My Potted Garden

Last year's garden worked much better than the one I have going this year. Last year I had more tomatoes than I could eat all summer long. This year I just have a few tomatoes, one or two per week instead of dozens, and several plants have just died on me. My other ventures have also shown spotty results.

I have three kinds of peppers: yellow bell, jalapeño and a hot red ball. I have gotten one of those last although all three plants now have fruit maturing on them. But there are only three peppers on the jalapeño plant instead of the dozens I had anticipated.

The garlic plants started to wither, so I pulled them up and found respectable bulbs had developed. They were a little hard to peel because we didn't really give them a chance to dry, but they worked just like the garlic from the store.

Sometime soon I'll have to dig up the horseradish to see how it has done. It has nice healthy leaves but I have no idea if it has developed roots that can be used for anything. It would be nice to have a couple of roots to grind up for eating and a few to re-plant for future crops.

Cathy had some herbs she bought and then neglected. I've been keeping them alive but nobody has been harvesting them for use in the kitchen. It's too bad. Some of them could be useful.

Several years ago, Delia abandoned a number of plants into my care. Some of them have survived, including two frangipani. One frangipani is blooming while the other just sits there about two yards away doing nothing despite getting identical care.

It isn't much of a garden. Having everything in pots keeps insects from becoming a problem but doesn't keep weeds from springing up. I'll have even less time and energy to devote to the plants in the future but they'll still get a bit of water a couple of mornings each week, just enough for survival.

Maybe next year I'll cut back.

Adapted for Religion

Evidence continues to accumulate that one of the key evolutionary adaptations that makes us human is the capacity for religion, which happened at about the same time we got the capacity to invent language.

I am geek by nature. I have been deeply interested in technology since my early teen years and that bloomed into an interest in the human condition. I am not alone, and I have discovered a television channel for people with similar interests, channel 327, known as Tech TV. You won't get it unless you have digital cable TV, but then what geek doesn't?

I have been aware of the connection between language and religion making us human for some time now. I've found more and more other people who are also aware of this connection, particularly Kambiz Zarrabi, who teaches at Oasis and has written a book on the subject, "Necessary Illusion".

Today I watched a very interesting program on the subject.

Realizing that "the religious experience" seems to be concentrated in the temporal lobes, researchers have been using magnetic fields to invoke the sensation of profound religious feeling in volunteers. Other researchers have determined that the areas of the brain used by Buddhists meditating and by Catholics in prayer are the same areas.

Having the capacity to practice religion has been shown to extend life and improve one's chances of survival. In other words, to practice a religion is survival of the fittest. Religion will not die out because having a religion has evolutionary survival value.

That still says nothing about whether any of the religions have any truth in any of what they say or believe. The value is in the capacity to believe and to form communities based on those beliefs.

It doesn't say they are wrong, either. It is simply mute on that question.

I find it highly intriguing that the first animal to develop language improved his survival by evolving the capacity for religion along with the ability to use grammar.

Job Interview

I was slightly nervous. I didn't sleep well. I kept waiting for the alarm clock to ring. I would sit up, look at the clock, see how much longer I had, make sure the alarm really hadn't gone off and that I hadn't slept through it, then go back to sleep. Finally, the alarm went off.

I tried to wake the dog so I could give him his pill and put him outside for a while. He steadfastly refused to wake up.

I went into the bathroom, did my morning things, shaved, washed up. Emerging, I dressed. The memo had specified "business casual dress" so I wore slacks and a guayabera. I got the newspaper and put a stack of outgoing mail in the mailbox for pickup. Now the dog decided that day had, indeed, come and he wanted to go out. I shoved a pill down his throat and put him outside to do his thing.

The kitchen was a total disaster. I was away all day yesterday but Cathy was home all day yesterday, up until the time she left for Los Angeles, so there had been no opportunity to undo the damages she had inflicted on the kitchen. Okay, I could survive without coffee. I wrapped a pair of hot dogs in paper towel and popped them in the microwave to heat for breakfast, serving myself a glass of V8 juice to go with them. I did my blood sugar test and accompanying insulin shot, the dog insisting that this was the moment he had to come back inside, then was free to quickly consume my breakfast before heading out.

The company, ADNC is hidden on Mira Mesa. The street it is on has a building with the number 9605, a wide driveway, and then another building numbered 9805. Process of elimination led me up the wide driveway to an industrial park which included the place I was looking for, number 9725. It is good that I started early since finding the place required some trial and error and several trips past the entrance.

