ForbesOnTech

Construction Debris Box and Portapotty Removed-- Huzzah the Remodel is Really Done!

Today will be a very good day for me.  The final phase of my remodel—new cabinets and a glass enclosure for my new tub and shower are in, marking the completion of the remodel we started seven months ago.

            The most difficult part of the remodel—living through the demolition of the eastern pary of my house here in Escondido to make room for aa fully self-sufficient in-law for MaForbes—was completed six weeks ago. The final phase/project was wrapped up yesterday afternoon.

            Sometime this morning I expect to see glorious rich brown earth that has hidden by construction debris box in mid December for the first time in 2008. The contractors’ portapotty will be removed at about the same time today.

            I’m going to celebrate by reopening my upper garden and tilling a 50 by 25-foot patch, and then planting two long rows of heirloom tomatoes and four or five melons as well as a couple of big pumpkin hybrids. I’ve got four rolls of quarters wrapped and set aside for my trip to the nursery and with just a little bit of luck my upper garden will be planted by Sunday.

            While the debris box has been sitting in the space where I’ve gardened for the last five years the voles have been quietly establishing their colony.  Voles are fecund, fast breeders, and my strategy is drown the suckers using my hose or use God’s own rodent eliminator-- weasels. I know this sounds hateful, but when it comes to my garden, it’s just me against the burrowing rodents.

            I also think I’ll buy a small stock tank and keep it filled with water out there. My reason? As long as they are prey/food, nearby if there are weasels on hand, they’ll come running for the combination of water and live chow. And nothing eliminates a garden full of gophers and evil voles faster than a mommy weasel and two hungry kits. Besides they’re highly amusing to watch.

            A battle between weasels and burrowing rodents or venomous serpents? There’s no reason to bet on the outcome. It’s a done deal.—Farmer Forbes with another how to attrract weasels to the garden strategy on 6/25/2008.

What's it Going to be; Google's Android Platform or Apple's iPhone?

Over the weekend, Om Malik commented on a recent piece in the Wall Street Journal on delays in Google’s Android smart phone operating system here. Om’s observation is “welcome to phone business, Google.”

The article quotes Google’s Andy Rubin on some of the tribulations Google has faced in getting Android ready for release with forthcoming TMobile smart phones. 

What Om missed in his post however, is this: Andy Rubin is one of the few Valley executives—other than Apple’s Steve Jobs-- who has real experience dealing with cellular carriers. Before starting Android software (which was acquired by Google), Rubin co founded Danger Research, which developed the Sidekick smart phone platform which was sold for use by TMobile on its network.

I believe Google’s Android platform has the potential to throw a giant monkey wrench in Apple’s plans and mid-term success for its iPhone. Unlike Apple, which is relying heavily on the Kleiner Perkins’ administered iFund to attract developers, Google has the workforce, wherewithal and pocket book to lure top-notched developers to Android. And it can do this without the intrusive over watch of a third-party venture capital firm.

Let’s see which platform will consumers vote for with their pocket books:  Android developed by a company that’s synonymous with the internet; or the iPhone, which will be two or three years old when the Android steam roller picks up momentum.

I can hardly wait to see how this tussle shakes out. I think it’s going to be fun to watch.—Jim Forbes 06./23/2008.

Peaches go Plop In the Night-- I Harvest 45 pounds

Gardening has become a core element of my stroke recovery program. It keeps me engaged in something that requires moderate physical activity. And it forces me to think critically about several processes that if done somewhat correctly yields tangible and tasty results.  Rolling past the middle of my gardening season I’ve already broken open and unearthed my Kennebec potato crop, picked and consumed several dozen ears of tasty fresh corn, and harvested enough tomatoes to fill four buckets.

            While I’ve written mostly about vegetables I have something to confess: I also have 28 hybrid tea rose plants in my rose garden, 48 cymbidium orchids in pots in my back yard and my garden is edged with California golden poppies and double blossom giant carnations.

