samadhisoft.com

I heard today that my younger son, Chris, 26, has signed up to work on a cruise ship and has flown off to Juneau, Alaska to join the ship. They’re going to be gone 12 weeks and travel down the west coast and through the Panama Canal.

I was very happy to hear that he’d done this. He and I have been estranged now for several years and I couldn’t even begin to tell you what that’s all about because I don’t know – I’m hoping he’ll get over it at some point.

But, regardless, I’m really pleased that he’s made a move to go see some of the world before he’s gotten too drawn into jobs, relationships and responsibilities.

Go Chris! Good on ya, son.

Temperatures here in the Pacific Northwest have gotten back into their normal ranges and that’s a relief. Business here at the nursery has picked up as well after the heat wave passed.

Our trip to New Zealand is less than a month away now and preparations are beginning. I always feel a growing sense of excitement before a big trip.

I tried to upgrade the forum software portion of this site two days ago and botched it and the result is we have no forum capabilities here now. This isn’t a big loss because the readership here is still low enough that the need for a forum is still minimal but I hope that changes over time.

The problem with the forum upgrade is the same problem I have with a lot of the WordPress (that’s the blogging software I use here) stuff. It is well documented but I don’t find the documentation particularly well organized so it’s hard to wend your way through it in a top-down fashion. Also, the many PHP files which make up WordPress and its many plugin additions are very poorly commented so they are difficult to follow without a lot of close study and I’m usually moving at such a rate of speed that I want to spend five minutes to look at the code and than make a change and until I understand things better, that’s a dangerous method.

I suspect that the poor commenting within the code is due to the cafeine afflicted youth of the writers who’ve eschewed anything so old-school as commenting their code because anyone who’s really ‘with it’ can obviously noodle it all out in five seconds – and it is extra work and they just want to plunge to the end-game and the glory thereafter.

Quarter end taxes today. Rebuilding the sides of the dump truck today so we can carry loads to the dump so we can clean up the pipes storage area so we can install a second pipes rack so that pipe storage is better organized.

Meanwhile, I have a pile of magazines here I want to comment on here on the blog. Not to mention that I have a piece to write on the Perfect Storm which really need to get done since it is a core piece of what this blog’s about.

Whooo-yaa! I’ve had my coffee – out and at ’em.

Sunday was brutal. 95 which is way high for the Pacific Northwest. The only saving grace was that not many customers came to the nursery yesterday. And those that did, we asked what plants and trees they wanted and then marked on a map where they were to be found and sent them out into the heat while we stayed with the fans in the office. Not really good customer service but – at 95 degrees – there are limits to what one will do for money .

Still hot today but if Monday last week was any indication, we won’t have much traffic. Typically, in the summer, business gets slower because people are worried that without the rains we’re blessed with eight to nine months a year, they might have to water. Truth is, they’d have to water stuff anyway for at least the first year when they plant something new so there’s really no way to avoid the summer watering.

I was down at Starbucks again this morning. I’ve gotten to know a good group of people there and most mornings there’s someone interesting to talk with. Sometimes it’s motorcycles, sometimes it’s personal histories and sometimes it’s the environment. I think I’m a natural for the sidewalk cafe lifestyle .

I saw several interesting articles on-line and in a copy of Scientific American (June 2006) that I picked up last night so I’ve been writing up a storm posting and commenting on things.

One theme that I consider an essential part of the Perfect Storm Hypothesis (which is as yet unwritten because it will be a large and integrated bit of writing) has to do with essential causes. As in how does it happen that mankind has gotten the planet into the mess it is in?

Part of my thoughts about the causes relate to a favorite theme of mine, The Biological Imperatives (which I also need to write about so I have a set-piece to refer to when I use the phrase).

Another part has to do with the external and internal illusions which we human suffer from without knowing we have them. This is a facinating area which I’ve seen a lot on, in a piece-meal fashion, but I haven’t seen a lot of connecting of the dots to relate these ideas to mankind’s problems with decision making at global levels.

