My First Pepper!

I haven't been able to sleep all night, so I finally took the birds outside for a morning stroll in the garden. It had just rained during the night, so the morning was fresh and cool. The birds fluffed up immediately and Charley started singing a mating song. He hasn't sung it so fully in weeks; lately, he's only been singing a few truncated notes at a time before losing interest. They like being outside.

Anyway, I've been trying to grow a veggie garden for two years now. This was the first year I successfully got my sweet peppers to sprout and grow into plants. I just read up on peppers, and found that I'm supposed to harvest the first central fruit to encourage bushier growth and more cropping. I had been saving my one good-looking pepper, hoping it would grow large and eventually red/orange/yellow. But, after reading that, I decided to go outside and harvest my one pepper.

My first pepper!

Maybe I'll post photos if I can figure out how to do that later. I hope the cropping works! I need some vegetables going here. All season working on the garden, and all I've had so far is two and a half heads of lettuce and a zucchini the size of my pinky. The spinach, eggplant, other lettuce, broccoli, bak choi, gai lan chinese cabbage, jalapenos, onions and tomatoes have all flopped so far.

Last year, I was able to get broccoli, basil, a bit of dill and coriander, and green tomatoes, so if the sweet peppers crop well, and I can get both last year's and this year's successes, then I'd almost have a real honest-to-goodness productive garden next year! I'm very excited!

Why Blogger Sucks

-Despite my deliberate failure to include a First Name and Last Name in my Blogger profile, Blogger somehow pulled my name into my blog posting and published my blog with my full name included, even though my Display Name was given as "S".

-I filled in First/Last name with some other nonsense words to try to republish it, but no matter how many times I saved and resaved my profile, Blogger still displayed my full name (that I never gave the website!) on my blog.

-I deleted my blog post, and republished the content, hoping that the Display Name would finally show up as "S". Wouldn't work.

-I checked the Help section, but no information was given on how to correct this, and I couldn't find a contact email or phone number for support.

-I deleted my entire blog, resaved my profile a few times (the First/Last Name fields NEVER had my real name in there, so I don't know how Blogger pulled that information), reposted and republished and reset all my options, and now, 7 hours later, my private info seems to be gone. Finally. I hope.

Hey BLOGGER! If you tell your users that something is "The name used to sign your blog posts", please actually use that field to sign the blog posts, and not whatever info you got with whatever spooky ways you use to invade our privacy instead!

A Day of Worsts

This is an experiment. I've never blogged before, and stopped diarizing years ago, so I figured I'd give it a go.

Today has been the worst technology day I've had in a long time, and of course, it happened at the worst possible time, since today was the one day I needed a certain document for an early appointment tomorrow. Thinking that the bulk of the work (finalizing the document) was finished, I procrastinated until well after midnight to print it out.

My little blue Epson Stylus wouldn't print.

Okaaaay -- I figure I just need to run it through some Printer Utility tests to clean the heads, check alignment, check the nozzles. I run the nozzle tests, and from a few little gaps, it looks like I just need some head cleaning. So I clean the head a few times.... but it still won't print. I'm getting blank pages printed out. The ink wells are about a half or a third full.

So I give up on the little blue guy, and decide to try my old PC's laser printer instead. Before wasting my time retyping the document, I do a few test prints. Everything seems to be working fine. So I start retyping the document and suddenly the keyboard stops responding. The CAPS LOCK, NUM LOCK, and SCROLL LOCK lights start going wild, blinking on and off. The computer emits a little wail, intermittent at first, then it's a constant screeching. It sounds like a little bird in pain. I reset the computer, hoping it'll clear up the problem... But no, now the PC won't even load up Windows at all, since it gets stuck on the start up process, giving me a "No Keyboard or Keyboard Broken Error" type message. Stupid me. I should have printed out what I had before resetting the thing. Resetting, rebooting, resting, yelling, moaning, begging... Nothing works to bring back my keyboard.

I'm back to the blue guy, my Stylus. I run some more tests, try some more test prints, hoping something will turn up. Nothing, until I try printing everything in purple which gets me 1.5 printed sheets before the purple runs out and fades to a faint cyan. I guess the ink monitoring utility isn't too accurate, or something is wrong with the ink jets. Though purple and cyan aren't the most professional ink colours to print documents with, I guess it's better than showing up empty-handed. I can always pretend it's International Purple Day.

+++

I tried to watch The Passion Of The Christ today. I spotted the DVD at the library and decided to borrow it; having heard loads about it, I was curious what the buzz was all about. The Passion now has my vote for the MOST BORING MOVIE EVER. I suffered through an excruciating 10 minutes before deciding to fast-forward to see if I could find anything of interest. Even at a fast-forward speed of 2x, it was too monotonous to bear so I had to compromise by fast-forwarding at 4x speed. This took me to 18 minutes into the movie, at which point I decided to slow down to normal speed and do a survey. With nothing promising on the horizon, I wandered out of the room to clean up the kitchen a bit. Have to admit it's pretty bad when cleaning seems more interesting to me than watching the movie.

On the possibility that I wasn't giving The Passion a fair chance, I decided to check imdb.com reviews to see if there were any secret tips for surviving the movie. Maybe other viewers with higher thresholds for total boredom would have some sage advice to the tune of "Stand strong through the mind-numbing ennui of the first 19 minutes -- once you get past that trial of character, the rest of the film is brilliant!" Nothing so optimistic greeted me at IMDB; the first review I saw acknowledged that The Passion might hold special interest for those who are religious, but evaluated it as an utter failure in terms of being a film.

Love it or hate it, like or dislike, I think art must always interest the viewer. We have to stick around long enough to experience the work. And while I only saw the first minutes of this one, I'm pretty sure I'm not the target audience. At least not today.

I'm open to change, though. So if anyone has any sage advice for me on how to appreciate The Passion Of The Christ, whatever it is (Do you think fast-forwarding at 8x speed will do it?) please let me know!