Snow peas grow fast. It was just over a month ago that tiny stalks and little leaves started to shoot up. Now some of the plants are nearly three feet tall. A few days ago I spotted the first flowers, and today the first two pea pods arrived. I’m growing snow peas in four containers, […]
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Spinach… it’s what’s for lunch
Spinach wasn’t exactly a bumper crop in my 2011 rooftop garden. I managed to harvest a few tiny leaves by the time the weather started getting warm and killing off my plants. 2012 is turning out to be a much better year. I’d like to take credit for the difference — but I think more […]
Watching the garden (and the gnats) grow
There’s been a lot of activity on the rooftop over the past few weeks. The snow peas are growing fast, the garlic is having a party, and the spinach is actually starting to look edible. I also received a belated birthday present of five locally sourced strawberry plants recently. I only had four planters, but […]
Signs of life among the garlic chives
It’s been about five days since I planted garlic chive, pepper, and tomato seeds in some indoor planters. Today the first signs of life started showing up in the garlic chive pot. If the little green bits look small in that photo, try the macro view on for size. <img border="0" src="https://i1 vente de viagra […]
Rooftop Garden update (4-04-2012)
It’s been a busy week up on rooftop garden, where all the garlic is strong, the snow peas are good looking and the spinach is… well, a bit below average. When I planted the first cool-weather crops in mid-March, it was unseasonably warm in Philadelphia and I think some of the little guys got a […]
Winter/Spring rooftop garden 2012
It’s been unseasonably warm in Philadelphia for the past few weeks, so my rooftop garden is already off to a pretty great start. About two weeks ago I soaked some snow peas for a few days to get them ready for planting, and a week and a half ago I turned the soil in the […]
Book review: Visit Sunny Chernobyl
It sounds like a silly idea at first: visiting seven of the most polluted places on the planet and treating them as vacation spots. But from the moment he hits the ground in Chernobyl and as we follow him to Canada, Texas, the Pacific Garbage Patch, Brazil, China, and India, Blackwell is an engaging story […]
This is why we don’t spend much money on cat toys
This week I picked up a few items from IKEA and assembled a new standing desk for my office. As you might imagine, there was a bit of cardboard packaging left over. Fortunately, it hasn’t gone to waste. Puck and Ollie have been making good use of the cardbaord as a kitten tunnel for hiding, […]
My new standing desk workstation
For the past few years I’ve spent a lot of time sitting in a chair staring at a computer. When I was younger I worked in retail and stood behind a cash register or roamed a sales floor for 8 hours a day. When I worked as a full time radio news reporter, I spent my […]
The Hunger Games Trilogy
Note: I’m still experimenting with how best to write about books without reading spoilers. I think I’ve largely managed to do that here, but if you don’t want to know anything about the series other than whether it’s worth reading, the answer is yes. I just spent the last week reading The Hunger Games Trilogy by […]
Review: In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
As a tech blogger and journalist I’ve been following Google pretty closely since 2006, and I was using their products before that. But for the most part I’ve focused on the parts of Google that everyone sees: the finished products. Steven Levy took a peek behind the scenes and paints an intriguing picture of a […]
Review: Force of Nature (on the greening of Walmart)
There are a lot of reasons to hate Walmart, and while Humes skims over them he doesn’t ignore them. The company puts smaller stores out of business, squeezes its suppliers so that it’s tough to make a profit (but it’s tough to say no to the biggest retailer in the world), doesn’t pay its employees […]
Mini-review: A Princess of Mars
A Princess of Mars: John Carter of Mars, Book One by Edgar Rice BurroughsMy rating: 3 of 5 stars After seeing a couple of trailers for the new movie John Carter I was wondering what the heck I just saw… and decided to give the first book in the series I try. It takes a […]
Book review: The Deal From Hell by James O’Shea
O’Shea may think he’s written a book about how profit-driven, ego-centric people ruined some of the nation’s largest papers, but that’s because his own biases are at work here. Actually what this book does is paint a picture of why it’s hard to run a newspaper as a for-profit business with the goal of constantly […]
Crypto
Crypto by Steven Levy My rating: 3 of 5 stars Steven Levy has an amazing talent for taking complicated, technical material and turning into engaging narrative. I’m not particularly interested in cryptography, but knowing that Levy was interested enough to write a book about it prompted me to pick up Crypto and give it a […]
Rule 34
Rule 34 by Charles Stross My rating: 4 of 5 stars Stross does a good job of fleshing out the near-future world first introduced in Halting State, and of introducing new characters. The second-person narration does a good job of trying to get you into the head of the characters, but it falls a little […]