Once inside, the receptionist gave me a page with some questions (a quiz) and sent me to a small conference room to fill it out with the promise that if I passed the test I would be given another. There were eventually ten others taking the same quiz. Eventually, someone named Jerome came in and led six of the others away for a tour of the company. I got myself a coffee and started talking with another victim candidate, Jerry, about coffee and Guatemala. The remaining nine never spoke to anybody, as far as I could determine. Then Jerome got the remainder of us and gave us our tour.

The company is a server farm. It is in its fifth or sixth location, having outgrown previous locations because it consumed other, similar companies. They have an interesting rule: all technical people start in tech support, the job I was applying for.

They interviewed us in the order in which we finished our second test. All through my interview they laughed at me. First, the interview was conducted by John Oliver, the Technical Support Manager who had been my initial contact, by Jerome, whose position I'm not sure of, and by the company's vice president and Chief Financial Officer. The laughter began with the VP commenting that I had graduated from college the year before he was born. Then they remarked on the various antique systems, both hardware and software, that I had worked on, some of which they had only heard of but had never encountered. One of my test answers showed my distrust of Microsoft Outlook, perhaps shared by those present, but the vast majority of their customers use the product and I have to be ready to answer such questions for them.

Then they asked why I wanted the job. I said, "I've tried finding work before. My age works against me. I think I've proved that I can do anything from building and repairing computers to designing and implementing software systems." Fortunately, they continued laughing.

They called to offer me the job at 16:30. I report for a preliminary hour of orientation tomorrow at 9:00.

Modem For Sale

Not really. I haven't even disconnected it yet. But I'm about to tell my dial-up ISP goodbye.

Let's Chat

I am not terribly fond of computer chat. Or is that computer chatter? Whatever. I've been seeking feedback and I've tried a variety of devices to get it, but for some reason they all get ignored ... so now I'm trying chat.

So far I just have it linked to my two Xanga Weblogs and to my Netscape browser. I may also put it on my Web sites (totally useless since I'm getting fewer than one visitor per day between the two sites, but it's free so why not?).

It needs a little work. After you hit "post" it may just sit there. If that happens, hit the 'refresh' link. That worked for me. I guess that's what it's there for. Also, the default for the name is supposed to be "anonymous" but that vanished when I made my entry; if you want to make an entry as anonymous, spell it out yourself. It was free and worth every cent.

The little icons above the display area are supposed to have some function, but there are no operating instructions and I haven't played with them. I think one of them gives you a larger area from which to create your gems of insight, but I don't know which one it is. I think I get an icon the rest of you don't, one that allows me to 'fix' or delete your entries.

Unfortunately, there is propaganda at the bottom. It changes. At the moment, the message informs me that I can eliminate acne, a problem I rarely encounter.

I've been watching the thing for a while now and it's just sitting there. If anybody else is aware of it, they're not attempting to use it. I was hoping to be able to use it live, to have a real active discussion with somebody ... but I guess it won't happen.

Not today.

Giant Stores and Businesses

We didn't always have giant chains of nearly identical stores all across the country, threatening to spread around the world. They are a recent phenomenon, begun by men not long departed. Names like Woolworth, Macy, Kresge, Walton, Penney, Sears, Ward and Price stand out, though you may not recognize some of them.

I don't know which was the original department store, the store that carried many kinds of merchandise with departments for clothing (mens, womens, childrens), hardware and so on. The first such stores, when new, were expected to fail. When they didn't, they were quickly imitated and the idea spread rapidly. Pioneering stores began to publish catalogs so that those who couldn't visit the store could still purchase from their standardized selection of merchandise.

I remember, as a very young kid, being taken to the lunch counter of Woolworth's for a hot turkey sandwich or a hot fudge sundae and being left there while my mother shopped. There were other "Five and Dime" stores, but that was the name I remembered. As a family, we did a lot of our shopping in Sears or Montgomery Wards and, later, J. C. Penney. Those stores were anywhere you went, mostly in the downtown area of any town or big city.

Then something new popped up: malls. These were places away from the hearts of cities where you could easily find parking, free, for shopping at a concentration of stores and food establishments (they weren't always restaurants any more). About 1954, the first Kresge's found its way into our area, soon changing its name to the name it uses now: K-Mart. It seemed to combine the cheapness of the five-and-dime with the convenience of the true department store. A few years later, the Walton family brought its larger, grander version into the area: WalMart.