            But it’s my small stone fruit orchard that gives me real pleasure. As I’ve learned, growing great fruit takes patience, planning and a lot of work. One of my biggest goals this year has been to grow and harvest a “perfect (freestone) peach.” I started my season by trying an organic solution to control peach leaf curl (which hinders fruit production by  often causing fruits to drop long before they’re ripe.

            When I discovered the solution didn’t work I fell back on plan B; removing each effected leaf  by hand—a process that kept me crawling around my two peach trees for three weeks. I also hit my peaches with an extra dose of manure, in the hope that I could stimulate vegetative growth.  In addition, I thinned my crop to give the fruit more room to grow.

The good news is that the sound of heavy plops in the middle of the Friday night awakened me to the fact that my peaches were almost ripe and ready for the picking. This afternoon I picked 45 pounds of peaches and I suspect I can talk MaForbes into making fresh peach cobbler tomorrow. Yum yum.

            Did I grow my  “perfect peach?” No, but I came damn close.  The fruit is so good looking and plump that you instinctively cradle the fruit after it’s picked and take extra care to make sure it’s not bruised in the harvesting process.

It didn’t take very long for my neighbors to notice me on thw ladder picking peaches.  Two of them showed up with their own buckets and helped with the harvest.

            The pay off for me isn’t the size or even the quality of my crops. It’s the pure satisfaction of working outside and growing something that’s healthy, refreshing and quite tasty. And every year I do this I learn I enjoy it more.

Now if I could only master growing a simple damn watermelon.

Oh well, there’s enough time left in the year to put two more vines in the ground.  Besides, if that doesn’t work, I have some monstrous pumpkins going in an unused corner of the garden. Who would have dreamed I would I turned into Farmer Forbes after a long career in journalism?—Jim Forbes 06/23/2008.

The Great Serpent Infestation of June 2008-- Road Runners Say "Meep, Meep,Thanks"

    It's been a wild week here at Rancho Bizarro. the temperature has hit 100-plus degrees four days running, the yellowtail fishing has been too fantastic to ignore and yesterday I discovered I had a genuine infestation of venomous serpents, of the noisy geometric pattern kind.

     My discovery of the phenom came as i was pulling weeds in the ice plants on the northern edge of my glorious rose garden. As i reached down to yank an errant dandelion I sensed movement to my left side.  What I glimpsed was a small rattler coiling with it's little tail raised high. I'm not someone who goes out of their way to kill rattlesnakes. In fact, i was raised to believe that they have an extremely important role in the  southern California ecosystem. As an avid gardener I appreciate rattlesnakes' appetite for gophers and voles. So, I grabbed my long handled hoe, draped the snake around its end and gently placed it in an overgrown field on the other side of my driveway.

     Going back to the task of weeding, I heard more rustling in the ice plants. Bingo, another small buzz tail captured and removed to the field. Two small --sub 18-inch--rattlesnakes by 10 AM makes me think a female rattler or two gave birth a week or so ago to babies near my house. Two more of about the same size as i worked down in my vegetable garden made me even more cautious.

    I think the local roadrunner colony appreciated my moving the snakes to the field. Riding my  ATV down to the street to pick up my mail, i saw one of  long legged birds that live on my mountain top striding down the road with a rattle snake hanging like spaghetti out of his beak.  I'm sorry for the rattle snake. But the image of ferocious road runner makes me smile.

    OK, I'm over being sorry about the little  buzz tails demise. For now.

     It's a long way from Escondido to Silicon Valley and somewhere when I was southbound on I-5 moving back to Southern California, I shed a layer of tough skin and morphed back into Jim the Naturalist.  I think the transformation happened somewhere around Kettleman City after I passed three miles of apricot orchards.--Jim Forbes 06/26/2008

Strangling the Twitter Bird, Yet Again!

I’m ready to strangle the Twitter bird with my bare hands. Again!

It takes a lot for me to walk away from an application, but eventually when I reach the point where outages or system unavailability becomes more than I’m willing to put up with, I just say “To hell With it!” and walk away.

