 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
We're just pushing out a series of short fact sheets on low-impact development topics, specifically how residential, commercial and public property owners can create on-site systems to route and clean storm water and runoff rather than dumping it all into the sewers. Rain gardens, green roofs, swales, permeable pavement, that sort of thing. I know at least some of you are already doing this sort of thing, or interested in trying it. So, here: Nine fact sheets, free for the downloading, in .pdf and accessible HTML versions. They're a little Oregon- and contractor-centric, but several of the techniques are within the reach of the average homeowner with a strong back and sufficient know-how, and most can be adapted for different climates and regulatory schemes. Even more fun, and *greatly* detailed: Our award-winning Oregon Rain Garden Guide. Also free, all 14 MB worth of lavishly illustrated .pdf. Or you can buy the 44-page printed version for $4.95 from http://marketplace.oregonstate.edu/seagrant (categorized, oddly, under "Social Sciences" - must talk to our distribution person about that). Have fun, and feel free to share the link. Tags: do-gooding, gardening, saving the planet, work
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Having a great little extended weekend with ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=92.2) johnpalmer, who took some vacation time so we could have more than two days together, yay. Yesterday was mostly gaming (nearly seven hours' worth, with breaks for food), and an excellent (if I say so myself) dinner featuring the late-summer trifecta (sweet corn, peaches and tomatoes). Today we're heading over to the coast to play, meet up with saoba and grillghod for lunch and maybe find a cheap motel for the night. Bonus: Great sky last night, and I finally had a chance to test the advice I've had about how to shoot photos of the moon (basically: Set the camera as if you were shooting bright sunlight, not darkness, because you are). Worked out pretty well, despite fast-moving clouds. (Need I add that I'm taking the camera along on our coastal road trip? Who knows what might result!) I hope you're all enjoying the weekend, too ... Tags: coast, food_porn, friends, fun, romance, weekend
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
The Sea Grant program at MIT (a sister program to my employer, Oregon Sea Grant) is looking for a full-time communications specialist (as in writing, editing, Web managing and PR, not as in IT): here's the link. Typically, these are small programs with even smaller communications units - I'm not sure, but the MIT position may be a one-person shop - but if you're adept at writing in a variety of non-fiction styles from news to technical reports, know a bit about marketing and are good at keeping lots of balls in the air without much supervision, they can be lots of fun to work for. Plus: You'll probably get to witness and take part in cool marine science and outreach. Note that they're specifically looking for someone skilled in using social networking, and their communicator is also their Webmaster. Sea Grant programs are federally funded (as part of NOAA), but affiliated with state institutions of higher ed, which set wages and benefits locally. You won't get rich, but the benefits are typically pretty good - and the combination of federal and state funding tends to buffer us from being laid off in tight budget times. You might want to learn more about the Sea Grant program before you apply. Here's the national program's site: http://www.seagrant.noaa.gov/And here's the MIT program site: http://seagrant.mit.edu/Feel free to pass the link along. If I know you and you're planning to apply, contact me about providing a reference. Tags: signal-boost, work
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
... till johnpalmer's train gets in around 8. It's been ages since he's been down here, what with his recent adventures in first-time home ownership, and though I've made several trips north to see him, it's always nice to have him in my space, too. (-: Especially when, as appears to be the case, my hard drive is showing distinct and escalating signs of failure - disk error messages showing up in the event log at a rate of several per hour, and incidents of balky performance in odd places such as trying to create a new folder or rename an old one (Yes, I've backed up all my data...) A shiny new 1.5TB drive arrived overnight from Amazon, and what the heck, this'll give us a chance to do a clean install of the copy of Windows 7 he gave me for Christmas. Since I'm about to become one of the guinea pigs early adopters for the university IT team's impending support of Win7 (they never did support Vista), it can't hurt to have the same OS on this machine, too. If all goes well (and the words "tempting fate" just crossed my mind, though I don't actually believe in fate), we'll get the bulk of that dealt with tonight, and then have tomorrow free to relax, maybe hit the farmers market and head down to Eugene to see friends who've just moved houses and could use some help unpacking and moving things around (and who are always good to see, anyway). The weather's just gorgeous today, and supposed to remain so much of the weekend. I have the windows and back door open, and the cats, at least, are thoroughly enjoying the opportunity to smell Outside Smells. (-: I'm planning on having a lovely weekend - how about you? Tags: friends, fun, geekery, romance, weekend
I feel ...:  relaxed
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
