Farm News 11-04-07

Sunday morning, after chores, 52°

Seen on a 12-13 year old girl in downtown Oskaloosa, a tee shirt, across the front of it written, “Under Construction.”

Inadvertently, I implied that one of my bright, good-looking nieces did not know the meaning of the word 'ephemeral'. I should have been more sensitive in my expression, and I apologize, but use this opportunity to remind her that her physical beauty is ephemeral, but, if she writes of what she knows, the content of her mind can last as long as civilization.

Barn News – Kitten Found

Just when I had decided that Shotgun has been faking it somehow, and some of last year's kittens were still nursing on her, I went into the barn and heard a kitten yowling. There is no mistaking the sound of an unhappy kitten, and this one was very unhappy. It had fallen out of the hay loft, down between the studs, the up-down frame pieces of the barn walls, and into the gap between the outside wall of the barn and the inside wall of the stall below, the stall where the ducklings are currently growing. This sounds terrible, at first, but the stall walls are only four feet tall, and the 4” space between the stall wall and the outside wall is filled with straw, a place where many kittens have been born. The kitten suffered injury only to its dignity, causing it to yowl all the louder. Cats seem to be very sensitive about their dignity.

To reach the kitten, I had to cross a duck swamp. Ducks are the messiest creatures in the barn, generally; they spill lots of water, root around and stir up lots of mud, and dump most of their feed into the mud. They build up low, round mud knobs, sticking up on the end of their upper beak, which they then use to shovel up mud, feed, and water. Duck pens are stinking mud-holes, and I had to cross that to rescue that silly kitten.

I may be 70 years old, but I have not forgotten one of the prime directives of civilization: when given the opportunity, men must be willing to give their lives if necessary to rescue something young and helpless, in the hope of presenting it to the nearest human female so she can care for it. I wore out my wife with that kind of thing long ago, so I brought the kitten to the house so she could inspect it, and then returned it to the barn to find its own way in cat society. The younger adult cats, of whom there are far too many, immediately checked out the kitten and, after quite a bit of sniffing, decide that it was one of them. Then the young adult cats went through some acts to show their places in the hierarchy of cats, those places being far higher and more important than the place of the kitten. In cat societies everyone knows the rules.

The kitten is gray and white, mostly gray on top and white on the bottom. It's a pretty kitten, a tomcat I would guess by the look in its eyes, and it was smart enough to quickly find a place to hide in the wood pile by the stove. When I left the barn after evening chores, the evening I found the kitten, it was hiding in the wood pile, occasionally giving a half-hearted, pitiful yowl, and successfully telling the older cats that, yes, it knew its position in society.

The kitten was discovered on Wednesday, given the name Pitiful on Thursday, and Friday evening when I went to do chores there was no sign of Pitiful. I called, which normally starts it to yowling, and looked in all the likely places. Sadly, I assumed that some misfortune had removed it from the barn, and began chores. When it came time to feed the adult ducks, I called, “Ducks, ducks,” as I always do, and the ducks came running, as they sometimes do. Behind them, running as fast as his legs would carry him, came Pitiful. Pitiful has found friends, the adult ducks.

Other Barn Events were headlined by the appearance of the Lady Bugs. After 2:00 pm or so, there are millions of Lady Bugs flying around in the yard, gathering together for winter hibernation. Groups of several hundred will collect in sheltered spots, spaces between the exterior wall and vertical poles of the barn being popular. Programming geeks look at behaviors like that and are delighted by how all that was shoe-horned into a bug brain.

There are still no leads on a buck to breed with Lucy, but Jesse will probably find a mate for Beth, Bebe, and the unnamed young goose (that young goose needs a name). Not that it is very important, she will probably never learn to respond when I call her by name. Beth is the only goose that responds to my voice, Beth was incubator hatched and imprinted on humans as parents. The others hatched under a goose named Nadeane, a sweet tempered small goose who was incubator hatched and strongly imprinted.

When a goose hatches, the first thing it sees that moves is Mommy. If the thing that moves is a human, then that human remains part of the goose's family for the rest of the goose's life, and we say the goose is 'imprinted' on humans. The goose might make the human their closest friend for life, if encouraged, but it is far better for the goose to be weaned away to the goose flock. Geese live 30-40 years, and, unless you want to have goose poop beside your door for 30-40 years, it is best to help the goose adjust to living as an adult goose, with a gaggle (a gaggle is a flock of geese) of its own kind. A strongly imprinted goose will wait beside your door for your return, and fail to eat enough to remain healthy.

Imprinted geese will form into a flock if kept together. There is a year or more of fighting and general uproar any time new adult geese are introduced into the flock, but little problem with young geese raised under a member of the flock.

In some culture, somewhere, I think in Switzerland, someone figured out that geese could be trained to regard a stick, with some kind of ornament atop it, as Mommy. Sure enough, if you took the stick and walked to the goose pasture for the day, you could plant the stick in the ground and the geese would remain within sight of the stick all day.

Next spring I think I might concentrate on raising some new geese from the incubator.

Weasel celebrated Halloween with a skunk. I don't know how the skunk is doing, but Weasel is very aromatic.

