As usual, I planted three EarthBoxes with seedlings purchased today from Summerwinds. We waited longer than usual to plant this year for two reasons – first, because our Master Gardener friends told us to wait, and second, because we wanted to plant after coming home from Europe.

The first EarthBox is on our porch, and it has:

• Diva Organic Cucumber, claims to be ripe in 58 days (July 8)
• Slice Max Cucumber, “mid-to-early maturing”
• Red Bell Pepper, ripens in 60–80 days (July 10–30)
• Yellow Bell Pepper, ripe when it’s a rich yellow.

In past years, I’ve tried planting three peppers, but no more than two have ever produced, so I decided to see how only planting two works. I completely replaced the soil in this box, since the old soil was two years old.

The second EarthBox is out in the sun, with tomatoes. This year’s choices:

• Early Girl, ripe in 50–62 days (June 30-July 12)
• Large Red Cherry, ripe in 70–80 days (July 20–30)

Last year was not a good year for tomatoes – we got a fair number of yellow cherry tomatoes but only a few of the larger ones. I replaced half the soil in this box, since it was fresh last year.

The third EarthBox is also out in the sun, with watermelons. I planted two of the same:

• Sugar Baby, ripe in 72 days (July 22)

Last year, I planted four melons in the same box; we got a few small melons, but nothing exciting. I replaced half the soil in this box, too, since it was fresh last year.

The 2012 garden is planted! - from Read This Blog! - Because everyone is entitled to my opinion.

We recently spent a week in Amsterdam before taking a river cruise through the Netherlands and Belgium; I will eventually post photos from the trip, but in the meantime, I wanted to share some possibly-useful tips for others travelling to Amsterdam and environs.

Money

• DO tell your credit/debit card companies that you will be using your card in the Netherlands and when you’ll be there.
• DO get money from ATMs rather than buying it before you leave the US; there are ATMs at the airport and all over town and you’ll get a much better rate.
• DO expect to find some shops which only accept cards and will not accept cash.
• DON’T get the Travelex “Cash Passport” Chip and PIN card – the exchange rate is hideous and they demand your Social Security number.
• DO expect to be able to use your US credit card when you are dealing with people – even though the Dutch all have Chip and PIN cards, every credit card machine I saw in a shop could also accept a US magstripe card. [1]
• DON’T expect to use your US credit card if you’re dealing with an automated kiosk (such as the ticket machines for the railway)
• DON’T take the option of paying in US Dollars using your credit card. The rate is probably not as good as your card company will give, and if your card has a surcharge for international transactions, you’ll have to pay that surcharge even if the transaction is in US Dollars.
• DO carry a few Euros in change with you at all times for small purchases and toilets – many public toilets charge between 20–50 cents for access.

Getting into town from the airport

• DO take the train unless you’re staying far from the city center.
• DON’T wait until you’re at the airport to buy your train ticket.
• DO buy your train ticket in advance from Belgian Rail; print it at home and bring it with you.
• DO have Euro change in pocket if you need to buy your train ticket at the airport, or go to the ticket window if you need to use currency or a US credit card. The machines ONLY take change or PIN cards.
• DO buy Second Class tickets for this trip unless you have a lot of luggage or can’t manage four steps up or down stairs.
• DO know that the trains to Centraal Station leave from Schiphol platforms 1 and 2.
• DON’T get on a “FYRA” train at Schiphol – it will cost you! You want to get on an “IC” train. The trains are marked on the sides of the cars; both use the same platforms.

