I’m trying to get through all the broccoli this week. Then it’s time to replant.

I generally find blogging about consumer goods a big fat bore, so it’s not usual for me to spend time writing about this or that new object that entered the house or to make more than a passing mention of some technological gimcrack giving up the ghost (martini-soaked salvage laptops being the exception that proves the rule).

However, since I killed our main A/V receiver amp due to fiddlin’ idiocy (bright sparking snap and curl of smoke included), I did replace it. Both receivers are capable surround-sound monstrosities with enough plugs on the back to cause a straight-up nervous breakdown. The new unit, happily, includes onboard digital-to-analog translation circuitry, which is a good thing. The old unit did not, and given my proclivity for inventing new harebrained ways to try to run computer-stored audio or video assets through the A/V, I was constantly trying to figure out why signal A was not coming out of output channel B.

Whatever: we all know I’m a classic techno-eejut, prone to cross-connect this thing with that thing in ways that, um, produce a bright sparking SNAP followed by a distressingly ghostlike curl of smoke. I’m noting this here because – oh joy! – The setup on the new unit literally went perfectly. I mean I, pulled it out of the box, traced the tangle of wires leftover from the unfortunate corpse of its’ predecessor, tried to remember which cable went to what in or out, and fired it up.

Unbelievably, each hookup was right.

Today, I spent most of the day downstairs working on scanning a friend’s earliest ‘zine output. In order to do so, I had to disassemble an older computer and consolidate its’ parts with a computer of equal age but which I have updated more frequently than the cannibalized unit. Two PCI cards and an internal hard drive, all moved from one vintage computer into another.

The whole process, including verifying that an even-more-ancient SCSI scanner works with the just-moved vintage PCI SCSI card, took fifteen minutes. One flaw emerged: the sticky tape used in the ten-year-old scanner to fix the platen glass had failed. Everything else worked exactly as it should.

I suppose I should take this as a sign that I know what I am doing, but I know that I do not, and therefore won’t.

On a countervailing note, my right ear is either totally clogged with wax, or a catastrophic ear infection has resulted in a massive loss of audio sensitivity overnight.

A happy, fortuitous even, independence day to you and yours, where and whenever you may be.

I should note that Vivian has accomplished total victory in her plumbing project.

In a coup of marriage-fu, Viv is tackling a plumbing project in the basement, while I am attempting to set up a 900mhz wireless speaker unit to use the B speaker output on our main A/V system.

I hope Viv is having better luck, as the receiver powered itself off a couple of times and finally generated a loud “snap,” accompanied by an orangish sparklight and a substantial puff of bluish, ozone-scented smoke. Happily, the receiver still attempts to start up, but shuts down again as soon as it would normally activate the sound-carrying components.

The owner’s manual helpfully says the ‘amp protection circuit has been activated.’ I’m thinking at the very least I blew a fuse. Supposedly it will reset in an hour. We shall see.

UPDATE: Stereo definitively broken, no water flow through plumbing project. JOY!

I have sworn to keep my current machine until it’s seen four years of service. I had been thinking that would put my reup in Spring of ’09.

I just looked at the serial number of the trusty old axe and the manufacture date is September 2004. Hm. I think I must have bought it within a month or so of that date.

Looks like I can shift some hardware acquisition up in the year. Good!

Tumblr has several methods to enable RSS republication, but they limit the updates to hourly, too slow for my needs.

Enter the Tumblr API and this guy.

Last thing to find is a Y! Pipe that does this sort of thing via API post calls to Tumblr, and it’s all over but the shouting. And the timed executions.

The garden has finally, and definitively, tooken.

We have been eating fresh greens every day for about three weeks, which is great.

The first head appeared in the broccoli overnight. I have six plants in the box, two big ones and two tiny ones indoors. I imagine I’ll rotate these to the outdoors as we harvest.

Tomato cuttings all propagated successfully. Next week I will be shifting all the tomatoes outdoors and see if I need to buy more plants this year or not. I didn’t do any pruning on the two I kept from last year until it was clearly too late to be of much good, and the really hardy one, a beefsteak plant, now has some sort of mildew. The cherry plant is fighting the yards and yards of stem it has to push juice through and seems unlikely to last much longer.

Potatoes all sprouted, onions are fine, and the carrot seedlings are mostly OK, save for some residual critter-diggins issues. That crittur, as yet unidentified, is the proximate cause of this post.

I laid in some corn, waaay too early, and it was unclear to me that the seedlings would survive the snow and such we went through in April. As it happened, the seedlings mostly did fine with the snow, but the continued low temperatures more or less arrested all growth and beginning about three weeks ago, they began to die back. That was fine with me, I just shifted the runty sprouts about until I had consolidated some new planting room and added potatoes.

About a week after I noticed the critter diggins in the carrots, I noticed that the animal had started digging in next to each corn seedling as well. At first, I just packed the soil in, thinking that since the seed had sprouted there was no decent food for tiny fellas.

In the last week, I have come home to see two or three of these tender stalks literally nipped at the base of the plant. The combination of digging and nibbled stalks makes me think it’s either rats or squirrels. I haven’t seen a rat around the house for a couple years, but I see several small, generally cheerful, squirrels every day.

I’m still cogitating, but based on this weeks loss rate, I will not have any mature plants from this run at corn. I gather I can replant now and still get a crop, which is fine, but I’ll need to resolve the problem. I suppose I wouldn’t be as irritated if the crittur was actually eating the stalk, but nooo! It’s nip and nibble and off to the next stalk!