Farm News 05-04-08

Sunday morning, after chores, 47°

Weight: 205 lbs. Hah!

Barn News

Thursday, I took Bobby and the two younger goslings out of the brooder box to see a bit of the world. Auntie Beth, the oldest goose, is very maternal and has been staying near the goslings most of the time, talking to them often. Beth became excited when I took them out of the box, making a lot of noise, which alerted Albus, the gander, who came charging into the barn to rescue his flock. Like most ganders, Albus's behaviors remind one of the back end of the white horse the hero is riding.

Beth, unable to stand the confusion, retreated to her nest, complaining of a headache. Albus looked around wildly for a foe to vanquish, saw one of the goslings, and gave it a hard pinch. The gosling, unhurt, scampered out of reach while Albus searched for the next foe. It is difficult to maintain a heroic life when guided by only testosterone and a bird brain.

I picked up the three goslings and put them back in the box. Albus left the barn to see if there were any threats outside, and Beth left her nest and went back to watching the goslings. The goslings need grass. Geese are grass eaters, normally consuming large amounts of roughage to obtain small amounts of nutrition. The three goslings are living on a 17% protein grain ration, all they want to eat all the time. They are growing rapidly, which is good, I guess, but I know they like grass in their diet. If I put them out in the yard with a dish of their ration, they will spend more time time eating grass than they will eating the 17% ration.

Inside, covered and sheltered from the wind, the goslings can easily tolerate 50° temperature.

Yesterday, Jesse candled the eggs in the incubator. None of the thirteen goose eggs were developing, and only eight of the duck eggs. Bebe goose and Babette goose are each sitting on one egg. Beth goose isn't broody, yet, and I haven't counted her eggs. This is why day old goslings can cost $16 each.

Sally's bunnies are a week old, now. In a few more days they will open their eyes. Will they, like humans, be very nearsighted at first? Based on my inexact observations, the goslings are very nearsighted when first hatched. Is that a natural result of the way our type of eye has evolved? Seems probable to me that, at least in birds and mammals, natural selection has provided an eye that is nearsighted when it begins functioning.

I read somewhere that the eye has evolved seven different times. Octopuses, for instance, evolved with an eye that is as unlike ours as is the rest of their anatomy. Are the eyes of baby octopuses nearsighted? There are a lot of different kinds of animals around here, but no octopuses. Could it be that nearsighted infant eyes are found primarily in species in which the young are dependent upon the adults during an early period of development? Such an adaptation could serve to focus an infant's attention upon their caregiver by excluding visual stimuli except those less than a few inches distant from the infant's nose, a way of our genes saying, “You must learn, right now, to recognize mama, and then you can learn other stuff.”

Shotgun's kittens have their eyes open and are growing fast. I've moved the kittens to a more easily accessed spot, so we can start socializing them. If I moved them to anywhere inside the barn, Shotgun would have simply move them back, or, worse, hid them somewhere in the hayloft. So, I moved them to the back porch, hoping she will leave them there, where they will see lots of human traffic and receive occasional tidbits.

The Oskaloosa FOOL Web Site

Trying to impress a bunch of old women, justify my continued tenure as Chief Fool, and add accomplishments to my resume, I created the FOOL's web site, www.OskaloosaFOOL.org. I enjoy boasting of my successes, especially when they are sufficiently esoteric that very few people have any understanding of or interest in the object of my boasting. (Farm News is actually a long note from me to my grandchildren, and their grandchildren, in which I can brag of my accomplishments, safe by age from any critical analysis.)

One of the computers given to the library by the Gates foundation lost its power supply, (in the sense that 'losing one's heart' is equivalent to having a fatal heart attack). It is a fine machine, with a 2 Ghz Pentium 4 CPU, 512 MB RAM, a zip drive, a large hard drive, and a big, well ventilated, case. I suggested to the FOOLs that we have our own web site, and, instead of paying a hosting service, we run our web site on our own server and have the ability to host other web sites. The old women who run the FOOLs all listened intently to my suggestion, figured it was something the Chief Fool might actually be able to do, and voted to set up a server and to spend $35 for a new power supply to make it work. I ordered a a new power supply, installed the power supply when it arrived, and set about creating a web server for a bunch of FOOLs.

First, I erased the hard drive, partitioned it, and installed Ubuntu Linux 7.04 LAMP server edition, the operating system. Then I configured the internet connection with a static IP address, borrowed from NEKLS, the North East Kansas Library System, obtained by using my overwhelming masculine charm on a pretty young grad student who is also a techie for NEKLS. (She's bright, doing tech support work for NEKLS while she finishes a PhD in Library Science, and pretty enough to make me feel all warm and friendly to her when I see her.)

When I finished, the server had Apache2 web server, PHP5, and MySQL database, installed and working together. Next I installed Joomla, a Content Management System. Joomla takes care of things like registering to use the site, menu buttons, and all that stuff. Other than occasional tweaks for maintenance, Joomla will create web pages as they are requested on the internet, called www.OskaloosaFOOL.org/ sometimes with something after the '/', and Apache2 will then send those pages over the internet to the web browsers which requested them. In order to make all that stuff work right, I needed some development and management tools, and some additional parts and pieces of software for Joomla.

I recycled a module that placed a NewsFlash of the Day in the upper right side of the home page, to placing a Quotation of the Day there, instead, and populated the list of quotations with dark sentences from Little Davey Sunshine, a friend. I added the frameworks for an online 'Yellow Pages', classified ads, photo albums, personal blogs, and book reviews. Then I added some more management tools to help me keep all that stuff working together. Finally, I wrote a couple of paragraphs called, “Getting Started,” and published the site on the web.

