Brad Linder's digital home

Turn of the season: Out with the snow peas, in with the beans

noreply@blogger.com (Brad Linder) — Fri, 25 May 2012 19:23:00 +0000

It's late May and the temperatures have been unseasonably warm in Philadelphia for this time of year. There's also been a lot of rain. In the rooftop garden that's meant the snow peas came in a little earlier this year than last, and the plants offered up a lot of peas.

But over the past few days I've been finding fewer pods to pick... and when I glance at the bottom leaves of the plants, I think I can see why. The hot weather is getting to the green guys... and turning them brown.

I'm hopeful that I'll be able to continue picking at least a few snow peas each day for the next few weeks, but these plants' days are numbered.

Fortunately I'm not putting all my legumes in one basket.

Last week I dropped a few beans into the planters that are currently home to the snow peas, and yesterday they started to pop their heads through the soil.

When I tried growing green beans in the garden last summer I didn't end up getting a very large yield -- but last summer was extraordinarily hot and dry. I'm hoping to do better this year.

Anyway, my goal is to let these guys grow up among the dying peas and cut away the pea plants as needed to make room for beans as they start to get big.

I'll also be putting the pepper and tomato plants that have been growing in my windowsill outside soon. They're not as large as I'd like them to be yet, but I don't want to wait too long to get them into larger planters and more direct sunlight.

Today I started hardening them off by putting the peppers and tomatoes up on the rooftop in the hot sun for about an hour. When I brought them back inside their leaves had wilted a bit from the sun and wind, but a little water and time back in the windowsill was all it took for everyone to perk up again.

Garbology

noreply@blogger.com (Brad Linder) — Fri, 18 May 2012 18:48:00 +0000

America is full of junk. Like, a lot of junk. Like we generate more trash per capita than any other nation in the world... an average of 102 tons per person over the course of a lifetime.

When Edward Humes started out to write a book about America's trash legacy he thought the number was closer to 64 tons -- but while researching the book he found that the real number was much, much higher. In fact, the average person throws out close to 7 pounds of garbage each day.

Garbology takes a close look at how (and why) we throw so much away, what alternatives exist, and what it all means.

Surprisingly, while Humes takes what you would think would be the non-controversial position that "waste is bad," he points out that there's actually plenty of space in the US to bury all the trash we generate... over the next thousand years.

All we need to do is find neighborhoods that want to put up with enormous landfills. Good luck with that.

Another surprising fact? Almost nothing that goes into modern sanitary landfills decomposes. You can read newspapers that were thrown away 50 years ago, and identify food items that were dumped in more than a decade ago.

Landfills essentially preserve items indefinitely by smushing everything together and kind of mummifying the remains of plastic bags, food scraps, and even toxic materials such as battery acid and half-full paint cans.

The good news is that toxic chemicals don't leach out of landfills at nearly the rate that was once expected. The bad news is that they're still in there and it means problems associated with improper disposal of hazardous materials is just a long-term problem now instead of a short term one.

In the first half of Garbology, Humes identifies and describes the problems that lead to our 102 ton per person trash legacy, and in the second half he looks at partial solutions including trash-to-energy facilities that burn trash to create electricity (they're cleaner than they used to be, but wildly unpopular in the US), and ways individuals can reduce their own footprints.

Like other Humes books I've read, Garbology is a very readable volume, thanks to the author's method of combining statistics and facts with anecdotes and profiles of individuals including one of the first "garbologists" who applied archaeological research techniques to modern-day garbage and a family that lives a nearly zero-waste lifestyle by rejecting virtually every product that comes in a package, among other things.

On the one hand, Garbology is the kind of book that can make you feel very guilty about your life choices... on the other hand, maybe that's not such a bad thing.

While I doubt I'll be going zero-waste anytime soon, I've already decided to make a few changes. For years I've taken reusable shopping bags on trips to the grocery store or farmers market. But the bulk foods area at Whole Foods has always been my weak spot -- because I've found myself grabbing thin plastic bags and filling them up with rice, oatmeal, quinoa, and other grains on nearly every trip.

These bags are meant to be used once for the few minutes it takes to get the food home, but they'll survive in landfills for thousands of years.

So this week I ordered a half dozen reusable bulk food/produce bags.

