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The tomatoes have been trudging along. They didn’t pop up fast, or grow very quick, but they are steadily getting taller and taller. Their neighbor (the squash) is sort of encroaching on their space, but it hasn’t been too much of a problem yet.

I know that I need to prune these things, I’ve heard that the suckers have to go, but I don’t know what is a sucker and what will eventually be a tomato. I need to call my uncle again. Or do some researching.

Anyway, they are coming along nicely as far as I can tell.

As can be seen below, the squash is growing like crazy. It actually started flowering today. I don’t know if it is necessary or not, but I always hear that some plants need pollinators in order to fruit. Well, there are no bees in my room, so just-in-case it IS necessary, I’ve decided to play the roll of pollinator. It should be only a few weeks now before I can eat these bag girls!

These flowers are actually pretty nice looking.

I don’t know if this is really necessary, but I sort of enjoy it!

It is weird, but this stalk split when the plant got heavy and started leaning over the edge of the trough. I thought about killing it before it got too diseased, but I let it go. Nothing has happened so far, and it has been split for a few weeks. Maybe it’ll live?

…since my last hydroponics post. Its funny… when I see it every day I don’t even notice a change, but when I look on here its amazing how much changes.

OK. A lot has gone down since March.

• A coworker of Jenn’s had a hydro lamp lying around, and he must have a heart of gold because he saw fit to let us use it. I don’t have it hanging that well yet (our ceiling is made of solid metal), but I am working on a solution.
• The morning glory started to get a little grabby, so I nixed it.
• The basil are growing like weeds. They smell great, but they grew really tall and started reaching so they tipped over. I need to do a little research (call my uncle) to see what I should do about them.
• The squash is going nuts and starting to crowd out everything else. You can see it is flowering, no signs yet of any fruiting though.
• The radishes are doing well… I should probably go ahead and eat them and plant more.
• None of the lettuce did well. It got really wilty (as if it was getting too much water) and never could quite stand up. I don’t know if it was too hot, too bright, or too moist… but the lettuce vetoed my system.

So thats the gist. A bit of a mess, but everything is doing well for the most part.

Am I the only one that dives for the remote control whenever a “Carlos Mencia” commercial comes on? One sure way to get my TV turned off is making me listen to that hack. I can not stand that guy. I’m right smack in the center of Comedy Central’s target demographic (26, male, college) and I think that Mencia is categorically not funny. His attempts to push the envelope with racial commentary are tired (and stolen). I can stomach the occasional stereotype about “beaners”, but basing a whole show (or worse: career) on the drivel is just not entertaining. I’m not offended, I’m just not entertained.

I realize comedy central needed to replace Dave Chappelle, but someone over there needs to realize that it is time to pull the plug. The year of low-brow humor being “in” is over (thank God). “Blue Collar TV” and reruns of “Larry the Cable Guy” have shriveled up and died, now if only the same fate would befall “Mad TV” and “Carlos Mensteala” the world would be a much happier (funnier) place.

If you want to replace the 1/2 hour slot, just pick random stand up comedians. I’d rather watch an up-and-coming nobody than listen to endless “midget”, “retard”, “gay”, and “racial” botch jobs. Hell I’d be more likely to stay tuned to 1/2 hour of commercials than listen to this guy.

He isn’t edgy. He isn’t original. He isn’t funny. Cancel it.

I recently installed Ubuntu (a user friendly flavor of Linux) an my Acer Aspire 3000. It was my first time installing Linux and it was amazingly easy. Sound, video, and ethernet all just worked. In my opinion the install process was much easier than installing Windows. Also cool is that Ubuntu actually comes as a Live CD which means that you can boot it up and check it out without committing.

The only thing that wasn’t completely automatic was getting the Broadcom wireless card to work. I had to dig around a little on the Ubuntu Forums but eventually I stumbled upon compwiz18’s script (directions here) that worked like a charm. Of note: the light on the front of the laptop that indicates power to the wireless card worked for me without the acerhk driver.

Anyway, I’m sure I’ll screw up the install somehow (installing Beryl maybe?)… so this post is really just a note to myself so I can be back up and running ASAP.

I was recently reading a Slashdot article about how we are stuck with the x86 architecture because its been in use for so long. Everyone’s used to it… its what we have. Whatever.

Someone (J.R. Random actually) made a flippant comment that struck me as odd: “The x86 instruction set will be retired in the same year as the QWERTY keyboard layout.” This intrigued me. I had never put much thought into how or why our keyboards are laid out the way they are. I certainly never knew that there were alternative keyboard layouts.

It turns out that the QWERTY keyboard (so named because of the five letters on the top left side of the keyboard) was infact optimized for performance. Just not the sort of performance we would normally be looking for. Apparently the guy who originally designed the QWERTY layout (Christopher Sholes) designed it so that it would actually be hard to type quickly! He did this because he was a typewriter designer, and anything over about 20 words per minute sometimes caused his typewriter to jam. Rather than redesign his typewriter he laid the keys out so that it would be hard to type fast. He did so by spreading the most popular letters as far apart as he could - which slowed most people down enough that jamming wasn’t a problem. Brilliant!

Sholes’ typewriter had some revolutionary features for its time. Long story short, it was so successful that it become an unofficial standard. Government offices started buying them, schools popped up to teach secretaries how to use them, etc. Eventually typewriters evolved enough so that people could learn to actually go fast, and before you know it, everyone was used to this design that was originally intended to make typists type slowly.

40 years down the road August Dvorak saw a movie of someone typing and thought that the finger movements were really inefficient. He made his own keyboard that would allow for faster more efficient movements: the “Dvorak keyboard”. He put all of the vowels on the left side homerow and all the most common consonants in the top or middle row for the right hand.

The Dvorak keyboard is supposedly better in every typing category (more speed, easier to learn, less finger fatigue/injuries) except for one: prevalence. Everyone in the typing world was already learning on QWERTY keyboards. Almost everyone who has been exposed to Dvorak’s keyboard agrees it is superior to QWERTY, the only reason we stick with QWERTY is that it was here first.

Well… I have decided to give a go of switching to Dvorak. Anyone that is currently running XP, Linux or a MAC can just change the settings of their computer so that it is a Dvorak. Windows users can look here to see how.

According to this free speed test I can currently type around 65 wpm on a QWERTY.

I’m going to practice typing DVORAC for a few weeks and go back and try again. The comparison will be slightly skewed as I’ve been typing on a QWERTY for 15 years… but if Dvorak is really superior I shouldn’t have any trouble catching up to my QWERTY skills in just a few weeks.

Note: I got most of the above details regarding the development and popularization of the QWERTY from Jared Diamond’s “The Curse of Qwerty”, which is actually a really good read.