digitalBush

Farmer might be a little exaggeration.  Maybe I'm more like a tomato growing hobbyist.  Either way, all of us "farmers" have our secret techniques to churn out bigger and more bad ass crops.  I want my tomatoes to be bigger and ripen earlier.  Hey, what can I say?  I dig competition. 

I think it's awesome for people to diversify their activities.  It's important to maintain a well-rounded personality.  Technology is cool and all, but nature is cool as shit too.  If you give a plant a little bit of love it will grow and flourish.   So, do you want to know how to grow big bountiful crops of tomatoes?  I'll give you my secrets.  Maybe you can step away from the computer and go rock some salsa.

Photo courtesy of Manjith Kainickara

1. Prepare your plating area.  I have a good sized garden and every year I till it as deep as I can.  In my neck of the woods, we have mostly clay soil.  I till in peat moss and compost to try and keep the soil from wanting to pack down.  After several year of doing this, my garden soil has become much looser.
2. Pick plant varieties that grow well in your area.  This will depend on climate and soil type.  Your local nursery will be able to help you here.  You will have a ton of choices.  Heirlooms or hybrids, big or small, determinate of indeterminate.  It's all your choice.   I grow early girls, better boys, and big boys.  Try to pick a variety so that you can spread out your harvest. 
3. Dig a hole.  You'll need to dig holes that will cover up roughly 2/3rds of the transplants.  I pick off the lower leaves making sure to leave at least the 2 top sets.  This will help the plant establish a strong root system capable of sucking up water when things start to dry out in the summer.
4. Feed the plants.  I make sure to put some Osmocote slow release fertilizer in the planting hole before I put my plant in.  Additionally, I will fertilize a few times with a water soluble fertilizer depending on how the plant is looking.  You need to be careful with the fertilizer though because too much will make your plant grow big but not produce much fruit.
5. Keep things trimmed.  As the plant grows, I will remove the lower branches.  By the end of the year I have about a 6" to 1' stalk with no branches or leaves.  This will help keep the lower leaves from touching the ground and keep dirt from splashing up onto the leaves.  By keeping the leaves off the ground, you'll reduce the risk of the plant getting diseases, bugs, etc that might be in your soil.
6. WATER!  I've read that fully grown tomato plants need a gallon of water per day.  They are thirsty, that's for sure.  This is especially important during the hottest part of summer.
7. Reap what you sow.  Pick your tomatoes when they are ripe but not too ripe.  If they stay on the vine too long critters will eat them.  If you pick one too early, you can put it in a cardboard box covered up for a few days and it will ripen.
8. Holy Crap!  I have a metric crap ton of tomatoes.  What do I do now?  We can our tomatoes to use in stews and chili later on in the winter.  Homemade canned tomatoes always taste better than the store bought canned ones.

Now, what are you waiting for?  Go get outside and start doing something.  Right after your frosts are over for your area is the time to plant tomatoes.  Hopefully you'll love growing stuff in your garden as much as I do. 

Photo courtesy of gorriti

I'm not sure what it is, but bad email practices really make me angry.  I'm always amazed at the horrendous things that I see people do.  Email has been around for long enough now that business people should have no trouble using the medium.  After all, we are just talking about basic communication skills here.  Alas, some people that I work with have terrible email etiquette.  Here are a few of the things that get me rowdy:

1. USING ALL CAPS.  Damn, this is possibly the worst thing you could do.  Not only is it freaking hard to read, but it looks angry.  When I get one of these, I know the person is either really angry or really lazy.  Usually the latter is true.
2. writing in all lowercase and in one big run-on blob no punctuation to be seen anywhere.  You've seen these.  It's about half a screen of incoherent babble and a stream of random thoughts with no markers for when one idea stops and another starts. It starts off talking about the sales meeting and transitions to sports.  Next there is something about puppies and then finally back to the sales meeting.
3. Excessive use of "ASAP". This includes synonyms like "URGENT" and "IMMEDIATE" as well as using that damn importance flag that no one pays attentions to.  I'm sorry, but when you claim that everything is an emergency, I stop caring any more.  It's like the boy who cried wolf except it's the sales that cried ASAP.  I've just become numb to this type of email.  If something absolutely has to be done now I'll have gotten a phone call.
4. FUBAR Subjects.  I'm not even sure why this one is an issue, but it is.  Apparently it's extremely hard to craft a terse subject that sets a general tone of the email.  Instead, the subject contains the damn body of the email including the person's freaking name.  WTF?  My subject line can only show so many characters.  With a subject 3.73 miles long (that's approximately 6 kilometers for those of you metric folks), you would expect the email body to be a novel right?  Nope, usually it's a simple "see above".  Argh!  That's just laziness and impatience. 
5. The email then phone call email. "Hey, I just sent you an email.  Did you get it yet?"  It's okay if you just sent me something funny and you want to share the laugh with me.  It's okay if you follow up via phone because I didn't respond in a timely manner for the issue.  It's not okay if you hit send and pick up the phone to dial.  Computers are amazing things that deliver email with amazing reliability.  You can be fairly certain that clicking send and not getting an error means that I'll get the email.  I'll read it when I'm damn well ready to read it.
6. Poor spelling.  I'm not perfect and I spell things wrong on occasion. I'm no grammar Nazi, but spell check is built in to Outlook.  In fact, you don't even need to click something to perform the spell check as it puts a big red squiggly line under the damn word as you type it wrong.  Those people who make it a habit of having spelling mistakes are just being lazy.
7. "Reply All" all the time.  There's nothing like getting a broadcast message to announce something at work only to be bombarded by the onslaught of replies.  Here's the scenario, email #1 is an announcement along the lines of "Please welcome our new employee Salesy McSales."  Emails #2-8 are an email with "Glad to have you on board."  Email #9 is an email asking where we are going to lunch to celebrate the new hire.  Finally Emails #10-13 are a brief debate over the location of lunch.  All of this for a person who isn't even in my department.  Nice.