Getting around town

• DO walk if you can – the touristy part of Amsterdam is small, and everything of interest is within a 45-minute walk (mostly less). Take public transport only when you’re in a hurry.
• DO watch out for bicycles and motorbikes, especially when crossing a bike path (and every street has bike paths). Treat them as you would any other fast-moving dangerous vehicle.
• DON’T be surprised by motorbikes (or bicycles) on the sidewalk, either, though they are usually going slowly there.
• DON’T worry about having exact change on trams; the conductor gives change. I don’t know about busses.

iAmsterdam card

• DO buy the iAmsterdam card.
• DON’T buy it at the VVV office at Centraal Station – there are long lines. If you must buy it there, use Line 6, not the “full-service” lines.
• DON’T pre-purchase the card over the Internet, which means picking up the card in person at the VVV office – in that same long line, of course.
• DO buy it at one of the other locations; if you plan to start with a canal tour, buy it at their counter (you’ll have to go there anyway to get the ticket that’s part of the pass).
• DO be strategic about the time of day that you activate the pass. It is valid for 24/48/72 hours, not 1/2/3 days. If you activate a 24-hour pass at 11am on Wednesday, you can use it all the rest of that day and then enter a museum before 11am on Thursday and stay there the whole day. This works best for major museums, like the Maritime Museum or the Van Gogh, of course. If you’re really hardcore, you could go to the Maritime Museum at 10am on the last day of your pass and get a ticket, immediately go to another nearby museum and see it, then return to the Maritime Museum because your ticket is good for the entire day.
• DO realize that the museum pass and the travel pass are completely separate after you buy them; you need not activate them at the same time (or even on the same day).
• DO realize that the discount offers in the booklet are valid even after your card expires (I think they go to the end of the year); you just need to bring the card and the booklet.
• DON’T plan to go to the Rijksmuseum or the Anne Frank House on the iAmsterdam card.

Sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll

• DON’T be afraid of walking through the Red Light District (of course, be aware of your surroundings, just as you would anywhere else).
• DON’T take photos of “red rooms” or the women working in them.
• DON’T go to a coffeeshop for coffee.

Eating and drinking

• DO expect the inside of restaurants to be non-smoking (both kinds of smoke).
• DO expect a lot of [tobacco] smokers just outside of a restaurant.
• DON’T expect free refills on coffee.
• DON’T expect free tap water.
• DO expect service charges to be included in your bill; round up to the next Euro or two if you’re especially pleased. I ran into one restaurant where service was marked as “Not Included” on the bill and tipped about 10% – I have no idea if that was right or not.

Staying connected

• DON’T use your US cell carrier’s international data plan, even by accident. AT&T’s price is $20/megabyte; other carriers are similarly exorbitant.
• DO consider using iPhoneTrip.com if you have an unlocked device or are on AT&T. I paid $17/day for unlimited data anywhere in Europe and used about 50 megabytes/day, which would have cost $1000 on AT&T.
• DO look for “Free Wi-Fi” hotspots; many small restaurants offer free Wi-Fi. One near our hotel gave us the password when we stopped to look at their menu and told us the service was available 24/7. We wound up having breakfast there four times!

• DO look for free Wi-Fi from free-hotspot.com if you’re near a fast-food chain like McDonalds, Burger King, or Subway.

  Language

• DON’T expect to need to know much (if any) Dutch. All tourist-oriented businesses are completely English-friendly, and almost everyone in the Netherlands seems to speak and understand English.
• DO try to sound-out written Dutch if you need to figure out a sign; it looks unlike English, but I found it fairly easy.
• DO say “Dank U Well” (“thank you”).

Amsterdam Dos and Don’ts - from Read This Blog! - Because everyone is entitled to my opinion.

I probably should have been properly paranoid and called them back, but she had enough information to convince me that she was legitimate (either that or a very good scammer). After we’d established mutual bona fides, she asked me the big question:

“Did you use your card to pay 399 South Korean Won for a website named ‘First Date’?”

Nope. And neither had my son or my wife.

And actually, neither had the thief – they’d tried, but “Verified by Visa” kicked in and they were unable to answer the question it asked, so the charge was declined and activated the fraud prevention system, leading to this morning’s call.

Naturally, this was the card I use for all my automatic payments (so I’m careful not to use it at gas stations or other places where skimmers are likely to live); fortunately, I have downloaded copies of my last few statements handy and can update all my accounts when the new cards arrive. It’ll make a great excuse not to do something more productive.

