Author: Andy

Smell after the rain

For most of my life, the smell immediately following a rain has been sage brush. It’s a lovely odor that is loaded with memories.

In Portland, I haven’t noticed any bold an immediate smells after rain events. I imagine this is largely due to the duration of rains, but the smells are usually organic, biotic; the smell of saturated soils, decomposition, and leaf mold.

Yesterday after a brief rain I stepped out into the back yard and noticed a strong and pleasant smell. The smell of thai food wafting up the alleyway. The after-rain smell here is thai food! I suppose if you have to replace something as wonderful as sage brush, thai food is a pretty good option.

Downy Woodpecker

The gnarly apple tree in our back yard is home to a house finch family. They’re delighted by the bird bath and the two feeders now hanging from the tree. (‘Let’s not go to that one, lets go to the good one’) I’m anthropomorphizing of course, but how could the birds not be delighted?

The tree also has a problem with boring insects. Nearly every inch of the tree has a hole in it with sawdust coming out. This is kind of disturbing because it means we probably have to cut it down unless the extension officer thinks it’s cool. In the mean time, a downy woodpecker is frequenting the tree. I’m going to take a guess that it too is delighted.

Home Sweet Home

We’ve moved in. Thanks to the immense amount of free labor from our parents, we’ve also made most of the major adjustments needed for normal plus living. We put in a dishwasher, took out the fireplace and put a vent in the roof, patched the ceiling, put in a disposal ($5 at the rebuilding center), hung blinds and lots of misc. stuff. Things look great, feel great, and aside from the boring insects in the apple tree, we don’t have that much to do this summer. The animals have adjusted well, Tigger better than Barley, but the dog on hardwood floors is kind of funny.

So tonight we walked to our neighborhood video rental and now we’re watching Money Pit. Knock on wood. More to come. I’m kind of tired.

Temporary Hosting

My brother-in-law has been kind enough to host my site during our move. Everything seems to be working normally, but go easy on the site and don’t waste his bandwidth.

Actually, it’s all part of a ploy to get him to use macs. First step – have him use linux and enjoy the flexibility but loath the interface inconsistencies and the broken packages. Step two – sneak a mac into his home under the guise of “hosting it temporarily.” Step three – suggest he give that 400MHz g3 a spin. He’ll be hooked in no time. No 4.2 GHz P4 with a gig of ram can compare to the spectre of a 7 year old mac.

Audioslave

I heard a story about a couple that went to see the Audioslave concert here in Portland the night after the actual show. The guy taking the tickets was incredulous.

A Carnivore-like filtering system for forwarded e-mail

A forwarded e-mail that Michelle received this morning required a fact check. Most forwarded messages do. It has become standard practice for many of us to automatically open myth debunking websites like Snopes.com when we see FW: in the subject line of an e-mail. Not that we need to check the veracity of these claims, but that we need to have a response to reply to the sender to inform them about the flaw in the message.

I’ve decided that it is time to create a carnivore-like e-mail filtering system based on urban myths and scams that will automatically and permanently deletes chain letters. Snopes.com already has a tremendous database of junk subjects. All we need is a convincing argument that these forwarded messages are a threat to homeland security and poof! we can get funding for such a system. Maybe we can even have the authors of such offending chain mails unlawfully detained.