I also learned recently that Whole Foods (and some other grocery stores) will let you fill up your own mason jars at the store. You just need to visit the customer service area first to find out the weight of your empty jars so you can have that weight subtracted when you check out. This feels a little more stressful to me than using the reusable nylon bags, which are so light that you don't really need to bother weighing them at all. But I might work my way up to the mason jar solution in the future.

It was a throwaway example in the book, but Humes also pointed out that potato chip bags will last for thousands of years in landfills. The same is probably true of candy bar wrappers, pretzel bags, and thousands of other items we throw away -- but that one little example inspired me to do something I've been meaning to do ever since I figured out how easy it is to make french fries at home by slicing whole potatoes and baking them in a little oil.

I picked up a cheap mandolin slicer for $14.99 and started making my own potato chips from scratch. All you have to do is take thinly sliced pieces of potato, dip both sides in oil, arrange them on a baking sheet, and cook at about 375 degrees for 20 minutes.

The resulting chips taste better than almost anything I've ever fished out of a bag, there's less waste associated, and most of the potatoes in our house didn't travel very far to get here. We pick them up from the local farmers market when they're in season.

And there's no bag to throw away.

Reducing plastic bags and potato chip bags won't save the world from trash. But if everyone thought a little more about the packaging that comes with the products they bought maybe there wouldn't be so many items (like plastic shopping bags) manufactured to be used just once and then thrown away.

Harvesting peas

noreply@blogger.com (Brad Linder) — Wed, 16 May 2012 14:53:00 +0000

It's official. I'm not going to be buying snow peas from the farmers market again this spring. Last weekend I was a bit annoyed to notice that one of my favorite farm stands had boxes and boxes of snow peas to sell while I only had two pods growing in my garden.

A few days and a fair amount of rain apparently makes a big difference. Peas are popping up all over the place, and I suspect that I'll be able to harvest enough to throw in some stir fry every two or three days for at least the next month or so.

Of course, that's assuming two things:

I can keep myself from eating fresh-picked peas as snacks before they make it to the kitchen.
I can find space in the planters for the other veggies I want to put outside in the next few weeks.

Nearly every planter of a reasonable size on our roof is now overflowing with snow pea plants. But if I want to be able to grow green beans, peppers, and tomatoes this summer I'm going to need to put them out soon.

The beans I'll just plant directly in the soil near the snow peas so that by the time the peas start to die off from the heat the beans should be starting to take their place -- but they still need enough space to get some sunlight while they get started.

The peppers and tomatoes are going to need a little more space... assuming the little guys growing in my windowsill get big and strong enough to brave the wild rooftop of south Philly soon.

The snow peas arrive

noreply@blogger.com (Brad Linder) — Thu, 10 May 2012 13:33:00 +0000

Snow peas grow fast. It was just over a month ago that tiny stalks and little leaves started to shoot up. Now some of the plants are nearly three feet tall. A few days ago I spotted the first flowers, and today the first two pea pods arrived.

I'm growing snow peas in four containers, some more densely packed than others. Snow peas were by far my most successful crop in the rooftop container garden last year, so I decide to plant seeds without abandon this year.

I expect a big harvest very soon and hopefully for weeks to come.

Toward the end of May I'll cut back a few of the plants to make room for peppers and tomatoes, and I suspect prolonged warm weather will start to kill off the snow peas by June anyway.

Because snow peas grow best in cool weather I'll plant some more in August for a September/October crop. I don't actually have any seeds left because I made the mistake of pre-sprouting every last snow pea seed I had before planting this spring. But I'll try my hand at seed saving by leaving at least a few pods to wither and die on the vine so I have some new seeds to plant in the fall.

I tried saving seeds last year but made the mistake of putting them in an air-tight jar before they had fully dried out. It turns out if you're ever looking for a way to grow mold inside a jar, this turns out to be a very good method.

The snow peas are under a mild attack by little leaf-sucking bugs which I think are a type of aphid. I occasionally spray them off with soapy water, but for the most part there are far more leaves than their are aphids so I'm not that worried about them right now.

The fungus gnats are still a problem. I've tried watering the soil repeatedly with a mix of water and BT, but that hasn't had much effect. I've also placed yellow sticky strips in the planters and watched as dozens (maybe hundreds) of gnats have jumped to their sticky doom.

But there are plenty more gnats to take their place.