Hopefully none you, my dear readers, are described above.  If I've offended any of you, well good.  Someone had to tell you how bad you suck at the Internets.  If you know someone who does these things, send them a link here.  I'm sure they'll laugh because they're oblivious to the fact that they do these things.  At least you tried.

I just released version 1.1.3 of my Masked Input Plugin for jQuery. This release fixes a bug where the buffer wasn't being cleared properly, causing characters that had been shifted to be duplicated.

I'm still trying to find time to tear down the plugin ans rewrite it while allowing for some of the feature requests I've received.

Photo courtesy of HaSHe

In my daily web adventures, I stumbled across this disturbing question on Metafilter about web privacy while at work.  What's disturbing to me about the question is the general lack of understanding about technology fundamentals.  I thought I would take a moment to share some experiences from the IT perspective that will hopefully shed a little light on things for some.

Networking Basics

First, it's important to understand what you are actually doing when you are surfing the web and sending out your emails.  The Internet works in a request / response  messaging system.  You request something from somewhere and that "place" responds back with the appropriate message.  When you do this, your message and the response are not communicated directly but through a series of connected nodes.  Even though you are talking to a server down the block, your message could possibly travel to the other side of the country and back through any number of stops.  It's like a game of "pass it on" that you played in grade school.  In theory every machine that your message passes through has the capability of reading your message.

Encryption Basics

So, we've established that it's possible that your credit card information you submitted to purchase a pair of fuzzy bunny slippers could have passed through several servers before it reached it's destination.  How is it that your information can be protected.  My non-tech friends and family will recognize that the URL starts with "https" or that their is a lock somewhere in their web browser.  What does this mean?  Well, this basically means that before any information gets sent to the server, your computer and the server will work out a special code to communicate so that your message is protected from prying eyes in between the source and destination. 

Putting this all Together

I think for the most part non-techies understand that lock=good and no lock=bad.  Unfortunately that is where things stop.  For home use that is generally all that matters provided the machine isn't riddled with spyware and virii.  When you step into the workplace it's a totally different ball game for one very important reason.  At work, you do not control your computer.  Let me repeat that: At work, you don't control your computer.  I do.  Well, at least someone like me controls your computer.  Those same people you annoy with your printer troubles and questions about why that video your friend sent you isn't showing up in your inbox; they control your computer. 

Is that scary to you?  It should be.  So, while it's true that when you order something with the "lock" showing that others won't be able to see the digital message as it travels between here and the merchant's server, there's nothing stopping me from watching what you do.  I won't be watching over your shoulder.  Instead, I'll be recording your screen as if it were a tv show.  Now, instead of seeing your digital messages, I can watch your day of typing and application switching like it were a primetime show.  I'll also have key log of everything you typed and a breakdown of how much time you spent in each application and web site.  I can watch you without you knowing it.

How scared are you now? 

I hope you are scared enough to stop checking your bank account at work and to stop trying to shop for your secret lover.  I could really be watching you.  It's important to note that if I'm watching you, you're screwed anyway.  Management thinks you are a screw up and want to know what you are doing during the day.  They basically want to know if you are goofing off during the day or if you just suck at your job.  That's when I step in and install some software that grabs all of that information that you think is private before it ever hits the Internet. 

Fortunately I'm an honest guy and I would NEVER do anything with the stuff I've seen.  Unfortunately, I've seen people's bank account balances with account numbers, usernames, and passwords.  I've seen personal stuff about their family.  I've seen their interactions on social networks.  It's really good for those people that I have morals and ethics.  In fact, the experience for me was rather unsettling.  I just felt wrong watching people.

Wrapping this all up

While you are at work, you should be working.  That computer that sits in front of you isn't your home computer and it's not for your enjoyment.  It's just a tool to do your job.  Think of it as your hammer to pound out your email nails.  It's okay (if your employer isn't an ass) to take a breather once in a while to check out the news or weather.   However, please heed my warnings above; it's not a good idea to do anything at work that is personal. 

Photo courtesy of Robert Scoble

I'm about to share with you something a manager of mine told me several years back.  This has stuck with me and looking back, I think it's the best advice I've ever received. Being the geek that I am, I tend to side toward being introverted.  I feel like I am more outgoing than a lot of those in my field, but I'm sure no salesman.  This advice has helped me step past that tendency and keep those people I have to deal with on a day to day basis happy without getting myself run over.

So, what was that advice?  When I worked in retail way back in college, it was always hard for me to deal with upset customers.  I mean, who likes dealing with upset people?  My manager told me: "Instead of telling the customer what you can't do to help them, tell them what you CAN do to help them."  At the time, it made sense.  I took the advice and followed it.  But now, I look back at that little phrase with amazement.  

In any situation where the 3rd party (be it a customer, client, or your boss) is unhappy, telling them what you're going to do to fix it changes the tone.  It's important to know that you can't fix everything.  Sometimes something is so screwed up it's beyond repair.  If that happens to be the case, just own up to it and let them know what you'll do to keep that from happening again.  No amount of pointing fingers and blaming others is going to make you look any better.  If it's your fault, them fix it and move on.

Saying what you can't do is looking backwards towards the event that caused the disturbance.  It does nothing but draw attention back to that event.  Saying what you can do focuses the mind on progress.  Anytime someone can visualize progress, they are more satisfied.  It won't make the problem go away, but it's proven for me to be a sure-fire way to get people out of my face and start making progress.