school, everyone you know is suddenly older, the music you spent formative years of your life listening to is on oldies radio stations, and stuff accumulates.

    And yeah, that packrat personality I mentioned, I have that. But not too badly though, not apeshit crazy like you see on TV or read about, where the old hermit guy has 30 years of newspapers tied up in his living room, or the wacko lady has 8,000 unopened boxes of toothpicks, or anything like that. No, I’ve got it just enough to annoy my wife. Could it ever get more serious? I doubt it.

    But you know… time will tell.