This is a long shot, but what the hell, ElJay is the source of all knowledge: My colleagues with Louisiana Sea Grant are on the front lines of public information and communication about marine issues in the Gulf, and as you might imagine, they're scrambling. Specifically, they're looking for good, easy-to-understand public information pieces - in print or on the Web - that tell people abouut what to expect from an oil spill - health concerns, volunteer cleanup techniques, what not to do, etc. Print or Web would be fine, as long as the information has a good scientific basis (so, not so much about the "how to clean an oil-slicked bird," because the research after the Exxon Valdez spill suggests that well-intentioned bird-washing doesn't save the animals, and in fact subjects them to additional stress which can kill some that might otherwise have survived on their own). Information in languages other than English (esp. Spanish and Vietnamese) would be good, too. If you know of anything good, let me know and I'll check it out and pass it on to my pals in Louisiana. Feel free to link to this post. Tags: environment, ocean, work
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
My boss is working with an international team to write a big grant proposal. The process is unwieldy as hell; right now, everyone's emailing Word docs with "track changes" back and forth, so there are multiple versions of the document flying around the world - from different time zones - and merging them is a daily nightmare for which he does not have time. So he wants me to find him a better tool - but one that works just like Word, with both revision history and comments built into the document ... and doesn't result in his having to collate multiple versions of the same document. He also wants collaboration that goes beyond group editing to "real discussion" of the proposal. But he's not interested in Web forums, chat, videoconferencing.... I've suggested Google Docs. He doesn't like it, because he's addicted to track changes - the Google "revision history" doesn't do it for him. I've suggested a wiki. He doesn't like it, for much the same reasons. Sharepoint is out, because our Sharepoint site is through the university and they don't allow extra-institutional logins. Even if they did, several of this team - including my boss - are Mac users, and IME Sharepoint isn't fully functional in anything but IE - whatever solution we find needs to be cross-platform and cross-browser. Also free. My initial impulse is to say "yeah, and I want a pony." But I'm sure some of you are more up on collaboration tools than I am. Suggestions, before I slit my throat? ETA: I walked away from the situation long enough to grab a bite of lunch and was able to go back to the boxx and explain why what he's asking for (a) does not exist and (b) will not solve his problem. I think he got it. He's going back to Google Docs, yay. Tags: eljay, technology, work
I feel ...:  annoyed
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
... from an excellent weekend in Washington. Gorgeous weather all weekend long, to the point where I realized it's time to pack some warm-weather clothes when I travel to see johnpalmer. Had lots of fun helping him do a bit of organizing in the new house, which is rapidly getting habitable (and will, no doubt, get that way even faster once the electricians finish their work so he has power somewhere other than the kitchen). We managed to check out a couple of new-to-us dining options in Renton (and miss checking out some others, which had evidently gone out of business. Gotta love this economy...). I can recommend A Terrible Beauty for one of the best breakfasts I've ever eaten at an American version of an Irish pub. I took along the little Nikon CoolPix s3000 camera I picked up on sale before I left Friday. It'll never replace the D80 in terms of taking great photos, but it was fun having a teensy camera in my pocket to whip out when something interesting or amusing caught my eye. Several photos of which are slowly uploading to Flickr as I type this. Oh: And if any of you emailed me over the weekend, please try again (assuming it was anything of import). I traveled without my laptop, which meant using PEAK's dreaded Webmail interface, and I managed to empty my inbox unread with a single, irreversible keystroke. Argh. Tags: photography, romance, travels
I feel ...:  sleepy
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
... is coming back from them. Work has been ... strange and irritating ... all week. Nothing huge - in some ways, things around the office are actually fairly mellow and amusing - but I keep thinking "I'm doing this when I could be out taking pictures???" Clearly, this means I need to take the camera with me when I hope the train north tomorrow to see johnpalmer and his new house (which I've already met, photographed and even measured, but it wasn't, y'know, his then.) (Speaking of photographs, O photo workshop classmates, look what we missed! See, I knew we should have stayed another week!!!) Tags: fun, photography, relationship, travels, work
