2/26 Seedling starts

i included the ‘time to harvest’ duration listed on the seed packet.  According to information from WSU, you need to add 50% to the time to harvest numbers  for this region due to the lack of summer heat.
I think I’m a week or two late in starting these tomatos.  Last year a stupice came up on it’s own in the garden, from seed dropped the previous year!  It did pretty well, and even set fruit.  The fruit never ripened, but none of the other tomoto plants ripened much fruit, either.

Tomato:

Manitoba(66 days) Determinate

Sun Gold Cherry(65 days) Indeterminate

Matina(75 days) Indeterminate

Gold Nugget(60 days) Determinate

Stupice(60-65 dats) Indeterminate

Tomatilla

Verde(60-68 days)

Cabbage

Derby Day(58 days)

Broccoli

Small Miracle(56 days)

Cauliflower

All-the-year-round(70-90 days)

Leek

Fall Time(80-90 days)

Strawberries

Mignonette

Italian Alpine

Lettuce

Esmerelda(48 days)

Some random seed from a Salad Blend packet

Parsley

Forest Green(80 days)

Basil

Sweet Basil

Lemon Basil(60-70 days)

Initial draft of garden planting schedule

I’m attempting to formulate a generic planting schedule for the Baring microclimate. There’s not much collected data for Baring, so I’m starting out with the Seattle numbers, and hedging a couple weeks towards the conservative side. It’s a good thing too, because we’ve had a run of real nasty cold and snowy weather the past week. Seattle was hit with some cold weather, but not as nasty as up here on the western slopes.

Last Frost: Seattle(3/24) Baring(4/7)
First Frost: Seattle(11/11) Baring(10/25)

General Planting Schedule
LF=last frost

Phase 1 (2/24-3/10 LF-4 to LF-6)

Iffy weather. If it’s a mild year, get an early start on Phase 2. If not, then keep the transplants indoors, and sow seeds cautiously.

Phase 2(3/10-3/24 LF-4 to LF-2)

Seeds to plant: peas, spinach, lettuce
Transplant out: broccolo cabbage, cauliflower, onions, parsley, lettuce

Phase 3( 3/10-4/7 LF to LF-4)
Seeds to plant: beets, carrots, chard, radishes
Transplant out: chard

Phase 4(4/7 to 4/21 LF to LF+2)
Seeds to plant: cucumbers, cantaloupe, winter squash
Transplant out: cucumbers, eggplant, cantaloupe, peppers
This is just a general set of guidelines, to give a quick view of what I should be looking at planting, or starting indoors. A specific planting out schedule needs to be set, then work back to find out when I need to be starting my seeds inside.

How international outsourcing is different than industrial innovation

Speaking from a software engineer’s perspective, the current move to outsourcing more and more work to India, and other countries is a disturbing trend. I at first feared that my coding days may be nearing an end. Why have a well paid American engineer to code up those requirements when they could be done overseas for a fraction of the price(ignore that myth for the time being)?

I initially thought of it as the inevitable march of business process, driven by the drumbeat of the stockholders yowling out PROFIT at regular intervals. The industrial revolution, similar in result to the current outsourcing ‘revolution’, initially produced many unemployed by replacing their jobs with machines, which worked faster, cheaper, longer, and more accurately.  Of course, the labor unions worked to keep the machines at bay, but their gradual introduction was inevitable.  Now, fast forward to today.  American engineers are being ‘replaced’ by their Indian counterparts.  However, the difference between the Indian engineer and the industrial machines is that, whereas a single machine could replace multiple workers, the opposite is true.  It takes multiple Indian engineers to replace a single American engineer.  It’s sort of the industrial revolution, in reverse.  Now, there’s nothing innately ‘bad’ about an Indian engineer, which makes them inferior.  It’s the fact that the barriers to the Indian engineer are manyfold, and include cultural, language, time, and education differences.  Since the requirements for software are generated in the U.S., by American engineers, all the translation is done by the outsourced engineer.  In the industrial revolution, the requirements were translated by the American engineer into various types of ‘machine language’.

I’m still not sure as to the impact this observation has on my understanding and opinion on outsourcing(not sure I have an opinion yet), but I find it interesting nonetheless.

The strange, yet practical, wisdom of kids

Ben(5), and Luke(3) seems to have an uncanny ability to understand the following, which I can’t entirely explain.

1.) Classify a new foodstuff as either a vegetable or fruit with almost perfect accuracy, even foods they’ve never seen before, such as a celery root.  I hesitantly propose that the following heuristics are involved, although I am unsure as to the hierarchy into which they are organized.

• It’s ugly – vegetable
• it’s colorful – fruit (although identification of an eggplant as vegetable was correct, and this doesn’t hold for carrots).
• Some as yet understands olfactory skill that can pick up subtle cues from the different odors fruit and vegetables put off.  This could actually be proven experimentally.

Interestingly, a quick poll showed that they differed on the classification of a tomato.  Luke classified it as a fruit, whereas Ben classified it as vegetable.  This seems to match the confusion present in the general populace as to the tomatoes classification. I, myself, am not sure of it’s classification without googling it.
2.) Know when someone is opening up some junkfood.  I believe their subconcious picks up on some minute crinkling sound, which keys up their concious to immediately seek out said junkfood.  This goes hand in hand with Luke’s(3) ability to know when packaged candy is chocolate or not.

Stockin’

Bought a position in PPDI Friday. It’s been on my watch/acquire list for a couple weeks, and it’s been strong(relatively speaking) the past few days, while just about everything else has been on crack, either weaving erractically, or bombing out.

Suncor would be an attractive buy, except that there’s been some unfavorable news on the the Canadian tar sands, and Suncor is big into the tar sands, so I skipped out on them.

Last weeks action:

Sold out my QQQQ position for a minor loss.   Sold at 41.23, bought at 41.92 on 1/27.   I thought it was ready for a move,  but it just  rolled along for awhile, causing me some annoyance along the way.  I sold it to make room for PPDI, which I thought might actually do something.
Bought a position in PPDI for 68.25.  I waited long on my stochastic and MACD signals than usual, partly because I’m feeling conservative at the moment.

I still have a couple of open positions ready for a stock buy, which I kept in cash for the past couple of weeks.  I’m looking to buy into a couple good stocks next week, if an oppurtunity presents itself.

Me in the shop at night

me_in_shop_action

Originally uploaded by thomastaranowski.

My long suffering wife, lonely from being a shop widow, came out to take a photo of me while I was working at night. I thought it turned out pretty well.

Scopin’ the garden

02-13-06_1158.jpgOriginally uploaded by thomastaranowski.

The flower ring out front. As you can see, the snowdrop flowers are actually in bloom, and the rest of whatever the heck is in there is coming up.

This was last week, BEFORE the arctic front came in!

BenWithSwordInKitchen

BenWithSwordInKitchen

Originally uploaded by thomastaranowski.

Picture of Ben fighting dragons in the kitchen.

Me with Jane Fonda :)

EF001345

Originally uploaded by thomastaranowski.

Just kidding. Anyway, everyone at work said I bore a striking resemblance to the dude with Jane Fonda. ROCK ON!

Antique movie theatre seats for sale.

I have the photos at Flickr, and it’s listed on craigslist for $25. Who knows!?