so i “gave up” on my indoor grow project a few months ago, because of recurring issues with pests. i planted my four weedy, pathetic remainders outside and left them to fend for themselves.
they’re doing fantastically well outdoors… 😕
zoinks!
Monthly Archives: September 2016
varieties
XJ-13
so, here’s a question
i wonder to whom i am related. i’ve done a fair amount of genealogical research, and i have a database with a few thousand people to whom i am related in some way or another… and there’s this piece of information, which i figured out when i was just starting out, about 15 years ago:
1 – self
2 – parents – 1 generation ≅ 25 years
4 – grandparents – 2 generations ≅ 50 years
8 – great grandparents – 3 generations ≅ 75 years
16 – 2x great grandparents – 4 generations ≅ 100 years
32 – 3x great grandparents – 5 generations ≅ 125 years
64 – 4x great grandparents – 6 generations ≅ 150 years
128 – 5x great grandparents – 7 generations ≅ 175 years
256 – 6x great grandparents – 8 generations ≅ 200 years
512 – 7x great grandparents – 9 generations ≅ 225 years
1024 – 8x great grandparents – 10 generations ≅ 250 years
2048 – 9x great grandparents – 11 generations ≅ 275 years
4096 – 10x great grandparents – 12 generations ≅ 300 years
8192 – 11x great grandparents – 13 generations ≅ 325 years
16384 – 12x great grandparents – 14 generations ≅ 350 years
32768 – 13x great grandparents – 15 generations ≅ 375 years
65536 – 14x great grandparents – 16 generations ≅ 400 years
according to the research i have done, i’ve traced one thread of my family fabric back to the 1620s, but i’ve only tracked 11 generations, which indicates to me that there was a shorter time between generations, the further back you go, but it’s an accurate number of relatives, even if the number of years isn’t exactly accurate…
but, i think about 65,536 people who had an active part in my creation, despite the fact that they never knew who i am, and probably never knew anybody other than the people two or three generations to either side of them… and i also think about the approximately 7,000,000,000 individuals that currently inhabit the planet, all of whom have the same 65,536 relatives, some of whom are the same people… and 65,536 only goes into 7,000,000,000 approximately 106,812 times…
so the probability is pretty high that you, and i, and everyone else, are related to pretty much everybody, if you go back far enough…
happy international talk like a pirate day
when they used the word “ye” meaning “you”, that is because the modern eye doesn’t recognise that the antique informal “you”, is spelled “thee” or, more correctly, “þe”. the letter “thorn” – þ – is left over from when everybody spoke anglo-saxon, and when it became less common, printers replaced it with the letter y, which was still getting figured out where it was supposed to go in the alphabet at that time. there are two forms of the letter “thorn”, a capital – Þ – and a “lower case” – þ – and, these days, you need extra help to type them, because, while they’re probably part of your computer’s character set, it’s no longer something that you can access from the keyboard. the numeric character entity for capital letter THORN is is Þ and the small letter thorn is þ so you can put them on the web.
also, in middle english, the second person singlar pronoun “þe” and the second person plural pronoun “ȝe” (the letter “yogh” actually morphed into the modern letter “y”) were both printed as “ye” by middle-english printers who didn’t have the right type. that, along with the fact that americans didn’t particularly care for the informal “thee” meant that they started using the more formal “you” for both the second person singular and plural pronouns.
the english language has a whole bunch of letters that regularly get left out of alphabets, þ (thorn), ð (eth), ſ (medial s), and ʃ (esh) are a few examples…
yeah, i know, i’m a typography nerd…
hat-tip to ken whitley for the idea. 😉
whoosh
tomorrow i’m flying to santa rosa for a friends’ wedding. we’ll be back sunday. this will be the first time that both me and moe have travelled together on an airplane. moe has travelled by herself quite a bit, and i have travelled some, but we haven’t done so together until this weekend, when we are flying home from santa rosa, by way of portland.
before may of this year, i haven’t flown anywhere since i went to san francisco with the big bois with poise in 2012. before that, it was in 1998, when i flew to boston for training at software dot com, pre-openwave. it’s been a matter of choice, as well as the fact that i couldn’t have afforded it, even if i had wanted to travel somewhere.
so, since may, i have spent more time flying places than i have in almost 20 years.
i still can’t afford it, mostly. in spite of that, it’s kinda cool and kinda scary, especially since, this time, i will be transporting 500 corsage pins (in my checked luggage) for my "fellow travellers"… 😉
okay
i got the third order from the web site, which is very good. the lady ordered three rolls of tibetan simpoi, and paid $6.50 shipping, which i thought i had fixed, but when i looked through the settings, i discovered one place, on a deprecated page, that said $6.50, which was, apparently, where she was going through… so i fixed it, and then deactivated the page (because it is deprecated, and not going to be included in future versions anyway), so now, presumably, shipping will be charged correctly.
and i’m REALLY jazzed that people are ordering from the new web site. it gives me hope for the future.
wump
i got the second order from the new web site. somebody ordered $2.00 worth of incense. the minimum shipping charge was set to $5.00, and the total for shipping was $7.20.
so i updated the flat-rate shipping fee to be a minimum of $8.00, instead of $5.00. i also updated the minimum international shipping fee to $25.00 from $10.00. this will, hopefully, prevent people from ordering stuff that costs less than the amount that it costs to ship the order to those people.
i think, with a bit of fine tuning, the new web site will work out just fine, even if i don’t get to hire the web designer to teach me the things i need to know right away.
greep
so i finally got in touch with the web designer. i took care of the most urgent issue myself, and after going back and forth with her a couple of times, she offered to skype with me, so that i could share my screen with her so that i won’t have to re-create an admin account for her… except for the fact that 1) i don’t want her to fix the problems, i want her to tell me how to fix them, because, ultimately, that is what i originally hired her to do in the first place, and 2) i don’t have a computer that can run skype AND on which i can access the back-end of the web site: i have a four-year-old MacBook Pro that’s running Lion (because i don’t want to have to buy all new software AGAIN) which won’t run the current version of skype, and a linux machine, which won’t run ANY version of skype… i can run skype on my tablet, but it would take a good deal of kluging to get into the back-end of the site with any facility, and, while i could do it, it’s definitely not worth it.
she wants to charge me and i can’t afford it. the last time i had her do anything for me was right after the site went live and i mistakenly deleted all of the content (i was deleting the extraneous admin accounts that she had created and i deleted all of the content they created instead of re-assigning it to me). she had a working copy of the site, and she uploaded it and had the site up and running again in half an hour, and she charged me $126… and, to be honest, that cleaned out my bank account and i’m going to have to wait until next year before i’m going to be able to afford to hire her again.
i’m sure that, if i try, i can probably figure out the remaining issues on my own, but it’s going to take a while.