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Psycho-emotional tug-o'war: Really looking forward to next week's Oregon Coast Photo Workshop with joedecker and a bunch of the rest of you (you know who you are!)... but also wishing I could make it up to Washington this weekend to help my beloved johnpalmer move into his new house. Argh, I say, and again argh: Why can't we be in two places at once? Or barring that: Where the heck is my teleporter? Ah, well. There will be fabulous photos (and good food, if klwalton and I have anything to say about that) all next week on the coast, and I've got Amtrak tickets north for the weekend of the 9th, by which time John will have spent enough time in his new home to have some sense of what needs doing to make it truly his own. Indigo Girls concert last night was terrific. Along with the every fabulous Emily and Amy and a great opening band, Coyote Grace, it was a great big family reunion of every lesbian and HBB in two counties. Cute li'l tattooed baby dykes, adorable multi-gen mommy-mommy-baby families and tons of steel-haired Women of a Certain Age (ie, my peers), some of whom I haven't seen since the Oregon Culture Wars of the early '90s. The Girls were in fine voice, they gave us *just* enough of "Galileo," etc. to feed the sing-along fever and played lots of newer stuff showing their contintinuing evolution as songwriters. They're definitely playing smaller venues this tour than back in the day; I asked someone if this means they're has-beens and the reply was, "Nope, not till they show up playing the county fair." Good point. Tags: fun, music, plans, relationship
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
If you're in the habit of posting links to Amazon or other e-commerce sites, you may have noticed recently that, when you click on one of them, instead of going straight to the site you get routed through something called outboundlink.net. The link looks just fine in your status bar if you mouse over it, but when you click it, the redirect occurs. Presumably this is a money-making scheme for LJ (they get a fraction of a cent or so for each click). But besides screwing up some users' legitimate affiliate links (set up so *they* can earn that fraction of a cent by sending people shopping), it's also a potential privacy concern, because it would pretty trivial for the referral company to track where those clicks are coming from. And by all reports, the javascript they're using to make it happen is kind of buggy - some links are redirecting to entirely diffrent Web sites. *sigh* Bone-headed move, sure to stir up another round of "That's IT, LJ, I'm breaking up with you!!!" That's *soooo* last decade... You can opt your journal out. Here's how. I've done it, and it appears to work. But we shouldn't *have* to. ETA - according to this thread, provided by jeliza, LJ will be scrapping the whole thing, but it requires a full code push. *headdesk* Oh, and the opt-out fix only fixes your own browsing experience; others hitting your links to any of the affected sites will still get the redirect until it's fixed. And here's a list of e-commerce sites the script appears to be redirecting. Tags: eljay, geekery, privacy, robber barons
I feel ...: annoyed
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
And that ain't no metaphor. I just spent a couple of hours doing garden cleanup out back; weeded the side border and raised bed; gave the latter its annual dose of composted chicken poop and mulch and generally got it ready for planting lettuce and peas, which can go in about any time now if I drag out the plastic cloche. I'm happy to see that the Italian parsley, which occupies the east end of the bed and which I use by the fistful when it's young and tender, did in fact self-seed and little baby parsleys are sprouting up all over. Some in the yard, too, but hey, I'm all for a mixed-ecology lawn. The raspberry canes, which I pruned a month or so ago, are showing loads of leaf buds. The sage and thyme appear to have overwintered well in their pots, as have the alpine strawberries I grow in an old galvanized steel mop bucket. I'll need to start afresh with other herbs, including the 9-year-old rosemary I let get so potbound that it wound up dead, dead, dead at the end of last season. Ah, well. Then I took a (literal) whack at the big job: cutting back the English ivy that's holding up the east fence and would take over *everything* if I didn't severely chop it each spring. My neighbor and I talk occasionally about trying to eradicate it (and replacing the fence), but we both get the shudders at the thought of what it would take to really get the stuff out, so we just try to keep it under control, he on his side of the fence and I on mine. Also spotted a couple of volunteer blackberry canes (thank you, birds), and grubbed the nasty things out by their roots, or at least as far down as I could follow them. Those will bear watching. That was rather a lot of stretching and reaching for sedentary old me, but I warmed up and cooled down, drank lots of water and took a good hot shower after, and feel pretty good. And there's acting class tonight, which always involves lots of movement, so I shouldn't seize up. I'm taking a vacation day tomorrow for a haircut and a bunch of errands I can't run on the weekends. Among them, a visit from the guy who mows my lawn; I want him to give me an estimate of what it would cost to have his crew rip out the entire west bed in front of the house, except for the lavender, and give it a load of well-composted soil. The bed is a *mess*, especially the ancient daphne, which looks like a tentacled creature with tufts of sad leaves at the end of its sprawling branches. And badly infested with grasses, too. It's the only full-sun bed I have, and I'd like to start over; I have in mind planting it with sun-loving perennial herbs (that rosemary, for instance), more bee attracting plants - and perhaps the peppers and tomatoes that just don't thrive out back, now that my neighbor's giant maple tree is shading the yard for half the day. Tags: domesticiity, garden
I feel ...:  accomplished
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