I discarded Twitter several months back but came back to it six weeks or so ago, when I wanted to see if I could drive traffic to my blog. I picked up about 40 hit’s a day initially. Enough to temporarily satisfy my justification to go back to Twitter.

But what’s behind my growing disliked of Twitter is the growing use of this short messaging social media network by peeps who find it necessary to post their every move throughout the day. Frankly, I don’t care much that someone is taking a walk through their upscale neighborhood and saw a poison oak plant in the middle of the city.

I used twitter three or four times this week; twice to describe what I think is the most outrageous yellowtail run I’ve seen since I was a young teenager in Southern California

(author’s note--a yellowtail is a very tasty and somewhat feisty member of the tuna family that hangs out around kelp beds). I also used it Friday to briefly note a rattlesnake infestation in my rose and vegetable garden).

I eventually removed seven young diamond backs from my gardens, gently taking them over to the huge field that adjoins my place here in Escondido where I released them to go on about their young rattlesnake lives-- killing and eating gophers, voles, rats and mice.

But what I really don’t like about Twitter is very simple: it’ not reliable enough to be used for serious tasks like monitoring customer satisfaction and related issues. And without reliability, depending on twitter to monitor anything is a lost cause and a waste of precious time.

Furthermore, Twitter seems to bring out the worse in high visibility social media celebs ( so-called “A-list bloggers”). Restated, if I really wanted to know what you had for dinner, and what the traffic was like driving from Tedium to Apathy in Silicon Valley, I would have picked up my phone and called you or sent you a text message. But hell, maybe I’m just a curmudgeonly old dinosaur--Jim Forbes 06/21/2008.

Yum Yum Yellowtail-- They're Off San Diego in Quantity

Yellowtail on plastic waiting to be cleaned

 

Growing up in Southern California, I’d wait patiently for the Thursday edition of the Los Angeles Times and it’s Sports Section.  In addition to a regular column by the late sports columnist, Jim Murray, it also had sport fishing catch reports from ports up and down the California coast.

            My belief that San Diego was the place I wanted to drown anchovies from is rooted in those long ago catch reports. And right now—in Mid June, 2008—is all the proof I’ve ever wanted.

            I tentatively launched my boat yesterday mid morning from the ramp at Dana Landing in Mission Bay and motored out to the Everingham Brothers Bait Barge to pick up a half scoop of active big sardines. Given a choice between a $20 half scoop of sardines or the anchovies, I’ll go with sardines every time.

            I left the harbor and steamed for the seaward side of the help beds that line the coastline from Torrey Pines to Imperial Beach on the Mexican border. I plopped an active sardine into the water, cut back the throttle to maintain steerage and watched my unweighted line unwind as my bait made for free water about 50 feet off the port side of my bow.

            I wasn’t exactly ready for the first strike. My line took off and I barely prevented creating a rats nest on the spool of my reel by clamping down with my thumb. I thumbed the reel in gear, reared back on the rod and the fish took off for the kelp. The run for the kelp, and the strength of the fish immediately made me confident I had hooked a yellowtail.  This gutsy, but oh so tasty Thunnoid family member is a school fish, so when you catch one yellowtail, you can be very sure there are others nearby.

            Very soon I had the fish next to my boat, which is when it decided it wanted me to do laps around the deck.  But very soon, after not letting the fish wrap the line around my outboard, I slashed down with the boat hook and brought my yellowtail on board.

            Slowly making my way north on the outside in a flat calm sea, I lost five more sardines to slashing attacks from fast hitting fish. But by noon I had two nice “big schoolies”—15 to 20 pound yellowtail-- on board, and was listening to fishing boat skippers trade reports of limits of barracuda and big legal white sea bass (which are making a strong comeback here on the San Diego coast) as well as fishermen catching limits of calico bass and the infrequent sheepsheads.

            By noon I was beginning to feel the effects of sun burn on the tops of my unshod feet, so I headed back to the ramp, loaded my boat on its trailer and headed home to Escondido to clean the one fish I kept for my household.