Related to this interest in illusions, there was an article in the June 2006 Scientific America entitled, The Implicit Prejudice, and it is about hidden biases that most, if not all, of us have. Mahzarin Banaji, a researcher, has been looking into this area since the late 80’s. She calls these illusions or mistakes in perception, “mind bugs”. And the tests that have been devised to reveal them are called Implicit Associate Tests (IAT).

There is a website here where you can go and take some of these tests and what they reveal may make you uncomfortable if you consider yourself a fair and unprejudiced individual.

I’m not going to talk any more about this here because I’m going to write an entry under Science and link to the article in Scientific American in it.

I’ve got so many things to write, I wonder if I’ll ever get half of it written.

Sunday morning 40 miles northeast of downtown Seattle I’m sitting at my local Starbucks at 8 AM and I’m sweating.   Yesterday was a bear at our nursery.  Over 90 and high humidity and the customers were out in force.  It was hard to walk outside without being fairly miserable and today looks like it’s going to be a repeat except that today, it’s only my wife, Sharon, and I working.  Nancy’s off to the Olympic Pennisula.

This morning, I’ve already posted on the United States’ failure to ratify the World Health Organization’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control and I’ve just seen another article I’m going to link to on the record heat wave sweeping California.   Hard to believe that folks  still disbelieve the Global Warming theory when  temperature records are falling all over the world this year.   I suppose when their hair catches on fire like in that episode of Seinfeld, they’ll get the idea.

We’re off for two weeks to New Zealand’s South Island on August 22nd and I’m beginning to get excited about it.   I’ll post more here as this unfolds.

Writing a Blog is, for me, a new experience. I tend to fuss with it a lot – tweaking this, tweaking that. Obsessive optimization you might call it. Then I worry, are people reading it. But then, after a bit of reflection, I think – it doesn’t matter, whether anyone reads it or not is an issue that will take care of itself. Just make sure the information is out there and you’ve done the obvious things to spread awareness of it and then let it go.

That usually lasts about a day, then I start tinkering again.

Yesterday, I changed how my RSS feed logic works. Originally, I just used the default RSS logic that’s part of a WordPress blog (this is a WordPress blog, by the way). But then I heard about Feedburner and decided to link into their services. Soon, I had a small icon that folks could use to link to my feeds and it routed through Feedburner so that they could collect statistics on how much traffic went through here via automatic feed links (verses people actually visiting the site using a web browser). But, then I read that if I used Feedburner this way, part of my RSS traffic would go by the Feedburner route and part by the original WordPress route and I would never have a complete picture of traffic.

Then I dug for awhile on-line to find out how to rearrange things so that all my RSS traffic would pass through Feedburner. I’d seen the method earlier but not saved the link. We’ve all been there and so I spent an hour or two launching searches, reading and getting distracted until I finally found methods for doing what I wanted.

Because so much of this blogging software is open-source stuff, there’s a real variation in the quality of documentation and a distinct lack of co-ordination. So, one method will seem very clear until you realize that this author’s solution deals with a very specific set of circumstances that applied to him and not, necessarily, to you. So, you’ll have to keep looking or wade into adjusting his method to fit your particular circumstances.

I found some stuff that looked reasonable but when I tried it, things stopped working altogether and I had to carefully backup. That’s the danger of cook-booking it without real understanding of what’s happening. I hate doing that but the truth is that much of the blogging software I am messing with is still beyond my grasp.

Eventually, I did it and all my RSS traffic is routed through Feedburner. Yah! I fully expected to see the little Feedburner icon show 40, 60, or 100 subscriptions. Yah, right. After several hours, it showed one. Overnight, the number advanced to three. I was underwhelmed.

I also use a plugin for WordPress called ShortStats and it shows me a lot of information about traffic. After the Feeedburner routing was installed, I noted that ShortStats no longer showed any RSS traffic. And as I thought about this, I realized also that much of the non-RSS traffic it had been showing me – was me!

