Today, I will be the loser who blogs about gardening.

title=”Early Corn by n1zyy, on Flickr”>

One day this summer, I found a package of corn seed and decided to plant it. Since I’d had bad luck germinating things in the past, I put dozens of seeds in the ground. Most, if not all, of them ended up growing. Since I’ve never grown corn before, and since I only planted corn after happening across it in the garage one day, I ended up planting it far too late in the season. While the corn grew quickly, it was planted late enough that it never got more than about four feet tall. I left it as long as I could, but after a few frosts, I picked it today. The plants had yellowed.

I ended up picking about 20 ears of corn. They were all a lot smaller than they should have been, perhaps 6″ long, and as the photo shows, the corn hasn’t grown in fully. I’m not sure what to do with the corn at this point, but it’s sitting in a bucket. I’m thinking I could let it dry and try to plant it next year. I still have half the bag of seeds, so I could end up growing a considerable amount of corn.

A bit of advice I read on planting corn was to space the plants with at least a foot between each plant. I had eight seeds planted in the same hole. The roots seem to have intermingled, leaving one big clump of plants. The few individual plants didn’t grow any taller or produce bigger ears of corn, so I’m not sure that planting corn more densely than recommended is really such a bad idea.

Earlier this year I cut off all the shoots from our lilacs. There must have been at least 50, each just a few inches. When the cold weather was closing in, I planted the cut-off shoots/root sections in the ground, figuring that the pots would freeze. Somewhat to my surprise, the plants are still green. If they make it through the winter, there are going to be far too many plants. Somewhat curiously, when I initially cut the shoots off of the roots and transplanted them, all of the leaves fell off. But before I could conclude that they were dead and dump them, new leaves started to grow in, and today, the plants seem to be growing.

I’ve posted my review of the Pro96, Radio Shack’s digital police scanner. A high-level overview is that it has lots of features but is so shoddily built that I really wish I hadn’t wasted my money.

After disassembling it for the millionth time trying to fix the problem with volume cutting out, I had another one of my revelations: I’m sick of this crap.

In past discussions about police scanners, I’ve also vented that there doesn’t seem to be much innovation. They keep releasing new models that don’t really bring any features.

Then I discovered Uniden’s BCD396XT. One of the first things I noticed is that there isn’t a slew of complaints on the Internet about the volume knob not working, or no sound coming out the speaker. It’s also smaller and more compact, as if Uniden actually employs people who use police scanners and realized that a big, clunky, yet hollow enclosure was really annoying. I’m also running into a problem with the Pro96 where, although it has 500 channels, it has ten banks of 50 channels, each of which can only (as best as I can tell) contain a single trunking system. So even though I don’t really listen to all that much, my scanner is pretty much full, because I use the banks to organize logical groups of channels.

And then I realized — Uniden not only employs people who own scanners, but people who innovate and come up with new features. They implemented Nuisance Delete but called it Temporary Lockout. It can decode NACs, and the tones fire departments use when “toning out” calls. It can even do Priority mode on a trunked system, so that when the police key up on a trunked system, your scanner will drop the chit-chat on the DPW channel and go back to the police. You can program a channel as digital-only, so that when your piece-of-junk scanner stops decoding the signal, it won’t play the digital audio, un-decoded, through the speaker. (But maybe this new scanner doesn’t even have the problem the Pro96 did!) It includes AGC, which the Pro96 claims to have included, so that really loud transmissions are quieted and really quiet transmissions are pulled up a bit. It shows signal strength and battery level.

In short, it’s basically everything I’ve ever wanted, sans a really clear menu system. The only problem is that it’s $495. And I’m not sure anyone would want to buy my current police scanner, which I don’t think I could honestly sell without mentioning that it’s a giant piece of crap that I’m trying to unload because I hate it so much.

I now know what I want to be for Halloween. And it’s safe: “It has the same chance of lifting your 6-year-old as the one you may have seen on CNN or MSNBC TV.” I just found out where they’re sold online.

Of course, the costume won’t be complete unless I also carry around a Tupperware container into which I vomit profusely.

I think I’ve mentioned before that I view gay marriage as a “duh” right. Anyone arguing against it is a bigot trying to deny a civil right to a minority solely because they don’t like that minority. I can’t fathom how anyone could view it as anything but that.

Of all the people that I figured would view things my way, an 86-year-old Army veteran from Maine, a life-long Republican and VFW chaplain, wasn’t high on the list. And yet his reasoning is so compelling:

The woman at my polling place asked me: do I believe in equality for gay and lesbian people? I was pretty surprised to be asked a question like that. It made no sense to me. Finally I asked her: what do you think I fought for in Omaha Beach?

