Idiomatic Expression

Today, Mark Warner signed a bill making it a felony to send high-volume unsolicitated bulk email! I think it is time to switch to a Virginia based email account! The Washington Post has the details.

In celebration of my ninety-ninth blog entry, I bring you Agent 99.

Barbara Feldon!

I have been looking around for organic lawn care advice, and stumbled across Organic Lawn Care For the Cheap and Lazy. Being both cheap and lazy the advice presented here is pretty much perfect for me. I want to try to keep an organic lawn for a couple of reasons.

1. Chemicals are expensive;
2. Chemicals are difficult to apply (although chemical burns look like mini crop circles);
3. My lawn top soil is pretty health; and
4. most importantly because I am not terribly fond of poisoning myself.

The website sets out a couple of lazy rules to an organic lawn.

Must do:

• Set your mower as high as it will go (3 to 4 inches).
• Water only when your grass shows signs of drought stress and then water deeply (put a cup in your sprinkler zone and make sure it gets at least an inch of water).

Optional:

• Fertilize with an organic fertilizer in the fall and spring. I recommend the Ringer brand.
• Have the pH of your soil professionally tested. Add lime if it is below 6.0 and gardener’s sulfur if it is above 7.0.
• How much top soil do you have? See how deep a shovel will go into the soil. How deep can you dig a hole in one minute? If you have less than four inches of soil, you must add topsoil.

Copyright © 1996, 2000

So far I seem to be doing pretty well with the “in a nutshell rules”.

I have no problem setting my lawn mower to its highest setting; unfortunately I don’t have a working lawn mower yet. My Father-In-Law has donated a beautiful TORO that can be set to mow at 4-inches, unfortunately it hasn’t run in the last four years. This weekend I used the weed-whacker left over from the last tenants to keep the front lawn under control. Hopefully we will get the lawnmower to the small engine repair shop in Vienna soon (three hours of tinkering with it didn’t do much good).

So far we have had so much rain that it hasn’t been necessary to water the grass seedlings much less the whole lawn, but again I have no problem watering the lawn less often, and spending more time between going outside and repositioning the sprinkler.

In another sign of the coming apocalypse, a man tried to eat a live dog in Syracuse, NY. If you are going to try to eat a dog, maybe you should start with a Chihuahua, and not a German Shepherd!

If you use MS Windows either by choice or by force, you have probably been perplexed as to what in the hell was going on inside your little beige box. Compared to OpenBSD, Solaris, or OSX the tools supplied by MS don’t give you an easy way to monitor the internal workings of the windows family of operating systems. I have spent the last week working with a CA beta product and had been having a pretty tough time until on of the CA programmers I was working with recommended DebugView to monitor the debug output.

I have also found TCPView extremely helpful in determining the root of problems with the distributed application that I am working with. TCPView shows all TCP and UDP endpoints on your system, I have even started running this on my laptop to keep an eye on my network connections (you never can tell when your employer is going to try and slip some new spy ware on your computer)!

There are quite a few other useful tools at Sysinternals.com, and none requires more than unzipping the .exe and starting the program.

If the income tax were voluntary would you still pay?

What about if you got to decide where your tax money was spent?

This year I have added a small optional tax to, payable to Fairfax County, to my tax bill. I am donating to both the Fairfax County Park Foundation and the Fairfax County Open Space Land Preservation Fund. I am contributing less than one month’s worth of the compulsory tax, but hopefully it will translate to one square cm of open and a couple of grass seeds paid for by yours truly.

If you can afford it, take this time to donate to the local causes you value. If you don’t fund them, who will?

Have you ever taken a close look at your snack food? I mean a REALLY CLOSE look?

If you think that was scary, check this out, and these aren’t to pretty either.

When I was a kid life was much simpler, meals were prepared for me, we were never out of Kool-Aid or milk, and snack time meant OREOS! Not Coffee’n Cream Oreos, not Chocolate Creme Mini Oreos, and definitely not Reduced Fat Oreos! At some point the continual push for increased (and not maintained) profits has pushed CEOs to pervert my childhood! Now there are so many different varieties of chocolate and creme fat-ass wafers that I would be surprised if your local mom-and-pop killing mega-super-conglomo mart has room to display them all!

At least I can still buy the Oreos that I remember from my childhood. The geniuses at Frito Lay in their infinite wisdom removed my favorite childhood snack chip from the market. I can no longer buy the Doritos that I enjoyed with my white-bread PB&J sandwiches. A fresh bag of deep fat fried Taco flavored Doritos is as close as your neighborhood 7-11. The closest you can get to original Doritos is NACHO CHEESIER Doritos! They might as well be shit-flavored Doritos, because I am never buying a bag.

Choosy moms can still choose Jif, but now they have to decide between Berry Blend, Apple Cinnamon, or Chocolate Silk Jif (among other varieties). At least the Chocolate Silk variety is honest, and looks like the warm pile of crap that it is!

Who made the decision that every popular food item needed countless inferior sub-varieties? I really want to know so I can wind my magic watch backwards, find the bastard, and blow a Morton Pot Pie sized hole in his head. Then I would march my idiot murdering self to the closest 7-11 and buy a big bag of ORIGINAL Doritos to eat on my trip back to the present.

Keep you dirty stinking money-grubbing paws off of my FRIGGIN childhood.

Room Without A Window
the position being taken
is not to be mistaken
for attempted education or
righteous accusation
only a description
just an observation
of the pitiful condition
of our degeneration

walls made of opinions thru which we speak and never listen
ceiling made of pride vicious and self satisfied
door that’s made of rage hard and slowly aged
always closing tighter with every war that’s waged

room without a window cant see out…

Do you need a library for your pr0n? Try libpr0n!