I run an RSS News Aggregator named RSS Bandit and I’ve had it looking at my samadhisoft.com blog every 15 minutes (to see if new stuff has been posted) just like it does on a dozen other blogs I follow. So, it was going to my blog every 15 minutes day in and day out. That’s 96 visits in 24 hours. Grrrrr. That’s more than half of the non-RSS traffic I was thinking I had.

So, I blunder about obsessing on readership and wondering how after 25 years as a professional computer programmer, it seems that every 19 year-old in the world, full of caffine and with no education or experience seems to be able to figure this blogging stuff out at light speed while I’m stumbling in a fog.

Then there’s another aspect to all of this. I’ve written a few personal pieces here on the blog; philosophical and personal things but most of my content is reposts from news sites and other blogs. To be sure, these interest me and reflect my convictions but they are hardly value added content. Rather they are redistributions of things already out there.

I want to write more original stuff. Indeed, I’m bursting inside with stuff to say but good writing takes time and after I’ve tweaked things for an hour or two and checked my stats for the 15th time, I hardly have time to do anything but scan other blogs via RSS Bandit looking for something interesting to repost so I have the feeling of contributing.

But then I look at that little Feedburner icon saying I have three readers and I think, what could I do to get better distribution?

Meanwhile, other projects lie fallow. We have a website that our business uses. It works fine but it has needed some freshening up for months. More than 50% or our new walk-in business comes from that site’s out-reach so there’s every reason to give it some attention – If I could only get that pesky blog’s stats up first.

Then there’s the Windows based C++ software I run on our PDAs here at the nursery. it is a deep and complex puddle of stuff but I understand it well because of my previous professional experience – unlike the internals of WordPress and its plugins. Several years in the making, this s/w I’ve written could, if I pounded on it for a few more months, be a commercial product.

Blogs… Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh-grrrrrrrrr.

Ok, there. I feel better. Now, I wonder if anyone will ever read this.

A few minutes ago, I asked my wife to take a look at my blog so she could see my new beautiful automatically updating weather icon (at the bottom right of this page).

Well, when she pulled my blog up on her screen, it didn’t look anything like the one on my screen. The difference was that she was looking at it using Internet Explorer (IE) and I was using FireFox.

For a few minutes, I was convinced that the change I’d made to display the weather icon was the problem and that it was confusing IE but not FireFox. But, after I removed the change, the problem was still there on IE and I began to realize that the problem was actually a post I’d put up three days ago about the Falun Gong. Apparently, within he HTML code I’d copied then to build the post, there was some ‘extra stuff‘ that was confusing IE but not FireFox.

The bummer was that because I always use FireFox for my blogging updates, I hadn’t looked at the site using IE for many days and therefore the site has been hosed for anyone looking at it using IE since the 7th of July. Grrrrr.

Dear readers, if you notice this site looking distinctly weird, don’t assume it is you. Assume it is me (probably is) and drop me a E-mail at dennis at samadhisoft dot com saying, ‘Hey, wake up there! Your site is a mess.’

Monday morning. Fresh from Starbuck’s. TIme has a lot of cycles here at the nursery. Years, months weeks each have their rythym and predictability.

Today, last week’s done. The accounting’s caught up – we know what we made for the week. This morning, I’ll run the deposit down to the bank and mail out the week’s bills.

They say men are mono-taskers and that women are a lot better at multi-tasking. I don’t doubt that it’s true. But, in this job, I’ve learned to multi-task better than all my years in the computer industry ever taught me. Accounting, customers, computers, web sites, machinery, irrigation systems, personal projects and more all come and go in any day’s hours almost without predictabilty.

But, none of this is in the form of complaint. When I drove out today on my way to Starbucks, I took a look around at all the greenhouses and plants and trees standing everywhere. Greenery and health incarnate in the morning light. And I realized how blessed I am. Most of what I saw was my wife and my worker’s doings and yet I get to be a part of it all. And blessed by Good Livelyhood in the Buddhist sense. Blessed by a successful business and workers and customers that are a constant pleasure.

Someday, I’ll say more here about my wife, Sharon. But it’ll be a longer piece than I have time to wade into this morning. She is the central wonder and treasure in my life.