On a brighter note, the first thing I saw when I logged onto Facebook today was a congratulatory post to Luba Cherbakov (one of my peers in my last group at IBM) on her appointment to IBM Fellow; when I looked at the press release, I found that Ron Fagin, a fellow member of Shir Hadash, had also been appointed as an IBM Fellow. Well-deserved congratulations to both of them! (I wonder if the food at the ceremony was Kosher for Passover.)

I never could get the hang of Tuesdays…. - from Read This Blog! - Because everyone is entitled to my opinion.

It was amazingly restful.

The phone is back on (I needed the GPS for our evening walk), but I intend to be more mindful in how I use it during the coming week. And it’s worth remembering that airplane mode works on the ground, too.

A break from 24/7 - from Read This Blog! - Because everyone is entitled to my opinion.

I wonder how his poster got to the show.

The science is real - from Read This Blog! - Because everyone is entitled to my opinion.

Yesterday’s GoDaddy Super Bowl ad reminded me to finish the job, and now all of my domains are at NameCheap.

There were a few ads I liked yesterday; Chrysler’s “Halftime in America” ad caught and held my attention, as did Chevy’s “Twinkies” spot, and I enjoyed Audi’s “Vampires”. Other than that…let’s just say that I’m glad the game was close.

Super Bowl Advertising Works! - from Read This Blog! - Because everyone is entitled to my opinion.

The caller introduces herself as a paid caller on behalf of the American Lung Association. I ask her to remove me from their call list, which she agrees to do.

Then I mention that it’s before 9am on a Saturday, which is too early to call someone. Her reply: “we start at 8am”.

Dear American Lung Association: pissing off potential donors is a bad idea. Having your solicitors take a holier-than-thou attitude about the time they call is a terrific way of pissing off those donors. Be assured that your mail will go directly to my recycle bin from now on.

How to lose a donor - from Read This Blog! - Because everyone is entitled to my opinion.

Facebook

There was a time when I felt compelled to keep up with my friends’ postings on Facebook. If I was too busy to check the site during the day, I’d make a point of scrolling back as far as it would let me so I’d miss as little as possible.

I remember feeling that way as clearly as I remember yesterday.

But yesterday seems far away; today, Facebook gifted me with their latest design change, and suddenly, I have no desire to catch up. In fact, I have very little desire to go to Facebook at all – the new design is complicated, what with a scrolling ticker in the upper right, an arbitrary division in the main text area between the “Top News” and the “Recent Updates”, and, in general, a lot of visual sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Google+ looks more attractive every day; I just wish they’d let me use it from my primary email address (hosted on Google Apps for Your Domain) instead of forcing me to use my depreciated GMail address.

Netflix

Perhaps Facebook’s new complication was inspired by the Sunday night Netflix announcement. If so, they have more work to do – after all, you can still interact with everything that Facebook offers on one website, while Netflix is going to force their remaining users to deal with Netflix and Quickster.

I didn’t mind the price increase much, but doubling my workload because Reed Hastings has a vision of the future…what do they think they are, an airline?

If it’s not the heat, it’s the stupidity - from Read This Blog! - Because everyone is entitled to my opinion.

links for 2011-09-14 - from Read This Blog! - Because everyone is entitled to my opinion.

My original design constraints became irrelevant more than five years ago, but every time I thought about changing the appearance of the blog, I thought about the mass of CSS and PHP I’d have to deal with and put the project aside for another day. Or year.

This week, though, I started assisting the Webmaster of
the Los Gatos Silver Tongued Cats Toastmasters club in moving our site from FreeToastHost to WordPress (a project not yet complete), and he showed me how easy it was to make changes using modern themes and their associated widgets. So I spent this afternoon updating this blog to use the Weaver theme; the hardest part was figuring out how to get my Google AdSense to display where I wanted it (under the title) at the full width of the page (the answer: put the AdSense code in as a snippet instead of using the header widget).

I’m not sure that I’m finished with the redesign, but it certainly seems more modern (and less tiring to read on a widescreen display). Comments are welcome, of course.

Redesign! - from Read This Blog! - Because everyone is entitled to my opinion.

