Everybody Staze…

So, last week before leaving for Portland, I fertilized the blueberries again. They’re looking quite nice, though I’m still confused why only two are flowering. My hope is that with some judicious pruning this winter, we can get them all flowering (from reading, flowers are borne on 2 year old wood, so it could be that there’s just too much young wood on them. *shrugs*). Then yesterday, we went and picked up a yard of doug-fir sawdust. Turns out, this was way too much. So, we now have sawdust about 3-4″ thick under the berries, as well as all the way to the fence. =P Oh well, it should really keep the weeds down, and will certainly make the blueberries happy.

Now I’m reading up on lawn care. The front yard at our place looks the best it has, well, ever. It’s extremely healthy, very few weeds, and all and all very nice (bit of crab grass, but I hope to take care of that soon). The back, on the other hand, not as nice. TON of weeds on the north side, I’m guessing due to the lower light levels. So, I’ve been trying to weed-n-feed there. Hopefully that too will work.

We also finally got around to removing the very sick/dying rhododendron that had been planted next to the front door (in a built-in planter). It doesn’t get any rain in that location, and because of the make-up of the planter (mortar, bricks, etc), it was probably WAY too alkali for it anyway. I put it in a 25gal nursery container with a rough 70/30 mix of peat/perlite, some acid loving osmicote, and a good drench of Superthrive. Hopefully it’ll perk up. The one that was sick and dying elsewhere on the lot I did the same thing to last year, and it’s extremely healthy now.

Tonight I’m going to double the RAM in the web server/file server/energy monitor, etc. Hopefully everything will work. I tried turning on mod_deflate on the system yesterday, and was dismayed by the performance. I hope to just enable it on some of the stuff I’m working on that will be a lot of data (further using google visualizations for power use, which 3 days of data would amount to 700KB uncompressed).

Mac OS 10.5.7 came out yesterday while I was getting sawdust, and I’ve installed it at work. So far, so good. They said they fixed some error with Dvorak keyboards, but I never noticed anything. My hope against hope is that it will fix the longterm issue we’ve had with AFP crashing on the server. Somehow, I doubt it.

This month will be the first time I can check my utility bill against the TED. I’m hoping it’ll be close… I really don’t want to have to call the local utility company to check my meter, though a newer digital one would be sweet. PGE up in Portland has been going around replacing analog ones with digital ones. I’m somewhat jealous.

At work we’re writing up a proposal for what amounts to “grant” money to offset probably budget cuts this coming year. I’m really really hoping to get 1-2 servers out of the deal. 2 servers would let me switch all critical systems over to Intel Xserves, and jettison 5 original Xserve’s. 1 server would let me upgrade the mail server and implement CalDAV. I would still need to dual purpose a machine to take up the slack from not getting the 2nd server… so, I’m hoping for 2. Mind you, this should also lower our power usage.

That’s all for now, since I can’t think of anything else.

Links for future reference:
http://extension.oregonstate.edu/catalog/html/ec/ec1521/
http://extension.oregonstate.edu/catalog/details.php?sortnum=0616&name=Lawns

Back when we had gotten our bid accepted on the house, but before we had moved in, the previous owner had let Tara and I come plant some blueberries in the yard. We planted 6 of them, 2 3y old bushes, and 4 2y old bushes. That year, we didn’t do what we were supposed to, and remove the blossoms, so they produced the first year. Last year, the didn’t really produce at all (they were exhausted), and this year, only 2 of the bushes are really producing flowers.

But, this year, I’ve started fertilizing with Ammonium Sulfate to see if I can re-awaken them. They look extremely healthy, and are growing quite well, but just don’t seem to produce flowers (except the two). =/

At this point, I think we’ll just have to deal with the fact that we’ll only get two bushes worth. But, since this is the 3rd year, this winter I will need to prune. And, low and behold, the only reason I like Oregon State (=P) is their Botany/Horticulture programs.

Caring for Blueberries in a home garden: http://extension.oregonstate.edu/catalog/html/ec/ec1304/

Hopefully with the fertilizer, and the fact I think I’ll add some doug-fir mulch this year, I can get them nice and happy(er). Hopefully the mulch will also help with the weeds, but we’ll have to see. Now if I could only find a good source of Doug-Fir sawdust…

UPDATE: http://www.laneforestproducts.com/products/?product_id=275 or if we want something less “sawdusty” in color: http://www.laneforestproducts.com/products/index.php?product_id=9 (should have a similar PH).

So, I finally did some basic Google Visualization stuff. On the sidebar, for my energy usage, you can now see a link for usage history. This will open a new window that shows daily KWH usage for my house. It’s an annotated timeline, though I’m not currently doing annotations.

It’s pretty simple, about 40 lines total, of which, 15 or so are php. Nothing too special. You’ll also find a link on that page to the “RAW” data, in all it’s “glory”.

More to post later, but for now, it’s all I got.

Here’s the page I used for how to structure the java output from php to make it work: http://code.google.com/apis/visualization/documentation/gallery/annotatedtimeline.html

Take care!