June 2011 – Taojones

Father’s Day Bullfrog

Bullfrog, a photo by Tygh on Flickr.

I was doing a little yard work today. I know, it’s Father’s Day and my orders were to relax and take it easy, but I wasn’t exactly slaving away.

Within a couple of minutes of starting work, I found the biggest frog I had ever seen. Some water accumulated in the tarp I was using and the frog apparently was attracted to the bugs in the dirt along with the water.

Even all scrunched up, the bullfrog was bigger than my fist. I caught him and put him in a bucket so that I could take his picture. Once we had that out of the way, I put him back and there he stayed until I tried to move the tarp back over the soil.

That move spooked him and away he hopped.

Audio Direction Finding

Based on the same sort of triangulation that is used to pinpoint the source of gunfire in some cities, I think I could, using three microphones, build a 3-D model of the soundscape.

Each microphone records continuously. Downstream, the computer matches peaks and troughs and tries to determine the position of the sound source relative to the three mics.

I feel confident that I could place the loudest sound, but other ones might be trickier 😉

Biorhythms.

I had a tough time engaging today. I got some administrivia done, but not a lot of meaty work.

I did have a nice chat with my neighbor who will be working with me on a project, but I want to start knocking some projects off the plate here.

Maybe tomorrow. More then.

Server maintenance

I upgraded my ESXi server today. What an ordeal. Next time, it will be much more efficient, but this time was a learning experience. I intended to install 16GB of memory, but I only got 8. Because of the machine’s internal architecture, I’ll need either 8 more, or to return the extra that I can’t install yet. Definitely a case of RTFM. At least I read it before I started inserting devices… The server was down already, but…

Wow, it took a few hours.

Work Begins

I have to say, working from home does have its advantages. I tend to handle phone calls and business development during the day and push a lot of the work requiring lots of concentration into the evening hours. I end up working a lot, but I also have time to take care of a few things around the house while I am at it.

Work Begins, a photo by Tygh on Flickr.

Sunny days can be very inspiring. I am currently in the process of rebuilding the front yard and replacing much of the foliage that is in place today. I have tried to find homes for the big Rhododendrons, but the first one weighed about 150 lbs with it’s root ball in tact and was too big to fit into my car’s trunk. It’s been out of the ground for about a day now and it is showing signs of stress. I feel like I should chop it into pieces before it breaks my heart. I am reminded of the movie “Into the Wild” where McCandless kills a moose… now what?

The other rhodie is still in place. It looks smaller and more manageable. I am hoping I can find a place to transfer it to so that it will be out of the ground for the shortest possible time.

My other patient is the Dogwood that I moved from its current location. It is too tall and lanky for where it was and so I am putting it on the corner of the house. It actually seems to be doing ok for now, but still less than happy. I have to test some underground pipes before I finalize where to put it.

In all, I am still excited about the project. My wife thinks we are going to need more plants and she may be right. We’ll have to see how it all looks once I get everything together.

Remember?

This isn’t happiness

This song haunted me in earlier days. The lyrics seems so incomplete despite there being a lot of words here. They are oblique and mysterious. I'll never know to my satisfaction what she and Billy Joe were throwing off the Tallahatchie bridge. I'll never know why she never said a word at the dinner table when the subject came up. I can only speculate, and I think that's really the brilliance of the song. You get this feeling that the clues are all there, and so you listen... but the clues are not there, they are only in your own head.

Sunny Diorama

Sunny Diorama, a photo by Tygh on Flickr.

So I had an extra photo of this Wilson’s warbler that I printed and thought it would be fun to make a little shadow box out of it.

I still have a ton of real work to do, but maybe that’s what inspires me to do little things like this on the side.

At my last place of employment, there was an enormous amount of time spent on training. One thing I noticed was that getting actual work done generally seemed more fun than doing the training… maybe that was the business being smart. 😉