He calls Freedom and Equality “values worth dying for,” before adding, “We must have equal rights for everyone. It’s what this country was started for.” In the shockingly lucid words of one Youtube commenter, “He fought for freedom sixty years ago, and he’s still fighting for it. “

I recognize that people come in different shapes, sizes, and intellectual abilities. Some people are articulate writers, while others struggle. Some people are naturals when it comes to spelling, but others have a really tough time. For the most part, though, we all go about our daily lives without a difference. The person in front of me in the supermarket checkout line might have their Master’s degree, or maybe they never finished high school. But when they’re paying for their toothpaste, the difference isn’t apparent. And I would wager that, even in, say, leaving a comment on Youtube, the difference isn’t really apparent. The person with the Master’s probably has better writing skills, but, in putting together a couple sentences in replying to a music video, it’s not really apparent. You’re not going to write a dissertation or worry about what a gerund is on Youtube.

Internet comments bring all sorts of people out of the woodwork, though, some of them with really loony beliefs. Read the comments on any news story remotely relevant to politics, for example, and nuts from both sides will emerge and argue about something that isn’t relevant to the article.

But Youtube is unique. Sometimes I believe that the site’s comments are overrun by people who are 13. But the thing is, people who are 13 should be way, way smarter.

Consider, for example, this absurd video showing the giant screen behind McCain being overtaken by a Barack Obama rickroll during the campaign. Obviously, this did not happen; it’s a ridiculous parody of a parody of a strange Internet meme.

It’s somewhat disappointing to see a lengthy discussion about whether this actually occurred. Of course it did not. Common sense might dictate that. But it’s more the way people ask that makes me grimmace. Someone says “did that really happen plz plz plz reply,” and then someone else comes along and gives their guess: “now i dont realy think this happend….not to kill anyones buzz, but i think we woulda heard about it if this happend, and im sure someone is going to jail IF (IF) this did happen for real,” says one commenter. (What, exactly, would you go to jail for?) Someone else replies, “this this happen for real,” just before someone else comes along and asks, “this cant be real??? is it?“

Those are the good comments. This is why I want to cry:

So a few comments. First, “you suck” is not terribly constructive criticism. While I’m very happy with the election results, I don’t go around leaving “YOU SUCK” comments on videos of McCain. I’m kind of over the heated election. And frankly, as of late, I think McCain’s been a nice guy.

Then there’s the issue that, out of ten words, six were spelled wrong. “John McCain,” perhaps among the easiest names ever, is wrong both times. First and last. The way embarrassment is spelled is, frankly, an enberesemt to humanity. The fact that they got the name “John” wrong both times is much more troubling than the fact that they never capitalized it or used any punctuation at all.

But none of that bothers me nearly much as something else. Do you see the author’s name? jordanprocutions? I have a sneaking suspicion that they were trying to say “Jordan Productions.” Not only did they get 60% of their words wrong, but they got their own name wrong, too.

So I’m left wondering something I wonder most any time I look at the comments on Youtube: who are these people, and what is wrong with them? First graders? I can’t imagine they’d have strong opinions about JHON MACIN. People who don’t speak English? I can’t imagine they’d be terribly involved in our politics, and I’d think they might go for a more phonetic spelling if they didn’t know. Crazy people? Well, that much is a given.

It seems I lost the MegaMillions drawing on Friday night. If I ever win, I think I’d like to take out a series of billboard ads displaying random facts that I think everyone should know, yet too many people don’t:

• Pretty much 100% of spam has a completely forged “From” addresses. Do not reply. Do not complain to the ISP.
• Your browser’s cache speeds things up and saves you from downloading page elements over and over. You do not need to empty your cache. Doing so will make your computer slower, not faster.
• Cookies keep you logged into websites. You do not need to delete them.
• You did not win the Nigerian lottery, or any lottery that you did not enter. It’s a scam.
• Your bank does not need you to confirm your password. Nor does any other service. It’s a scam.
• The First Amendment bars the government from censorship. It does not apply to private actors.
• The First Amendment protects speech. The Second protects arms. Please do not confuse them.
• The Iraq War was not, and is not, a response to 9/11.
• “No prayer in schools” prohibits mandatory, school-sanctioned prayer in schools. You can thank the First Amendment for that. It’s the same First Amendment you should thank for the Constitutional right to pray in school if you so choose.
• / is a slash. is a backslash. Geeks hate it when you get it wrong. Web addresses do not use backslashes.
• Back up your files regularly. Your hard drive will fail some day.
• Ctrl+- zooms your browser out. Ctrl++ zooms your browser in. Ctrl+0 reverts to normal zoom. If everything is suddenly big or small, that’s why.
• “Loser” is a noun and a lame insult. “Looser” is an adjective and does not make sense unless comparing the looseness of two items. If you write “Your a looser,” well, you’re a loser.
• Barack Obama was born in the United States. He has a birth certificate. Those who claim otherwise are delusional conspiracy theorists.

I’ve done just enough SEO at work to have been irritated when my search for “cancun nh mexican restaurant” didn’t turn up Cancun Mexican Restaurant, in Bedford, NH. Not that my site carries tremendous weight, but I’m hoping a link will at least get them into the first page of search results for their name. It’s kind of a shame they’re not on the first page, actually, because I’ve been quite pleased, and because they seem adept at social media, even using a Twitter account.

