This view of the diary is limited to these topics: gardening. There may be lack of
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It brings home to me how difficult it is to get professional-looking results. But at least
it should now work for a while. All I need now is a dry day without wind.
Finally got around to spraying the weeds, not before time. For some reason my Chinese
cabbage does not germinate well, and only 2 of the 6 I planted last time have come up.
Decided to plant them as seedlings and transplant when they're big enough, but ran out of
light after I had filled the tubes.
I seem to have spent most of the day surfing the web today, not an occupation I relish. But
there are things to buy, and the web seems the obvious way to do it.
It's time to buy new seeds and other plants for the spring. I have a membership with the
Diggers Club, and they've sent a catalogue
with all sorts of interesting things in it. I've made a list of what I want. But how do I
order them on the web site? Apparently I have to start again from scratch; all my
preparations are useless, because they have organized the web site completely differently.
The catalogue has an old-fashioned order form: a table with product number, description,
quantity and so on. Wouldn't it be nice to have the same thing on-line? If it's there,
it's well hidden. So instead of using the web as intended, I'll write an email with a list
of what I want. What a waste of a web site! It's not as if Diggers are out of line here,
of course.
Finished my planting and did a bit of weeding. I should have done more spraying yesterday:
then I would have been able to transplant
the Erysimums that have taken over the
east garden. But today it was raining, and who knows when I'll be able to continue.
Gradually, as spring approaches, we're doing more work in the garden. Finished spraying the
weeds by the fence to the SE paddock, and did a bit more pruning. We should transplant
the Erysimums soon.
Finally got round to transplanting
the Erysimums (the purple bushes in the
“before” and “after” photos below). Problem: we have far too many,
and after moving all I could find place for, and bringing a few to Chris (who also got the
roses), things hardly look any different:
I'm also a little concerned about whether the Erysimums will survive transplantation. We've
had varied experience in the past: we've had transplanted bushes die on us, and yet all
these bushes were single twigs only a little over a year ago:
More work on the Erysimums, and I've now
done as many as I want to do at the moment. I'm still rather concerned about how unhappy
they look after transplantation:
Pulled one last one out, took it over to Chris and planted it there, also removing most of
her roses. At home, planted
a “Captain Cook”
Callistemon in its place.
I had been expecting it, but decided not to remove any plants. We'll see how well they
cope. The one I'm expecting to do worst is
the Chlorophytum, which looked like
this:
A bit more work in the garden. Now
the Erysimums are gone from the central
part of the garden, planted a few Alyssum
seeds there, and Yvonne continued with poppies
and Gypsophila. It was too cool to
really enjoy things, though, and didn't do much else except a bit of pruning.
Finally into town today for my blood test, this time at the alternative place, which proved
to be much quieter than the Base Hospitallast month, and was seen to in a matter of minutes. If I had arrived 5
minutes later, I probably wouldn't have had to wait at all. And then I discovered that I
didn't need to be fasting for the blood test! I could have done it any old time.
Then down to Curtis St to try out a new barber's shop, but was mightily put off by the
ambiance, and fortunately discovered in time that I didn't have any cash, so off to find an
ATM, and decided against returning.
Back at the car, discovered that the intermittent issues I've been having with the starter
motor are no longer intermittent: the starter no longer worked at all. Called Yvonne to come and pick me up, and off to finally post the E-510. Thank God that's
over.
Yvonne showed up and we tow-started the car, then off to John Stevens to get him to repair
it. But he was off sick, so we just left the car there and went home again, stopping at
Formosa Gardens to buy some
fertilizer and a few flowerpots.
Back home, wanted to plant some stuff in the pots, but the weather was too bad, and ended up
doing some reading, something I normally don't seem to find time for any more.
Partially against my better judgement, bought a grain mill attachment for the Kenwood mixer
on eBay in the evening. I'm still greatly
concerned about the reliability of the units, but they seem to be the most reliable I can
find in Australia, and I need something to replace the Bosch unit.