This morning, a friend from shul (who happens to be a Googler) answered my Google+ post, asking if this review might be of the story I was looking for. It was, and a quick search found the first few pages on Google Books.

I wanted to read the whole story, and I thought I’d probably be able to find Matheson’s book in a local library, but I was still curious where I’d originally read the story. I was pretty sure that I’d read it in an anthology, not a single-author collection, so I went to the Contento Index and looked for “The Creeping Terror”. I discovered two interesting things there:

• The story was also called “A Touch of Grapefruit”
• It had been anthologized under that name in Star Science Fiction 5

Both of those facts seemed awfully familiar. I got up from the computer, went to the bookshelves, and found my copy of Star Science Fiction 5. And “A Touch of Grapefruit” was right there on page 35.

Yes. I’d been searching for years for a story which was sitting on my own bookshelves.

At least I got to read the end of the story today!

Five Days — That’s Not Too Many! - from Read This Blog! - Because everyone is entitled to my opinion.

I was worried about spam – not the random spam that we all have to put up with, but spam created by companies sharing email addresses. So I took advantage of having my own domain and started giving out unique email addresses every time I created a new account. Everything funneled into one mailbox anyway, but I had control.

Over time, I realized that there really wasn’t a lot of leakage due to email sharing. In fact, I found that I got more spam sent to “random_address@my_domain” than from any other source. So I stopped making up new addresses but I didn’t do anything about the hundred-or-so addresses I’d created.

In the last year, I’ve gotten quite a bit of misdirected legitimate mail – some of which I really didn’t want to have anywhere near my computer (other people’s financial data). But I couldn’t easily block it, because I had to leave my catchall forwarding in effect to handle all of the accounts I’d created years ago.

Today, I decided to fix the problem once and for all. First, I had to find out what addresses were getting mail. I fired up Mail.app and downloaded all of my current mail; then I crawled through the mail folders, pulled out the “Delivered-To” lines, and built the list of addresses in use (not all of which were ones I wanted to maintain).

After that, it was a straightforward, if slow, process:

1. Look at the next address in the list
2. Search for the mail referring to that address (on Gmail, search for “address in:anywhere”)
3. Figure out what company or companies was using that address
4. Log onto their website and change the address (or unsubscribe, if it was someone I no longer cared about)
5. While I was there, I usually changed the username to something I could remember and made the password stronger (1Password is my friend!)
6. Lather, rinse, repeat

It took all day (with frequent Facebook, Google+, and newsreader breaks, of course).

And I’m not finished – I still have quite a few weak passwords to strengthen. But not tonight.

Memo to self: sometimes, simple is just fine.

If it wasn’t broken, why did it take all day to fix? - from Read This Blog! - Because everyone is entitled to my opinion.

I have been searching for the story for many years, but with no success. I’m sure it was published well before 1970 (probably in the ’50s), and I think I read it in an anthology.

If you know this story, I’d be grateful for the details. Thanks!

Can you outdo Google? - from Read This Blog! - Because everyone is entitled to my opinion.

I’ve removed the general Amazon link on my site; it’s too much trouble to edit out all of the other links I have scattered throughout the site.

Over the course of four years, I earned nearly $11 in referral fees, so I can’t say I’m terribly upset about this development. I do think that sales tax needs to be simplified and made consistent between online and brick-and-mortar retailers; online retailers should, at the very least, collect and remit the state sales tax for every state (dealing with the complexities of local sales taxes is a problem — even a five-digit ZIP code isn’t sufficient to properly compute the tax in many areas).

Collateral Damage - from Read This Blog! - Because everyone is entitled to my opinion.

My first step was to join ProMatch; I was lucky enough to get on my first choice of teams there, the JumpStart team, and I’ve jumped right in; I co-facilitated a workshop on “Marketing Yourself” yesterday (which, by sheer coincidence, followed a presentation by Dilip Saraf on “Personal Branding” which set up our session very nicely, as well as being interesting and useful in its own right) and will be co-facilitating another workshop next week. I also got invited to the Facilitation Team, and have given a Brown Bag seminar on Improv. I even got called in for a short TV news piece about the improving unemployment numbers.