            I don’t remember a better yellowtail season in a non El Nino year and as long as the air temps hover around 90, I think the run is going to last through the summer. So, if your travels take you to San Diego, do take the time to go out on an all-day boat. Be prepared for fun but you may also want to pack some soy saice and wasabi in your tackle box. Yum,yum fresh yellowtail sushi for a boat lunch.  It doesn’t get any better for a summer Southern California fishing treat. – Jim Forbes 06/19/2008.

Putting Distant Remembered Things to Good Use-- Welding using What's On Hand.

Sometimes necessity brings back useful memories or lessons from long ago.

            Like yesterday when I discovered my favorite patio chair was broken. I thought I might be able to repair it with some sort of epoxy.. buty nooooooooooo! The epoxy joint lasted less than 5 minutes after curing for 24 hours. In case you don’t know this: Epoxy’s strength is to withstand tortional, not lateral forces.

            But as I cursed and stared at my broken chair, I was struggling to remember some quasi-important factoid that seemed to have been lost in my stroke, several years ago.

            Then walking around to my boat port to the unused flower pot where I store tie-downs, the fog lifted and I suddenly remembered being taught an emergency welding technique in high school and actually using it on a drive down Baja California, once.

{Author’s note, there was a time, several decades ago in Pre Prop 13 California, when high schools had classes in industrial arts. In addition to learning how to make roach clips, some students learned basic car repair, wood and metal working.}

            What keyed my memory was seeing one of the two humongous 12-volt batteries in my boat as I stuffed an unused tie down strap in the old planter. Simultaneously, I remembered I had some thin welding stock in my garage.

Off to the garage I went, pulling on my old leather lovess and searching for some welding rod sock I knew was somewhere on my bench top. I pulled my damaged chair over behind my boat and then hooked my jumper cables to the freshest battery in the boat. I then took my cordless Dremel, grinding a shiny spot in the metal of the chair about one foot away from the area I wanted to join (which I had previously sanded as well).

            I attached the clamp from the negative terminal of my battery to the cleaned contact point near the area I planned to join and then clamped the rod stock (which I had first ground a point on using my Dremel tool) and gingerly began sparking. Wearing my mirrored sunglasses I focused on starting an arc while maintaining the circuit.

            I knew that the battery lacked enough current to allow me to get enough heat to make a flowing joint so I just tacked both sides of the broken piece in place.

            In about five minutes I had repaired my chair, using something I think I learned in high school and have used only once before, when I had to repair my 68 VW bug 200 miles south of San Felipe, Baja, California at about 4 AM.

            I have no idea whatsoever what other memories I’ve lost track of because of that damn stroke. I do know that I’m often at a loss when I’m in former work setting and someone comes up to me and says, “Hi, Jim how are you?”

            I just stand there grinding mental gears thinking ‘I suppose I remember this person but who are they really?”

            Thank God for names on badges, sometimes it’s enough for me to make a connection, sometimes it’s not.”

            Regardless, I at least can smile, reply  “I’m doing great!” and sincerely mean it when I ask what they’ve “been up to recently?”

            Another day, another reason to smile and maybe even the inspiration I need to do some retail therapy at Harbor Freight, which has small welding set on sale this week. Oh boy, joining metal to metal with electric fire. Be still, my pounding heart.—Jim Forbes 06/16/2008

(Mandatory disclosure: the management of ForbesonTech does not recommend or endorse the use of unauthorized and potentially dangerous emergency welding techniques. Never ever arc weld without eye protection and leather gloves. The data in this post is provided for informational purposes only. Void where prohibited by law—jmf)

The Right Tool for a Backbreaking Job

Swinging a mattock (the Hand tool on left) to chop and prepare hard packed clay landscaped plots for planting is not a much of fun.

But,if you look around  hard enough you occasionally find the right tool for the job.

In my case it was my cordless drill and an 18 by 1.0-inch auger bit(in my cordless drill pictured to the right of the mattock). By drilling 6-inch deep holes in the clay spaced in 8-inch diamond patterns, I was able to use my Mantis tiller  to break up the soil and mix in potting medium in about six hours.