Quiet day somehow. Did some “cooking” (preparation of sourdough and kimchi) and some gardening (planted a lot of seeds in
preparation for the coming of spring), and that was about that.
A note in the letterbox this morning telling me that two of my eBay purchases had arrived. I also still hadn't heard
back from John Stevens about the fate of my car, so decided to go into Ballarat. John was
there, but still looking a lot the worse for wear. He had had trouble looking at the car
without the dongle for the ignition immobilizer, which I hadn't been able to fit under the
door of the office. It looks as if it might be related, so he's going to disable the
immobilizer. I can't see anybody stealing an 18 year old Mitsubishi Magna with 250,000 km
on the clock.
More planting work in the afternoon. Discovered that the Lobelia punnets contained many
more plants than we had expected, a total of 14 plants. We only needed 6 for the pots, so
planted the rest in the garden. I wish I had a good feeling for what they look like.
Somehow all photos are so vague.
A comparison with the photo immediately after the
frost shows that the browning of the ends is new. If that's all the damage it took,
it'll be easy enough to bear.
This isn't the first time I've seen things like this, but strangely I've never seen any
advice about how to avoid or handle it. Took the lid off the seed tray and put them
outside, where hopefully they won't be too unhappy.
The Ipomoea seeds looked different, as if
they were dying:
Somehow spring is in the air. It's no warmer than it has been, but there's something that
suggests that it's going to warm up. Certainly the flowers are in on the act: the last
rosebud of autumn has held up through the winter (certainly helped by my decision not to
remove the bush), and today started a sort of half-hearted bloom:
As if to mark the point, Will Tatnell along to prepare to carry out the earthworks that we
planned at the end of autumn. More discussions, and off
into town to buy some gravel. On the way stopped off at a scrap yard
in Sebastopol looking for a
second-hand car radio. The cheapest (and nastiest) they had cost $50, and of course didn't
have the right connectors. They gave me the name of a radio company, Thomas, somewhere off
Sturt St. To be investigated at a later date.
My seed trays are germinating nicely, but sometimes I wonder if I've done the right thing.
On the one hand, last year our Ipomoeas
hardly germinated at all, and this year they're going fine:
Will Tatnell finally along today to do the earthworks we've been planning for over 3
months. He made pretty good progress, though his Bobcat was a little large for some of the
work, and we had to leave the smallest for some other solution. Still, things have changed
a lot, as Saturday's house photos will show:
So now we have our garden earthworks done, and there's plenty of follow-up work to do. In
principle we should have worked in the garden all day long. In fact, the weather was
terrible—yet again heavy winds and rain, also a bit of hail—so we stayed
in the house most of the day and didn't do much, though I did put most of my seedlings out
where hopefully they'll get sun without being blown away.
Finally got a reply to my mail to Diggers Club—16 days after I sent it, followed by four reminders. And of course, they're in the
Microsoft world, so he put the answer separate from my message and missed out some of the
questions. When are people going to become literate?
Got a reply from Steve Woodford today, along with lots of code. It's all for NetBSD, and by chance I have just installed the latest
version of NetBSD (with the intention to use it as Dom0 for Xen), so the clear next thing to do would be to complete that
installation.
It seems to be years ago since I last had a NetBSD machine running—not exactly
something for an ex-NetBSD developer to be proud of. But that means I had quite a bit of
configuration to do to get it up and running the way I want, and in the meantime I'm running
close to my IP traffic limit for the month (at least for peak traffic, between 12:00 and
24:00), so had to defer until tomorrow.
Of course, another thing I need to run this weather station software is the corresponding
hardware. There are plenty of weather stations on the market, both “Buy It Now”
and auctions. Which do I buy? For some reason, the “Buy It Now” units came
with free shipping, something that people underestimate: I can return the unit if I don't
like it, and I get the purchase price refunded, but not shipping. So buying it cheaper is
offset by the $25 shipping I would lose if I returned it. The “Buy It Now”
units cost $129; decided that I could bid up to $91 on the auctions, making a total price of
$116.
