New photos uploaded

I finally got around to uploading some of the pictures I've been taking lately. Last week I kinda went on a snapping spree, running around my back yard while I was cooking some burgers for the family.

Naturally, I took lots of photos of our garden:


I also did some experimental stuff, just finding whatever caught my eye in the area.

Random thought of the day

Youtube - never was so much storage available to so many, only to serve up so much crap.

Look away

What is it about people that sometimes we don't see things until we look away, and then look back again?

It's the silliest thing, but I was just killing time by playing solitaire (mind-numbing activities are great relaxation after a long day of heavy brain usage). I thought the game was done, but then something distracted me and I looked elsewhere. When I looked back a second later, I saw an obvious move (what move in that game isn't obvious? ;-) that was had been staring me in the face for several moves. As the old adage goes, "if it were a snake, it would have bit me".

Yet, I had missed it.

Of course, a game of solitaire is a ridiculous example indeed, but we've all been there with bigger matters, haven't we? Staring at some complicated problem for a long time, beating our heads against the wall to find a solution. Finally, we give up and walk away.

Then, minutes, hours, or even days later, we come back to what we were doing, only to find the solution staring us in the face.

I have to wonder what it is about the human brain that causes this phenomenon. I don't have any answers, of course, but it is a curious thing. Just the kind of thing to make you pause and think.

So, always make the time to step away from whatever you're doing. You may find yourself more productive for less effort.

New post to SquareFootGazette

Linda posted our first update for our Square Foot Gardens in 2008.

New Photo Album - Longwood Gardens

I finally got around to sifting through some of my old pictures and uploading them into my online photo gallery.

These are shots I've taken of Longwood Gardens when we went there a couple of years ago. In all, it's a really nice place to visit, very relaxing with all of the beautiful plants and landscaping.

Here's a sample ;-)

Perhaps a little cheese with that wine...

I found a neat site to record the wines I buy/try. Winelog.com is rather well done, sort of a social bookmarking site for wine. I find it's very well designed, intuitive, and easy to learn and use.

Nice to see, sadly too rare in development. :-(

MythTV Upgraded to R5F1 - now using SchedulesDirect

As I wrote in my last blog post, I've now upgraded my KnoppMyth box to the latest release, R5F1. What a difference five revisions makes! :-P

In the hopes of preserving all the programming that we'd recorded on the prior install, I chose to upgrade, rather than reinstall. That proved to be only partially successful. The raw files still live in /myth/tv, but MythTV no longer knows anything about them. When I have time, I'll try to figure out how to move the videos so that MythVideo will recognize them.

I also took the effort to migrate my listing service from Zap2IT to SchedulesDirect. The project leader for KnoppMyth posted the procedure on the phpBB forum.

Signing up for the service was no problem, and the manual upgrade procedure went fairly straightforward. The only two hiccups I have are with the channels recognized by MythTV for the input source. After doing the upgrade and setting up MythTV to use my SchedulesDirect account, the channel scan failed to eliminate the channels that I don't have. The other problem was that the names for the channels are all listed as "Adding Channel". Both problems are being encountered by others, per the postings to the forum.

If I find any solutions besides just manually correcting, I'll post it.