Patrick’s Rants

The worms are slowly getting established – they are not quite at the eat their own weight per day stage. At least it doesn’t look like that yet. We are still collecting the kitchen scraps to go into the compost pile at the garden. Little is going into the worm buckets as of yet. I looked and it’s only been a couple of weeks so maybe I’m just impatient, but I’m ready to start harvesting the castings. I mentioned the worm buckets to my mom who seems to think they are a good idea and wants her own setup. It sounds like I’m back to work.

The firewall with web caching has really been slow. The hard drive light was on regularly and I was sure that my web browsing was hampered. I had tried to tweak squid and squidGuard to use less hard drive space and RAM, but loading some pages still seemed to crawl. Yesterday I logged into the firewall machine to check the memory usage – 100%. The machine was swapping in and out causing the hard drive to run excessively. That’s when I realized there was only 48mb of RAM in that machine. 48! Holy smokes! No wonder it was trying to create a swap storm. As a firewall 48mb is fine, as a web-cache and proxy, not so much.

I pulled the cover off the PC case and saw that the CPU fan wasn’t turning either. I got a fan off the shelf, swapped out the old style ram for more up-to-date SIMMS – one stick of 256mb and one 64mb stick. I fired it up and it booted (which is the absolute best thing that can happen after surgery). Now my AMD K-6 II is running cool with its new fan and swap space on the hard drive hasn’t been touched. Never underestimate the power of more RAM.

Teabaggers held protests all over the country on April 15th, 2009. Of course the very things they are protesting against were all well in play before Obama even won the election last November. Obama’s budget and deficit includes in expenses the cost of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is no longer an off the books adjustment with emergency funding every two months. The budget also discounts revenues from the Alternative Minimum Tax – Congress made adjustments to the amount that will be collected and Obama (For shame! The horror! That traitor!) did not count as revenue the amount of AMT that would not be collected.

I am not defending the decision of AIG to pay retention bonuses to the very people who propped up their products with toothpicks, I think those people should not be retained. They probably should be prosecuted, but there was technically nothing illegal in what they did since they were working in the unregulated sliver of credit default swaps. But this is not directly about that. This is about the right wingers and the no government oversight no matter what the cost groups who want to place all of the blame on an administration that has been in office less than a year. And for that reason, I will gladly call the protesters teabaggers.

If you want to read more about the protests in Flagstaff the story and comments are online at the Arizona Daily Sun while Fox News is blasted for their own slip of the tongue over their protest against the use of the term teabagging.

But you know the anti-government people are probably right. There are too many laws governing how clean our water should be, whether we even have water, too much interference in the way of roads, sidewalks, reliable electricity police and fire protection. How about we do away with all of it and go back to having to grow our own food washing clothes once a month in the manual ringer? You know when you are so busy just trying to survive you don’t have time to criticize the government that isn’t there. Now that the government has provided roads, running water, sewage and trash service, law enforcement and property rights you have time to complain. Yes, the first amendment even protects stupid speech. Would you really want it any other way?

Jack is riding the range with midgets/dwarves/little people to advertise his mini sirloin burgers. With some magic of the camera and computers Jack, of Jack In The Box, is herding miniature cows all the while singing about “cows the size of schnauzers” along with the helium pumped lungs of the little people. I think the politically correct line got moved just a little.

I have to wonder how old the ad execs at Burger King are. The latest commercial with the Creepy King is made to look like a music video – Sir Mix-a-Lot’s “Baby Got Back”. Creepy King is singing about liking square butts while his dance troupe shakes rear ends packed with cereal boxes. The scene cuts to Sponge Bob Square Pants, then back to Creepy who seems to sing, “Sponge Bob I wanna git wit ya’”; then he holds up a Sponge Bob kid’s meal. Do the ad execs not understand that this is homo-erotic? “I wanna git wit ya’” means Creepy wants to have sex with Spongy. Oh, and I think Sponge Bob is underage too. Is this the image that the creators of Square Pants want, to have the beloved character go into cartoon porn renamed Spooge Bob? Sheesh.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has posted a review of motions to dismiss filed by the Obama administration over illegal spying on US Citizens. It would seem that Obama is taking the same state secrets defense that Bush was lambasted for. The government also seems to be arguing that no matter what the government does, it’s not illegal. Obama, I supported you, this is not how you build trust – or win a second term especially when you argue for openness in the operations of our government. Secretly spying on US Citizens is not open government. Remember, we have these laws because Nixon thought he was above the law. He wasn’t, George Bush wasn’t, and President Obama, neither are you. Shed this position of secrecy and stop listening in on us.

I have no problem actively opposing the government that wants to snoop on our conversations, the politician who favors corruption to morality and darkness and secrecy over honesty and light.

Honk if you’re Amish

Yesterday I managed to get another bucket out of Burger King. I recently found out that I’m competing with the manager of the store for the buckets. She’s using them, according to her, to make 5 gallon planters. That’s not a bad idea especially if you have to move plants inside.

When I got home, bucket in hand, my wife looked at me and said, “no more buckets!” as I placed the newly acquired bucket onto the counter. It wasn’t until I had to go back outside that I noticed we had even more buckets than I remembered from yesterday morning; the worms had arrived. It’s been around two weeks since the buckets were taken to the office to get “set up”. Now they are here and we can start to use them for composting part of our kitchen food waste.

This morning, I went to work modifying the two bucket set up. First, I transfered the worms to my four bucket system. The two bucket system uses one “solid” bucket as the base and an upper bucket with holes drilled in it and a lid with ventilation holes as well. My bucket system uses larger holes in the bottom – 1/2″ versus 1/8″ – over which I lay newspaper that is dampened. Both systems use newspaper as bedding material so there is not much change there. Then over the top I placed one inch strips of newspaper. All of this is moistened by spraying it with a water bottle – everything I’ve read tells me that it has to be the consistency of a damp sponge so it’s pretty wet. I then started scooping the lettuce and other greens that were placed on the top as food into a plastic bin that I set to the side with a hand cultivator. Once the majority of the foodstuff was placed to the side I tipped the starting bucket and gently pulled the remaining compost and the wriggling worms over the top of the bedding in my new system. I then added the food back to the buckets.

As I sat looking at the bucket system I was trying to figure out how to save a little space with it. Then it hit me, stack the “unused” segments below the used bucket. So I have the solid bucket on the bottom, next is a bucket with all the vent holes, then a “spacer” which is the top 6″ or so of another bucket with the bottom cut out and finally the bucket with the worms and a lid. When the castings get to be “too much” for the top bucket, the spacer is placed on top, then the next main bucket with bedding is placed into the top of that. Assuming that the top bucket sits just on the top of the castings and bedding. Start feeding in the new top bucket and worms should naturally make their way to the top. Leave it that way for three weeks and all the cocoons should hatch with the next generations of worms leaving nothing but worm castings on the bottom – which becomes plant food. Then we use the worm castings for fertilizer and start all over.

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Atheism is a religion like not collecting stamps is a hobby