And people continually bid higher! After the third one went for $106 (total of $131),
decided that the other bidders weren't quite rational, and bought one with “Buy It
Now”. Now to see when it arrives.
The weather's still terrible, wind and rain, but we need to move ahead before spring catches
up with me. Planted some Acacia
myrtifolia between the parking area and the house; hopefully it will become a reasonable
windbreak. The seedlings are quite old—we brought them with us from Echunga, so they
could be 3 years old—but they're still in tubes. Used this new technique they're
talking about of planting them much deeper, burying the bottom of the stem in the ground.
We'll see how that turns out.
He's off on holiday to Birdsville on
Monday, and he wanted to get things chopped down before he left. He managed that, but left
behind a lot of branches which we had to cart off and burn—it seems that the fire
danger season is starting on 1 September 2009. That kept us busy much of
the afternoon, so much so that I didn't get any photos. There's not much left of the trees
now.
Checked the Sony Australia
web site to find who can repair my CD player. Result: 5 service centres in
the state, four of which are in Melbourne and the fifth
in Geelong. And then the text:
If an Authorised Service Centre is not found near your region, please call 1300 13 76 69 for
more locations
And yes, the sentence wasn't terminated. This is the web, after all, and not a printed
publication. Called up the number and spoke to
Heidi, who wanted all sorts of information, including model number,
purchase date, where I bought it and what was wrong with it before she divulged that
Greene's TV service, 149 Humffray St, North Ballarat could look at the thing. She also gave
me a reference number and told me that she would send email to Greene's.
Into town with Chris in the late afternoon, she to pick up her car and I to take in the CD
player. They hadn't seen the email, of course, but found it. The positive side is that
they took that as sufficient authorization to repair the unit under guarantee, and didn't
want to see the receipt. Clearly a good loophole for getting Sony equipment repaired after
the guarantee expires.
It seems that there's still something wrong with my phone. I went in to an Optus centre a while back, and they had no problems
contacting it. Today Yvonne tried and got the same message
as before: “the number you have called is not connected”.
What's the difference? The telephone network, I fear. I originally had the number with
Telstra, but changed it over to Optus
last year. I suspect that Telstra has messed things up
and not registered the changeover. It worked for Yvonne's phone, so this isn't an automatic
problem.
Had to wait some time for the rain to stop before I could take my garden photos. The
cathedral is a thing of the past. Here
the comparison with what it was like when we first started using it:
My weather station has arrived, so spent some time looking at porting wview release 5 to NetBSD, something that apparently hasn't been done
before. It's not in pkgsrc, and the instructions are pretty unclear. Spent some
time porting radlib, not made any
simpler by the fact—probably typical—that the installation directory (and thus
also the -I include directory) defaults to /usr/local, even for NetBSD, where
the default is /usr/pkg. Also discovered that the “standard” union for
semctl arguments is missing in NetBSD:
/*
* semctl's arg parameter structure
*/
union semun {
int val; /* value for SETVAL */
struct semid_ds *buf; /* buffer for IPC_STAT & IPC_SET */
unsigned short *array; /* array for GETALL & SETALL */
};
After fixing that, got things sorted out, but ran into further problems with wview.
Porting it is only the first part; after that I have to incorporated Steve Woodford's
patches, written for version 4 of wview, and test them. I can see I'll be using the
Microsoft software for a while.
Yvonne then returned with the weather station, and I spent some time putting that together,
not helped by the fact that it is mounted on a two-part pipe, where one piece needs to fit
into the other, and the other part had been partially crushed and needed to be straightened
out. Apart from that, and the excessive lengths of interconnecting cable, it seems to be
functional. Very poor contrast on the display, difficult-to-read instructions, and no
non-destructive way of reading out the maxima and minima. I'll leave it running in parallel
with the ALDI station for a week or two.
