Odd Lots

[jeff_duntemann]

• Good grief! Salvia is a hallucinogen! How in hell did I get to be 55 and not know that? (We used to grow it as a ground cover years ago.)
• Nick Hodges wrote to say that the Easy Duplicate Finder utility I mentioned in my June 20, 2008 entry was written in

Comments

[jeff_duntemann]

There's some truth in the contention that Borland/Codegear doesn't make the logistics of deployment easy--but coding, wow, coding is a breeze, which is why I still do my Delphi work in Delphi 7. (My machine downstairs still has Delphi 6 installed and it still works on the sorts of win32 projects that I attempt at home.)

Alas, on my short list of things to fear are cruise missiles, biological weapons, Microsoft technologies, and unbounded string functions. I think I'm going to stay where I am.

[anonymous]

Using Firefox 3, when I try to use the link to the article on clearing brush in Santa Cruz I get:

Secure Connection Failed

secure.jeff-duntemann.livejournal.com uses an invalid security certificate.

The certificate is only valid for www.livejournal.com

(Error code: ssl_error_bad_cert_domain)

* This could be a problem with the server's configuration, or it could be someone trying to impersonate the server.

* If you have connected to this server successfully in the past, the error may be temporary, and you can try again later.

Or you can add an exception…

[jeff_duntemann]

This puzzles me, but I haven't moved to Firefox 3 yet (and if this is what I'll have to face, I may not!) and so can't troubleshoot it here. I'd be curious to know if anyone else is having this kind of problem with the new release.

[jeff_duntemann]

Try this link. Different paper, looks like the same story:

http://www.santacruzsentinel.com/ci_9573309

The Merc seems to require authentication, but not always. Hmmm.

[crenelle]

I searched for the article at multiple locations in the usual fashion when the Merc News said they'd already retired it to the archives. I ran into a large number of brush clearing articles where the muni and/or the environmentalists would restrict/want/prevent brush clearing. Apparently everyone likes to clear brush because of the fire hazard, and the first thing they do when they pile it up is...burn it all. So someone probably thought that just burning all that dry wood probably wasn't the best choice. On this island, the residents pile brush high and deep and then burn it all, even when it stops raining here and place gets super dry during the late summer months, and while there are burn bans in effect. Hauling wood chips out of the wooded areas cost a fortune in diesel, and bringing it all out as is probably requires lots of trips. So it's a problem that probably should have been resolved much quicker before it cost the neighborhood the neighborhood; the typical solution is an illegal burn.

[kevinnickerson]

It doesn't do the quick crc/md5, or whatever it was, compare, but Find Duplicates has a much simpler user interface and precise control over which duplicate to delete.

Oh, and it's a no-install and seems to have been written in C++.

[jetfx]

Salvia's hallucinogenic properties have only recently become more widely known in the US and Canada, and even then it is not all that popular, so it is not unsurprising that you wouldn't have heard of it. Since the general public is mostly unaware of Salvia, it hasn't run afoul of the law trying to ban what is essentially harmless, although what American media coverage and political attention it has received has been overwhelmingly negative and sensationalist.

However I live in Canada, and the stuff is widely available at any head shop as it is perfectly legal. From personal experience, I'm not such a fan of it. It tastes awful, and the effects, which last about 15 minutes are incredibly intense and disorienting, with everything around you visually pulsing at the same rate as your racing heart. Then you're woozy for about an hour afterward.

This article from Salon should give you a better rundown of the experience than I can.

[jeff_duntemann]

Yes, I saw that--in fact, it was my last cruise through Salon that brought it all to my attention. Minnehaha pointed out that there are lots of different kinds of salvia, not all of them trip tickets. What we were growing in Scottsdale was clearly not in the interesting group. (I think it might have been all of two inches tall.)

I vaguely recall Carol crossing salvia off the list of potential landscaping plants here because the deer eat them, and we have deer like some people have mice. Nor is a 200-pound buck in the throes of a mystical experience something I'd like to meet on Star Ranch Road at 35 MPH.

[jetfx]

Many years ago I saw nutmeg on a list of hallucinogens, and a quick web search confirms it.