I need to eat something, but I don't particularly want to *cook* anything, because what I have in the house to cook is mostly more bother than it's worth to make in single-serving batches. I'm heading out of town for a few days, and by the time I get back, the leftovers would be nearing the end of their shelf life. Besides, I need to get laundry and packing done, so I don't really have the time to cook anything very interesting. Looks like breakfast for supper: I have eggs, I have bread, I have butter. Scrambled eggs on toast is is fast and easy and reasonably tasty. Working half a day tomorrow, then taking the train north to spend the weekend helping johnpalmer pack for his impending move into his very own house. So exciting (in no small part because he's invited me to help him shop for furniture, and it's great fun shopping on somebody else's dime). I need to wind some yarn for the train ride, too - I've managed to lose one of the nifty convertible gloves I made myself. )-: They're exactly the thing for outdoor photography: I make them with the thumbs and first two fingers finished just to the first knuckle, leaving the fingertips bare for maximum dexterity. The "convertible" part is a pocket that folds down over the back of the hand and can be flipped up to convert the gloves into cozy mittens when I'm not shooting. (If that doesn't make sense, think a hybrid of these and these - which, in fact, is just what they are.) Given that I've got joedecker's second annual Oregon Coast Photo Workshop coming up next month, I need to get knitting - and the beaded lace shawl I'm almost finished with is waaaaay too fiddly for the train. OK: Offa the Internet. Eggs and toast, laundry, packing. Tags: domesticity, travel
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
I didn't plan to be very productive today, but somehow it's turned out that way. It all started with a grocery run, with the goal of laying in some appetizing food for workday lunches, inspired by my new bento box. Lunch is the only meal I'm reliably eating every single day, thanks to my continued lack of appetite, so I'm trying to make it count, and the box's wee containers lend themselves to small servings of things with varied texture and color appeal, which is a pleasant way to eat. Got home and cooked up a batch of sushi rice, slivered up some nutrient-dense fillings (ginger, Jerusalem artichoke, smoked salmon, avocado, onion, red and orange bell peppers, wasabi mayonnaise, black sesame seeds) and made a couple of makizushi rolls, then hand-formed the rest of the rice into tenmaki balls around variations of the same fillings. Steamed and shelled a bag of edamame. That, with soy-vinegar dipping sauce and a handful of crunchy wasabi peas for snacking, will take care of three days worth of lunches; For the rest of the week I have hummus and naan (which I prefer to pita), dried apricots, raw almonds and still more Jerusalem artichoke (which I'm really enjoying, raw and thinly sliced then marinated in lime juice, cayenne and sea salt). Somewhere in there, inspired by a post from elusis earlier this week, I threw together a half batch of homemade pizza dough, let it rise while I was doing chores, and made a small deep-dish pizza in my cast-iron skillet with smoked salmon, mozarella and onion for dinner. Yum - I could pretty much taste everything, too! Also: Laundry washed and put away, dishes ditto, kitchen cleaned up, updates for a couple of my pro bono Web clients, e-mail newsletter sent for another, cat-hair remediation (of the floors and of the cats, who are starting to shed by the fistful as the weather warms up). Hauled the garbage and recycling carts in from the curb and had a pleasant conversation with my neighbor, who was doing some outdoor chores. I feel totally justified in blowing the evening playing TitanQuest with johnpalmer. (-: Tags: domesticity, weekend
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
As most of you probably know by now, johnpalmer and I enjoy playing adventurish/kill-the-monsters-and-steal-s tuff computer games in multi-player mode. It's something entertaining we can do when we're together and run out of steam for more active pursuits, and when we're apart, gaming has provided us with occasional "date nights" that can be lots more fun than just chatting on the phone. But chatting is definitely part of the fun, so a game needs certain components (besides amusing gameplay) to make it really enjoyable for us: * The ability to run multiplayer via local networking when we're in the same physical space, and via either direct TCP/IP connections or a game server that doesn't dump us into a world with a bunch of other players - neither of us has any real interest in World of Warcraft or those other massively social MPGs. * An easy-to-use in-game chat function. We've enjoyed several years of fun with various versions of Diablo and Sacred, and for the past several months, TitanQuest/Immortal Throne. But the chat function in TQ is less than optimal - trying to use it in game tends to end up with someone (usually me) getting killed by a monster while trying to type in banter. So we decided to see if we could set up voice connections that would let us actually talk while gaming, and after some research, we've both installed Skype. I picked up a nice, not-too-expensive USB headset on Friday, and we tested Skype out yesterday. Love it - really nice, clear sound, startlingly better than the telephone, and the noise-cancelling abilties of our headsets do a great job of screening out background sounds (including, we hope, the game's sound effects.) Later today we plan to see what happens when we fire up the game. If the VOIP doesn't introduce unacceptable game lag, I think we may just have a winner. (I know this is all "old" technology to lots of folks, but I still get a geeky frisson when I'm able to make stuff like this work without resorting to documentation or tech support. Old dogs, new tricks, all that)... Tags: fun, games, relationship
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Previous 