Thanks to a sidewalk sale at a local discount tool store I was able to get my planters ready very quickly.

Oh, I managed to avoid hitting any of the irrigation pipes in my landscape plots too. A Happy Fathers' Day Gardening tips--Jim Forbes 06/15/2008

My Tomato Cages Aren't Plumb or Level, But I Don't Care-- Dancing Through Another Gardenining Season

The 100-foot patch of land where I normally garden here at Rancho Bizarro has been taken over by a huge construction debris box and a portable toilet for the contractors working on my two-day-from-completion remodel, so I’ve found new dirt to grow things in.

            Well it’s not exactly new dirt, judging from my experience tilling and cultivating the 80 by 20-foot patch in front of my house.  To be quite truthful, I’d have to classify it as dried hard-packed Triassic adobe. In one place the damn dirt was so hard I wiped out the teeth on my Mantis tiller. That really bummed me out.

            But I’m not a quitter, so I went to plan B: chopping ground like a mad man with a long handled mattock.  What the hell, I don’t really have anything else to do and I’m not about to sit out a gardening season because of a little thing like a massive remodel. The good news is that I’m about half way through the 2008 gardening season and all my neighbors have gotten baskets of fresh beefsteak tomatoes, fresh Italian broccoli and bags of fresh Kennebec potatoes.

            I’ve survived two massed attacks by voles and gophers and convinced the local bird population that it’s less worrisome to take the free food in my bird feeder than it is to dig up seeds I’ve planted.

            Two weeks ago I caged up my last crop of tomatoes.  My older brother, Saint Chuck, happened to be down for the day and I was showing him my garden, somewhat proudly.  So St.Chuck (who in real life is an accomplished land surveyor who teaches that trade to apprentices here in Southern California) looks at the cages cracks a frosty smile and says, “Why aren’t they plumb and level?”

            There never seems to be a pick ax around when you want it, damn it!

            I have to admit it: my steel wire cages are in their third season and have seen better days; furthermore, I really don’t pay a lot of attention to how they’re set, when I put them in.

            But to someone who checks and certifies the alignment of support girders in multi-story buildings, I suppose everything should be plumb and level at the top. Needless to say St Chuck went home with only a few beefsteaks that evening.

            I’m not a linear gardener. And truthfully, I don’t care a whit if my tomato plants are aligned perfectly, or if my rows of beets wander  left or right.

            I do love gardening, feeling the back of my neck grow a little redder every day I yank a bucket of weeds from my patch. And, I’m a full contact gardener, so I get to smell rich earth as the year cycles through. My gardening clothes are stained brown from rich San Diego soil, my fingers are dirt-stained and calloused, but I’ve found an avocation that keeps my busy, exercising my afflicted left hand. And at the end of the day, I find I have a little more fine motor control. That’s part of why I love gardening and why I don’t quit.

            Besides when I get discouraged by crops that don’t respond to my husbandry, I can a voice in the back of my mind, quietly speaking across five decades, “ Now, Jimmy, don’t be a quitter, and take time to enjoy what you do.”

Lordy me, it’s been 50 years this week since that voice was stilled, but I still hear it from time to time down here on perfect and imperfect days alike, in the nurturing soil of rural Southern California.—Jim Forbes 06/12/2208.

Pulse Pen Coupon Cards-- Free to the First Three Responders

If you're one of the 30 or so people a day who hit my blog looking for a $50 coupon on Live Scribe's Pulse Pen, keep reading.

I was cleaning out my Demo book bag this morning and found several "Never Miss a Word" Pulse Pen discount coupon cards.

So the first three people to email me by hitting the "email me" button on my blog--underneath the picture of me driving the sporty tractor-- get savory $50 buck off coupons. 

Act now, operators on duty. And if you're among the first several callers I might even include a couple of ripe non salmonella tainted beefsteak tomatoes grown here at Rancho Bizarro.