I also have gotten very involved in the local Toastmasters club, the Los Gatos Silver-Tongued Cats; I volunteered as Webmaster and am going to be the VP for Education for the next six months; I’ve also given 8 speeches as well as visiting other clubs and competing in the area Table Topics contest (I placed second).

I’ve even started looking for actual jobs. I went a long way through the process at one company but didn’t get an offer, at least not this round; I’m now casting my net wider.

In short, I’ve been busy.

But today has been a change of pace; I managed a long walk this morning for the first time in a couple of weeks, then went out and hit a bucket of golf balls for only the second time this year (I haven’t improved!). And then I came home, and did nothing in particular.

Ahhh!

Selfish Friday - from Read This Blog! - Because everyone is entitled to my opinion.

Making it to 100 years is a big deal, whether for a person or a company – and in both cases, you should expect a lot of changes along the way. That’s certainly been the case for IBM; if it had stayed with its original products, it would have gone bankrupt decades ago.

I was with IBM for just over one-third of its history (so far!). At times, it was a great ride; of course, there were other times that I’d rather not remember too clearly. But throughout my association with the company, whether as an applicant, an employee, or an alumnus, the people have always been first-rate. And as long as that stays true, IBM will be able to continue onward – in fact, ever onward.

100 years - from Read This Blog! - Because everyone is entitled to my opinion.

The coming (and going) of Passover is probably the most obvious reminder that another year has passed, along with the inevitable note from the synagogue reminding me when Kaddish will be recited for her, but this year, I got a special and unexpected reminder — a comment on my Driving Shiva posting.

I close posts for comments after a few months to reduce spam, but William, the person who sent the comment, didn’t let that stop him — he commented to a post that still was open for comment, and I’ve moved his comment where it belongs.

Thank you, William; I appreciate your thoughtfulness and your persistence!

Five years? - from Read This Blog! - Because everyone is entitled to my opinion.

Tonight, Diane and I blended our own wines at Cinnabar Winery. It was fun, and completely legal – and this time, I absolutely plan to drink the product!

We had three reds to use in our blending:

• 2008 Sonoma Syrah, aged 29 months in Hungarian Oak, 30% new
• 2007 Solana Vineyards Paso Robles-San Miguel Petite Sirah, aged 40 months in French Oak, 30% new.
• 2008 50/50 blend of Paso Robles-Templeton Gap Grenache-Mourvedre, aged 29 months in American Oak, 20% new.

I tried each wine separately and decided I preferred the Petite Sirah to the other two; then I tried a few combinations before settling on 80% Petite Sirah, 12% Syrah, and 8% Grenache-Mourvedre as the recipe for Traffic Calmer.

Diane went for more balance, ending up with 55.5% Petite Sirah, 40% Syrah, and 4.5% Grenache-Mourvedre in her After Work Red.

We have to wait a few months for the wines to marry and mature…maybe for Thanksgiving!

BYOW - from Read This Blog! - Because everyone is entitled to my opinion.

We almost watched the next episode, too, but I wanted something lighter, so we turned to our brand new TiVo Premiere for Ovation’s Orange Blossom Special special.

It was entertaining and full of music, but it didn’t have any full performances of the song, so I let my fingers do the walking on YouTube in hopes of making my ears happy. We found (and played) a few conventional versions, and then stumbled across The Ukelele Orchestra of Great Britain’s version, which was distinctive, to say the least.

That wasn’t quite enough ukelele for the night, so we kept looking and finished the evening with the Ukelele Orchestra’s memorable performance of Shaft.

Can you dig it?

From War to Shaft - from Read This Blog! - Because everyone is entitled to my opinion.

I guess this shows two things:

• I’m feeling better
• Groupon’s Super Bowl ad fiasco didn’t drive me away

Now, if the rain would just stop for a while….

An inchstone on the road to recovery - from Read This Blog! - Because everyone is entitled to my opinion.