Yearly Archives: 2012

Bumblebee Nest in Squirrel Nest

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Working in the yard, I got a ladder out to remove an old squirrel nest from high up in a our backyard hedge. As I went to pull it out, I noticed two bumblebees land on the nest and climb inside.

I pulled the squirrel nest to the ground and opened it up to see what was inside. I found an orange, waxy mass that turned out to be bumblebee larvae. There was one bee “working” on them.

 

Meanwhile about five or six bumblebees were flying around the hedge looking for the nest. I put the nest on a lower bush. A few hours later, Kelly and I went to see that the bees had found the nest and were cleaning and feeding the larvae. By evening, the bees had covered up the larvae by moving nesting material around. I’ve never seen a bumble bee nest before.

Fiveforks.com Increasing Outages

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Fiveforks.com has been experiencing increasing outages at JustHost.com based on the website monitoring tools I use at AreMySitesUp.com and SiteUpTime.com. I decided to file a complaint, but I wanted to make sure the problem was with the JustHost server.

There was a reported big outage on March 12th. So I went into the raw logs that record every visit to Fiveforks.com whether by a person or a search robot (like the GoogleBot.) In this copy paste from the logs there is a really big gap of “silence” indicated in [RED] by my note.

I don’t have these kinds of outages with BlueHost.com where SJNLilburn.com is hosted. Pay a bit more there, but you get what you pay for?

222.77.227.81 – – [12/Mar/2012:16:45:13 -0500] “GET /ted/2011/10/stanza_and_epub/ HTTP/1.0” 200 23222 “http://fiveforks.com/ted/2011/10/stanza_and_epub/” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT 5.0) Opera 7.02 Bork-edition [en]”

222.77.227.81 – – [12/Mar/2012:16:45:15 -0500] “POST /ted/wp-comments-post.php HTTP/1.0” 302 – “http://fiveforks.com/ted/2011/10/stanza_and_epub/” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT 5.0) Opera 7.02 Bork-edition [en]”

222.77.227.81 – – [12/Mar/2012:16:45:38 -0500] “GET /ted/2011/10/stanza_and_epub/ HTTP/1.0” 200 23204 “http://fiveforks.com/ted/2011/10/stanza_and_epub/” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT 5.0) Opera 7.02 Bork-edition [en]”

109.230.217.46 – – [12/Mar/2012:16:45:41 -0500] “GET /ted/2008/09/domain_registration/ HTTP/1.0” 200 16313 “http://fiveforks.com/ted/2008/09/domain_registration/” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; Powermarks/3.5; Windows 95/98/2000/NT)”

[16:45 = 4:45 pm above. Next visit below at 1 minute past midnight. So 7+ hour outage.]

180.76.5.58 – – [13/Mar/2012:00:01:17 -0500] “GET /ted/2011/01/snow_day/ HTTP/1.1” 500 252 “-” “Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Baiduspider/2.0; +http://www.baidu.com/search/spider.html)”

146.0.74.234 – – [13/Mar/2012:00:03:05 -0500] “GET /wp-login.php HTTP/1.1” 200 2195 “-” “Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.3) Gecko/20090824 Firefox/3.5.3 GTB5”

46.251.228.99 – – [13/Mar/2012:00:13:15 -0500] “GET / HTTP/1.0” 200 2441 “http://fiveforks.com/” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)”

46.251.228.99 – – [13/Mar/2012:00:12:39 -0500] “GET / HTTP/1.0” 200 2523 “http://fiveforks.com/” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)”

Porch pollen

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Our screen porch always gets a good dusting of pollen, and then spring showers do not wash it away. So we have to hose everything down.

20120401-102708.jpg

The dogwoods and azaleas are all in bloom, and the zoysia in the back greened up enough this past week that we’re getting that Masters golf course look. The fescue we had prior always looked great this time of year, but it didn’t hold up through the hot summer. Zoysia loves heat.

Comcast Mess

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Comcast sent us a letter saying our TVs will stop working unless we have a Comcast box or get a free DTA (Digital Transport Adapter.) They are going all digital and all customers will need digital controls that allow for things like on-demand movies and even more and more channels.

We don’t want either, but our basic TV package would quit working unless we at least order the DTA. The first three are free, so I ordered one for each TV.

Three giant boxes came in the mail and one is pictured below. I think six Apple TV packages would have fit in one Comcast DTA package. Inside the box are:

Comcast DTA Shipping Package

  1. a little hockey puck, which is the DTA
  2. a small AC/DC power supply (oh good, another plug)
  3. a coax cable (oh good, more cables)
  4. an optional IR remote control wire in the event the remote cannot see the hockey puck
  5. a remote control for the hockey puck (oh good, another remote control)
  6. two AA batteries for remote (hey, batteries included)
  7. some 2-sided stickers for sticking the hockey puck on the side of something
  8. a giant, two-sided “simple” set up poster nightmare
  9. a smaller, many-worded instruction booklet
  10. a remote control instruction booklet with tons of secret codes that *might* let you turn your TV on/off and sound up/down with the new remote control.

And that’s just one set. Multiply the photo times three.

It took me hours to get all of this junk set up and activated. Our Sony TV went smoothly, but  the Philips with VCR was a mess because of cable complexities. And after much trial and error and Google research, the best we have with the kitchen Magnivox is the mute button on the remote will turn the power on/off and the volume down button will make the volume go up. If we want the volume to go down, we have to use the TV’s native remote. Ugh….

Apple TV with Remote

Apple TV much simpler.

Our TVs and VCR are all now “stupid” because all tuning and programming has been taken away from them and moved to the Comcast DTAs. I believe these “free” hockey pucks are Comcast’s attempt to grab the digital brains of our TVs before Apple comes in and takes over. I really hope Apple is successful at simplifying both the technology and pricing of TV and drives Comcast out of business. I’ll pay extra just to avoid all of this mess!

PS – We use our Apple TV (hockey puck) all the time. It was so simple to set up and uses our AT&T internet connection, so I hope some day we can just turn off Comcast.