Old Computer Wanted

I need another computer, one that is just becoming outdated, to replace my server. Actually, I just want to replace the motherboard inside the computer, the one component that does nothing much but compute. The replacement must have a Pentium type processor, be capable of holding 512 MB of RAM, minimum, and PCI bus. I can't afford a new server, and, besides, I like this one. It is a huge box, too tall to fit under a desk, with room inside for three CD drives and four hard drives. It's big, heavy, ugly, and I've lived with it for many years, but, for the second time, it's brains have worn out.

If you left click once on this your computer will initiate a series of actions. First, it will tell the program http to start and to send out a request on the internet. The words, 'left click once on this', are actually part of what is called a hypertext link, and they contain the address of something else on the internet, in this case it is the address of my web site, www.geezernet.com. The internet, with its amazing mind, will route that request straight to my server, which lives under the Oskaloosa water tower.

When the internet delivers the request for www.geezernet.com to my server, the server jumps to life and sends back over the internet the contents of my home page on GeezerNet.com. That is what is supposed to happen. However, my server is broken, and your request never gets there. The server isn't connecting to the internet. I replaced the network card in the server, and it didn't help. Thursday, after weeks of searching for a software problem, I realized that it had to be in the hardware, somewhere, and that I need to replace the motherboard.

For all two or three of you who are interested in diagnostics, I can't find any changes that have occurred in the Linux setup. Suddenly, the server lost connection with the internet. I installed a new PCI bus network card, but there was no change. I plugged a USB to Ethernet into a USB port and ran the Ethernet connection from the router to that. No connection. Everything seems okay, but no connection is there when I try to use it. I can't ping anything.

Now, the interesting part. There are two hard drives on the server, each with it's own, bootable, operating system. Drive 0 has Ubuntu desktop on it, and drive 1 has Ubuntu server on it. No matter which drive I boot from, the problem remains. From that, can I safely assume it is a hardware problem? No, but it might as well be, because I'm out of all ideas short of replacing the motherboard.

This deep pit of problem, though, then led me to think of yet another test. I will take Drive 0 from the server and replace the C: drive on my desktop with it. Then I will boot up the desktop with the copy of Ubuntu desktop on the transplanted drive. If the problems show up then on my desktop, then the problem is in the software stored on the drive. If there is no problem, I will know the motherboard on the server is at fault and must be replaced.

It is Saturday night as I write this, and I have been writing this article all week. Also, I've been drinking a bit of vodka, so I think I will leave the resolution to Sunday afternoon.

If you would like to provide a donor for a computer brain to be transplanted into my server, please send me a note. I am always happy to receive old computers, whether I can use them or not. Usually I remove usable parts and send the rest to the dump, an environmental offense to my county, probably.

A Good Sentence

“The other side of danger, an exuberant, awful certainty: the world, a complex contraption, operates not to slake human desire but from immaculate necessity, and our small consciousness a wondrous but transitory and superfluous attribute of its unspinning.”

From Liar's Moon, and I wish whoever borrowed my copy would would return it. The author, Philip somebody, I think, but I can't remember his last name, lives in Lawrence and has a daughter who is a sophomore at KU, I think. Thank you, Philip, if that is your name, Liar's Moon is a fine book, one I've read three times. The above quotation has been on a scrap of paper stuck to the wall above my desk for years and stuck in my mind with the idea that it was the subject of a sermon once given in Tonganoxie.

Another Day in Paradise, from our correspondent in Cambodia

Just returned from a walk on the beach. Wet sand feels very good on bare feet. Troubles, traffic, worries are not a concern today. Today I walked on Independence Beach. It's kind of deserted down there; very quiet. You might imagine that it is dangerous, but it isn't. Maybe at night it is spooky, but wandering about in the dark is never a good idea.

There must be crime here, but I haven't seen it. The police must arrest someone, but I haven't seen that either. The police must pull over some errant drivers, but I haven't seen it. Nobody gets a ticket for running a stoplight; there are no stoplights in Sihanoukville. Nobody gets a ticket for running stop signs; there are no stop signs here. Surely someone here comes to blows with someone else, but I haven't seen any fighting either. They say there are a lot of weapons here left over from the IndoChina wars, but I haven't seen a single gun. There are many things to worry about, but please don't worry about me in the Heart of Darkness.

My camera was mailed to me. It is still in the box. It's my intention to take some pictures and post them here. Right now, a latte across the street at an Englishman's shop, Espresso Kampuchea, seems like a good idea. Now the weekend is here, so no doubt I'll be too busy to be taking any pictures for a while. Gosh, it's 1:27 PM already. Where does the time go? I'm kinda planning on heading down to another beach for the sunset. If I wasn't so well rested, I'd take a nap. Decisions, decisions.

Raymond, whom, please, is the Englishman? [Grammar experts, did I get that right?] He has a coffee shop in Sihanoukville so he must be some special sort of Englishman; you have met him, it seems, so he is quite possibly an interesting looney. I hate to remind you of this, but the big salary you are drawing is for reporting the things of interest occurring in Cambodia. Please show a bit more ambition, and send those reports from Southeast Asia.

When the server is repaired and serving again, Farm News will be available at www.GeezerNet.com.

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