Garden Update Spring 2015

I have no idea who, if anyone, is interested in my gardening experiment. But here is my update, Spring 2015.

At first I was not going to have a garden this year since I have learned most of what I expect to learn and since I have much less time than before.

But I decided to plant another round anyway for the following reasons: the incremental work since everything has been set up is small, I own all the seeds and materials I need for most of this next season (e.g. insecticidal soap, copper solution, time release fertilizer), and because I wanted to see if I could get better results from the peas and beans disease wise by spreading them out. Also to see if I could get the lettuce to not bolt so fast by planting them in the shade.

So we planted

4 x rows pole beans

4 x rows sugar daddy peas

2 x rows oregon sugar peas

1 row and 1 container romaine lettuce, 1 in shade and 1 not

2 x containers basil

4 x containers sweet 100 cherry tomatoes

2 x rows carrots

I will plant a few containers of cucumbers and a few of semi-determinate hybrid tomatoes if I can find any.

In the past, a planting of this type has resulted in occasional useful crops of all the above vegetables, with some disease and bolting problems. As long as you are not depending on them, they are nice to have fresh from time to time. The pole beans and the peas are by far the most regularly available and actually useful (as I do not normally buy them at the store due to the prices).

The garden experiment is mostly over. It is fascinating to get a feel for the genetic and development issues in plants, and it is also fascinating to see with my own eyes the continuous struggle with disease and pests. If you have never seen this before, it is worth it. As an economic or health activity (e.g. save money or improve health with fresh vegetables) it is marginal. I would have to invest much more and scale way up before the incremental value was worth the investment.

Do Not Leave Those Naked Pictures of Yourself on Github

One of the not-so-entertaining results of our civilization's obsession with computing and cash is the "fuck our customers we don't care" approach taken by the consumer electronics and computing industry towards such things as systems administration, backup administration and security administration and its impact on our lives.  Now we are all forced to take on these dreary sub-specialties or face one of many horrible fates that this technology mania has brought down upon us: the wiped disk, the non-working backup, the zombie computer used by Chinese or Russian spies, or worse, the "hactivist" holier-than-thou swine ready to exploit your assets to mine Bitcoin or some other juvenile and anti-social goal for their self-appointed crusade.   We are all now responsible for these and many other tasks and woe unto those of you who think you are above such things for then your sins as documented by your iPhone will appear on social media and there you will be, in full color, engaging in some drunken bisexual orgy as an undergraduate for everyone to see just as you are running for your first political office or other responsible position.

Be warned, if you wish to avoid this or some other horrible fate, there are a few hundred things you need to pay attention to at any one time, although that list is a moving target. You have to know enough to keep yourself out of trouble.  No one else will do this for you. 

Many of us use Github as a repository for source code for our projects and collaborations. In the past I have used it off and on, but these days I use it more or less 7/24. As part of your repository, one could keep security strings that give access to various other resources that exist out there, such as the Amazon cloud. A friend did just that and forgot about it. Although he certainly knew better a few years later he made that repository public (it was either that or delete it, he wasn't working on that particular idea anymore).

Well his repository contained security information for his cloud account on Amazon which he also wasn't actively using and some hackers grabbed it and ran up a bill in the many 10s of thousands of dollars per day. Amazon.com caught it nearly immediately and my friend will not be liable for most of this bill, hopefully not any of it.

My friend is beating himself up because of course he knew better. He does know better, by the way. Don't let this happen to you. He suggests reading the following discussion on these issues to learn how to keep passwords out of your Git repository.

http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/163506/how-does-one-handle-sensitive-data-when-using-github-and-heroku

Never forget it's a jungle out there and that, generally speaking, people are scum.

Fierce Darwinian Struggle and Proof of Cooperation Between the Facilities in Computer Animation

When a friend made a proposal to try to manage the disaster that is unemployment in visual effects and computer animation in this country, his proposal required that visual effects and computer animation companies work together in some way in the area of labor, somehow sharing people in a way that I did not understand.   Of course.  Sure, makes perfect sense.  After all, the production facilities are well known for cooperating in this and so many other areas.

Just kidding.  The only thing the facilities do to each other is to beat each other over the heads and shoulders and try to get in a killing blow.  I can cite example after example in which the worst human behavior is exhibited by one facility against another.  They see life and the world as a zero sum game, if they win then the others must lose and vice versa.

Well, I was wrong.  To my amazement, three important facilities in animation and visual effects collaborated in an important area for years but they kept it quiet because of their inherent modesty and good will. Their collaborative efforts were directed for the greatest good of society and in the greatest traditions of American industry which aspires to grossly violate labor laws and destroy the economic well-being of their workers.

It all starts about a year ago when a founder of an important early computer animation company made a public proposal to address some of the dilemmas facing employment in this country for the computer animation proletariat. 

My criticisms of his plan were as follows: a. it did not address the subsidies that made certain industries, particularly visual effects, uneconomic in this country. b. it assumed that visual effects and animation companies could be cooperative in their use of labor, which I doubted, and c. it did not address the problem of vast oversupply of people who were qualified or thought they were qualified to work in production, thus driving prices down for labor and making it unlikely that they would be able to earn a living wage or live in security in this field.

Furthermore, my idealistic friend is well aware of the normal competitive nature in the field, as the facility he started and managed for many years was among the worst offenders, 

The normal mode of fierce Darwinian struggle was first expressed to me by my friend's business partner, who pointed out how it was a strategy of their company to drive their competitor out of business by any means possible and then absorb the former employees that they had selected as suitable, thus destroying any ability of the out-of-business company to reconstitute itself. An excellent strategy I think, and filled with all the positive values that I would expect from an executive in the field of computer animation.

I would say that this philosophy so elegantly expressed by my friend's partner does describe the default level of cooperation between the facilities: not only is there *no* cooperation but there are active efforts at all times to destroy the competition (which is to say, any other facility) and devour their flesh, laughing, and reinvent history to demean and despise their former enemy.

But in a shocking reversal, it was recently announced that three important companies in the field not only considered working together in common cause, but had actually been doing so for years. Instead of mere blind competition, red in tooth and claw, these three companies, Pixar, ILM and Dreamworks, were able to set aside their normal competitive nature and demonstrate a noble spirit of collaboration by grossly violating employment laws and conspiring together to see that the mere worker, despised by all corporations in America, are deprived of a fair wage in any sense of the word and in any way competitively determined.   Competition is for when it benefits the rich, not when it benefits the worker, as we all know.

It goes without saying that having worked so selflessly to abuse the worker in a cooperative manner, that those who were found guilty were not punished in any substantial manner.  Why should they be? This is America after all.

Thus we have proof that computer animation (and visual effects) facilities can work together towards a common goal, at least when it involves crime.   So maybe my friend's proposal needs to be rewritten so that it incorporates some gross violation of law and ethics, and then maybe we can get the facilities to cooperate for the common good.  That might work.