The Price family introduced the membership club store. There were a few membership stores based on service criteria, such as Fed-Mart (owned by a German consortium that paniced and shut them all down) and FedCo (which seemed to simply give up after years of mismanagement), but the Price stores were based on providing goods and services for those who operated businesses of their own. They merged into the present CostCo stores and now compete with the Walton families Sam's Club stores.

The Walton family became one of the richest in the world. Will they go on to rule the world? Probably not. Their time, like that of the Microsoft Corporation, may have already reached its peak. They may be in decline. There are too many hungry new businesses out there, trying to come up with the next formula for business success. Whatever that may be, it will probably be different from any business plan we've seen before.

It looked for a while as if the business of the future might be based on the Internet. The Internet seems to favor small, specialized businesses over generalized giants such as have ruled what is called the brick-and-morter realm. And to build a thriving Internet business almost requires having a thriving business off of the Internet to begin with. No, the business plan of the future will probably be something else.

I have no idea what it might be.

Clié LiveJournal Updates

I managed to make another entry in my LiveJournal Weblog from my handheld machine, a Sony Clié T615C, which is apparently no longer being sold (I saw none in Fry's yesterday). That makes two consecutive entries that have gotten through, and I think I have finally figured out why.

As the handheld unit synchronized the last few times, I've been watching the status messages. When my entries go through, I see a message about a connection being established to port 80, a message I don't remember seeing when the messages have vanished into limbo. Port 80 is the pathway used by browsers to communicate with the Internet for display of requested information; sometimes they'll use port 8080 as an alternative. If something else is using port 80, my handheld doesn't make the connection but is too dumb to refrain from trying to transmit the information and from deleting the file.

But I wasn't running a browser. There is a program, Semagic, that comes up automatically at startup that allows me to sign on to update my LiveJournal. Apparently it grabs port 80 even though I haven't signed on. Shutting down that program before synchronizing is what allows the handheld to get the data through.

With any luck, I should be doing LiveJournal entries on the Clié regularly from now on.

Now I Remember

Radio Gutenberg

I've mentioned Project Gutenberg before. They take public domain printed works and make them available to the universe for free. They have a new aspect, Radio Gutenberg, which uses a computer to render a specially marked up version of their works into synthesized voices. Their computer currently generates 22 voices with a variety of inflections and three stage positions, stereo left, center and right.

Note that the site linked to above will give you an audio feed from the computer system. I'm not sure what their schedule is, but they are performing a variety of works, not all of which is Shakespeare. I imagine there are announcements on the regular Project Gutenberg site. Radio Gutenberg is still in its infancy, with both the software and the mark-up language being used subject to modification and improvement. It is impressive enough now. It could become spectacular.

Imagine what it could be like in just a few short years when PG reaches 10,000 books if they can automate much of the mark-up of the speech synthesis and package the program so the home user could have his own system read any of those books to him from a single DVD-R disk.

It could happen.

My Mind is Playing Tricks

Have you ever walked into a room and then realized that you've forgotten why you wanted to go there?

Well, I've been working around something similar all afternoon with this Weblog entry. I know I had something to say and that I wanted to say it here, but I can't remember what it was.

While trying to remember, I banged out something totally different about New Words on my Tripod Weblog. It didn't help. I'm still drawing a blank.

It's probably due to the crazy days I had Tuesday and yesterday. That threw my schedule off completely and loss of sleep does strange things to my poor, battered mind.

I miss my mind. It was so nice when it worked clearly and regularly. If I thought I could find a decent mind mechanic to repair it, I'd have it fixed.

Computer Speedup

At first I thought it was an illusion, that my computer couldn't really be running faster now that I've upgraded the video card. It shouldn't have made that much difference. But it did.

It has been a long enough period now since installing the card that I'm convinced that my computer is running about twice as fast as it was previously. I don't do that much in the way of graphics. Oh, I use GUIs (graphical User Interfaces) on all of my operating systems -- Windows 98SE, Mandrake 9.1 Linux and Lindows 3.0 / Debian Woody Linux -- and all three run visibly faster. Well, you can't count the Lindows since it wouldn't install without the upgrade to the AGP nVidia GeForce 2 system, but the others are no longer as sluggish as previously.

Now, is it the use of the AGP (Accellerated Graphics Protocol) connection or is it something having to do with nVidia and its drivers? Or both? Anyway, having the cheap new video card take over much of the video processing freed up the processor to do its thing much more quickly, thereby wasting less of my time.

So I can play more FreeCell.