Currently, I'm working on adding voice and video chat, messaging, and mail. I'm also looking for tools to help manage FOOL memberships. I hope to merge the paper member records into the online FOOL membership list and use the technology to broaden and strengthen FOOL membership services. My goal is to have at least a 10:1 ratio of non-resident to Oskaloosa resident memberships.

Anyway, that's what I'm doing in my Chief Fool disguise that has made me so pleased with myself. Aren't you glad I told you all that?

Books

Three westerns this week.

Call Him Amos by Vic J. Hanson

One of the nice things about reading large print books is that you always have something good to say about the book. This one was in large print.

Return of the Fast Gun by Lauran Paine

Another large print western, but this was a decent read and it only required a few hours of reading time. Lauran Paine is a reliable writer, a descendant of Thomas Paine, the revolutionary radical. Lauran Paine is twenty years older than I am and still writing.

Friends by Charles Hackenberry

Another large print western and a good book. If you like westerns, you will probably like this one.

Farm News 05-13-07

Sunday morning, after chores


Grandson

Grandson Julian Alexander DeWolfe arrived Monday, quietly and purposefully, according to my daughter. She claims he's cute. He definitely looks like the sort of baby that will make women warble out, “Oooooohhh,” the universal call made by a human female when she sees a cute infant. Quite a few men will make a similar sound, but from males there is a briefer call with less warbling.

Julian was born with the ability to utter a call that attracts the attention of all adult females within hearing and leads them to display behaviors indicating anxiety if it continues for any length of time. Within twenty four hours of birth he will have trained an adult female to be completely devoted to his well-being and general happiness. That's a hell of a good trick that might help him get through life as an adult male.

I haven't met Julian, yet, but I'm sure he smells funny, all infants do. Women generally think that infants smell wonderful and are able to distinguish their own infants from others by smell alone. Men, if they have any sense, don't mention that the baby smells funny. Several times every day the baby will develop a very strong stench, meaning it is time for a diaper change. Women use the occasion to engage in even more cooing and warbling while they clean up the mess and put fresh diapers on the baby.

Sometime close to the end of this month I hope to travel to Boulder to inspect Julian and make certain he is suitable as a family member. Although my standards are less strict than those of Leviticus, still, a family needs some sort of standards. Generally, I like to check to see that he has hair instead of scales and that his pupils are round. My daughter has assured me that he meets these qualifications but I know better than to believe everything a new mother says about her baby.

Julian developed a slight jaundice shortly after birth, but he has recovered and is now ready to grow up. I'm looking forward to when he becomes a teenager.

Bostonians

A reader writes:

Hopefully I'm not jinxing anything by saying this early, but everything has gone so according to plan so far that I think (hope!) it's safe--huge congratulations on the impending arrival of your latest addition to the farm! (I know his parents will insist he really lives in Colorado, but that's just a technicality, really.)

Meanwhile, to distract you from the suspense of waiting, I will tell you of my observation of a few weeks ago. You have both been to Boston, so you know that Bostonians are very friendly people who will cheerfully help a complete stranger of questionable intelligence, say, load a free kitchen table into the back of a Toyota (not that I would know anything about this personally), or attempt to give you directions to wherever you are trying to go, even though the phrase "You can't get there from here" most likely originated here. (The original would have been something more along the lines of, "You really shouldn't try to get there from here, because if by some miracle you don't end up in Rhode Island, some piece of tunnel or overpass will probably fall on you on the way.")

Despite what I believe is genuine native good-heartedness, there are two instances where Bostonians cannot seem to help becoming homicidal, and those are: a) If you are wearing a Yankees hat or any other item of Yankees apparel, and b) When they are behind the wheel of a moving vehicle. One Friday afternoon a few weeks ago, I was on Memorial Drive, which as you may know runs along the river in Cambridge. Traffic there normally travels at least 20 mph over the speed limit, but in this instance it suddenly came to a screeching halt. I assumed there'd been an accident or perhaps a pothole had suddenly evolved into a sinkhole (quite possible, local road "maintenance" being what it is), since I couldn't think of anything else that would stop traffic so dramatically. What it turned out to be, though, was...a family of ducks. A whole group of Bostonians who would never stop for pedestrians to cross, not even if they were blind and in wheelchairs, waited patiently for the whole duck family to waddle across three lanes without even a tap on the horn from anyone. I remembered then that Boston is, of course, the town of Robert McCloskey's Make Way for Ducklings, and the man clearly knew his setting. In the book, a policeman stops traffic for the Mallard family, but I now know this was unnecessary--everyone would have stopped anyway.

What was especially strange about the whole experience is that I realized I have now been in Boston long enough for this to actually make sense to me, although I couldn't explain it to someone who doesn't live here--stopping for ducks when you would never pause for a pedestrian, I mean. I would like to think that I'd still stop for at least the folks in wheelchairs, but I also know I would definitely check my rearview mirror first to be sure that wouldn't get me killed.

Success, Finally

There are two computers in my office, a two year old Dell, running Windows XP, on which I do most of my work, and an old Micron, upgraded several times with new drives, memory, and, once, a motherboard and CPU, and now running Linux. The old Micron is becoming my server, and I will be moving both Geezernet.com and Geezernet.us to it.

Linux is the operating system which most servers use. Apache is a web server, a program that sends web pages out to people who want to look at them, and I now have it installed and working on the Micron. Last week, I finally successfully installed MYSQL server, a database program for servers. Next will be XOOPs, and then the web sites. Geezernet.com will by my personal web site and Geezernet.us will hold the web sites of the Neighborhood Network project.

It feels very gratifying to have learned so much that I didn't particularly care to know. Linux is a pain in the butt to install and configure but, once it is running properly, it is fast and flexible.


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