cross posted from ficial.wordpress.com

The most common tool for identification is the binary key. A person starts out with an unknown thing, the key presents a question about the thing, one answer leads to one later questions, the other answer to another, until the thing has been uniquely identified. This sort of key has a lot going for it - when it ( Read more... )

Things are slowly moving along on our house. After many iterations working with the timber-frame-kit builder we finally settled on a floor plan (and made a few larger changes in the process). We're at the point where we're just waiting for final plans from him to take to the bank for a loan and the town for a permit. Related to that, we're ( Read more... )

We got out on a nice hike today, and since the time was about right and since we had some rain recently, we decided to head to an area where we thought there might be some morels. Amazingly enough, we actually found some! We got 5 large ones (fist/hand sized) 2 medium ones, and 3 small ones - for us, a giant haul! For dinner we had seitan satay, ( Read more... )

Last weekend we planted 7 fruit trees at our new(ish) land, and yesterday put in three more. In all, we put in 5 apples, three pears, and 3 peaches. Hard work, but fun and gratifying. Among other things, it feels like we're actually beginning the process of moving up there (even though we don't have the house built yet ( Read more... )

Candied Ginger Chocolate Candied Ginger Chunk Chocolate Chip Ice Cream.

That is all.

In honor of the recent make-a-monster birthday party for shideem (documented at http://danielbeck.net/photos/archive/), I present to you

Systema Contranaturae

Being the Outline of a Classification of Creatures Sub-, Un- and Supernatural

Took the afternoon off to do a bit of work up at the land. Happily, the work was much less than I'd thought it would be, so I got to spend about 2 hours wandering through the woods. Spring clearly still has not sprung, but it's trying hard. Various of the very early things have sprouts up, and while it wasn't exactly warm, it was no-jacket weather ( Read more... )

As is usual for me, I gave myself a day of vacation for my birthday. I ran a few errands this morning, and then spent the rest of the day working on my keying tool. It's still in pre-pre-pre-alpha, but there's enough there now to give a general idea of how it works, if you're interested in such things: Read more... )

Had a fantastic brunch, with many great people and way too much tasty food. Then got out for a bit of a walk in the woods before the sun got too low. Now just hanging out after cleaning up. This is a really good way to spend a birthday.

The best so far today, barely beating out a wide field of contenders, is a variable named $string. While perhaps accurate, it's pretty lacking in the precision department. First runner up is a function called print_header that, some times, prints more than the header, and other times not.