I think I mentioned this a long time ago. It took me a long time to figure out why my saved game in Grand Theft Auto would always start at erratic points. I eventually figured it out: the Xbox 360 has no clock. When you turn it on, it seems to default to 11/22/05 at 7am, or at least, mine does. If you’re connected to the Internet, it will retrieve the time via SNTP. But since I never play online, I didn’t bother running network cable across the room.

It loads the “newest” file, which, in my case, is the save file from whenever I had the Xbox on for the longest. I once played for 43 minutes, so the 7:43am slot comes up first every time.

It occurs to me that this could be fixed pretty easily. Rather than using the time as the key, simply save an integer, and increment it with every save. And then select whatever has the highest integer. Using the clock seems foolish when there is no persistent clock. Rockstar, when will you learn? GTA4 and it’s still a problem?

Most sites give each user a unique ID, which is usually implemented as a sequential integer. Some sites don’t show this information at all (since it’s really just a behind-the-scenes primary key). Some sites “show” it in the URL as the unique identifier for a person. Some sites, Slashdot being the only one I can think of, display it prominently, as a sort of badge-of-honor for time on site.

I’ve been toying with the Facebook API just a little bit, to see what it would take to build a game. Facebook provides a tool to allow developers to tinker with API functions, one of them being friends.get, which returns an XML list of all the user IDs of your friends.

I don’t know how Facebook assigns user IDs. I do know from their API documentation that it’s now a 64-bit integer, which is kind of crazy. Most people just make it an INT. What fascinates me, though, is the range. I tend to think of myself as an early Facebook adopter. My user ID is 18601506, which we can infer as evidence that I was the 18,601,506th user to sign up for Facebook. I know a lot of sites that would be floored to have that many users.

But that’s nothing. The list of friends comes back in ascending order. The last entry is a bit over 1,800,000,000, which one could (perhaps erroneously) infer means that there are more than 1.8 billion accounts on Facebook, although that would include deleted rows, too, and this count would be utterly wrong if they stopped assigning numbers sequentially, which wouldn’t be a crazy thing to do with a partitioned database. The first entry on my friend list? It’s under 7,000. That’s a pretty amazing range: under 7,000 to over 1.8 billion?

I think most people have a mental filter. Ideas might randomly occur in their heads, but they’re run through that filter. They might have a thought like, “People don’t ever use fire extinguishers, leaving them unprepared. There should really be annual fire-extinguisher certifications that everyone gets.” I know I have. But most people would have this idea hit their filter and rule it out. Sometimes, though, I come up with ideas that wholly bypass this filter, and only after I’ve shared them do I realize how absurd they are. Besides an epic blog post about fire extinguisher training, certification, and practice, I’ve hatched a few other astonishingly bad ideas, including The Tree Game and the concept of Caramel Potatoes. (Like caramel apples, but with a potato instead.)

It started largely as an in-jest threat, but I decided that I want to make The Tree Game for Facebook. I’m hoping to use the knowledge and gaming expertise of my readers for suggestions, though. It looks like Facebooker is a Rails plugin for building Facebook apps, and it would be a fun project anyway.

For those unfamiliar, here is the description of The Tree Game: you play the part of a tree. You can grow or not grow. If you grow too tall, you might get struck by lightning. If you don’t grow enough, you don’t get any sunlight and die.

Now you know why no one really liked my idea The Tree Game. But it did have appeal in one way: it was so astonishingly lame that people remembered it and talked about it. I’d put it in the same category as John & Kate Plus 8 or Perez Hilton.

In actually making the game, though, I want some input. How should it work? I’m thinking it should be a turn-based game, where you’re allowed one “turn” every 15 minutes or so. You would have two choices, I think: “Grow” or “Don’t Grow.” “Shrink” might be an option at times, even though it’s not really possible in real life. As soon as you grew, the outcome would be decided. There’s a slim chance that a storm might come through. In that storm, it might rain (giving you points you can use to grow? do you need to spend a point to grow one iteration?), but there’s a small chance that you would be struck by lightning. Being taller would increase the odds exponentially. But being tall would also increase the points you get (via sunlight).

I’m not sure what the ultimate goal is. To be the tallest tree? To live the longest? To get the most points? What would you do with points besides grow?

I’ve also thought about other things that might happen. For example, beavers might come and gnaw on you. Perhaps, if you were tall enough, it would take a few turns for them to finish your tree off, and you would be able to fend them off in some way. (Drop acorns?) Something good would have to be available, too, like tree-huggers coming and hugging your tree, which would give you lots of points.

At the end of the day, it shouldn’t be too sophisticated, but I’d love to make it something slightly addictive that I’d actually play, and perhaps something viral that others would install. But I’m not quite sure how the gameplay should go. Ideas?