For my next gnat control attempt I'm going to take a suggestion from organic gardening expert (and You Bet Your Garden host) Mike McGrath. He says that placing cat grass near the gnat habitat will encourage that gnats to dig in and leave the other plants alone. I'm sprouting some cat grass seeds right now and hopefully I'll be able to put them outside in a week or two.

In other news, the spinach appears to be enjoying the weather immensely. I suspect it will get too warm to continue growing spinach soon and the plants will send up shoots and start flowering. In the meantime, it's nice to have a ready source of fresh spinach for meals once or twice a week on the rooftop.

Spinach... it's what's for lunch

noreply@blogger.com (Brad Linder) — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 16:03:00 +0000

Spinach wasn't exactly a bumper crop in my 2011 rooftop garden. I managed to harvest a few tiny leaves by the time the weather started getting warm and killing off my plants.

2012 is turning out to be a much better year. I'd like to take credit for the difference -- but I think more consistently warm (but not hot) weather has played a big role. I also switched from Bloomsdale Long Standing spinach seeds to America.

Anyway, I have several very healthy plants going right now and I picked some spinach to make a spinach-and-tempeh sandwich for lunch yesterday, and it was delicious.

I've still got a fungus gnat infestation to deal with. I've been watering the planters with water that has BT mixed in -- but it hasn't had much of an impact. That might be because the BT isn't dissolving in the water as much as I thought it would -- but today I tried crumbling the mosquito dunk before adding it to a bucket of water, so I'm hoping that will work better than just dropping a chunk in a bucket and waiting.

The snow peas have been growing like crazy and I suspect they'll start blooming within a few weeks.

While the plants that started outdoors are strong and healthy with thick stems and large leaves, one of the plants that started their lives in tiny pots in the windowsill died shortly after I put it outside. The other is alive, but hardly thriving.

Our windows might just not get enough light to do any serious seed starting indoors -- which is a shame, because I've got some peppers and tomatoes starting off indoors right now and I'd really like them to get strong enough to weather the rooftop conditions if I try to transplant them in late May or early June. But we might be better off picking up some plants at a nursery when the time comes.

It should also be time to start picking garlic soon -- but I should probably have done a better job of labeling the garlic when I planted it. Since I put garlic in the ground (or pots) three different times, I need to make sure not to dig up the younger plants too early. I was kind of counting on the oldest plants identifying themselves by out-sizing their younger cousins. But that might not actually happen.

A few planters are also little experimental grounds for growing multiple plants in the same container.

Here we've got snow peas, garlic, and spinach all growing in the same planter. The spinach at the front is thriving, but if you look closely you'll see a tiny spinach plant on the right which probably isn't getting enough sunlight because of the shade cast by the snow peas. If the image isn't big enough to see clearly, just click on the picture to see a larger version.

The garlic is a bit closer to the spinach than I'd expected -- but I'm hoping that since the spinach has shallow roots the two plants won't compete too much for space. The spinach will probably only be good for a few more weeks anyway. Once it gets hot spinach starts to flower and die pretty quickly -- or at least that's what happened last summer.

Watching the garden (and the gnats) grow

noreply@blogger.com (Brad Linder) — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 21:12:00 +0000

There's been a lot of activity on the rooftop over the past few weeks. The snow peas are growing fast, the garlic is having a party, and the spinach is actually starting to look edible.

I also received a belated birthday present of five locally sourced strawberry plants recently. I only had four planters, but I had some extra space in one my mixed containers, so I'm going to try growing a strawberry plant in the same large container as some snow peas, spinach, and garlic.

In the nursery, also known as the windowsill, progress has been a bit slower.

Fewer than half of the seeds I planted more than two weeks ago have poked their heads through the soil. I'm not sure if I'm over watering, under watering, or if there's another problem. But that's OK -- I planted seeds for more plants than I could possibly grow, assuming some plants would do better than others.

As things stand, as of April 20th, 2012 I've got two tiny yellow cherry tomato plants growing, half a dozen red pepper plants, and a fair number of little garlic chive seedlings.

Unfortunately I'm getting the feeling that I should have planted every single one of these seeds a few weeks earlier, because I'm not certain they'll be large and hardy enough to place outdoors when the weather is warm enough in May/June. But a lot can happen in a month or two.

It will also probably be at least a few more weeks before the snow peas start blooming, so I'm not in that much of a hurry to rip them out and replace them with peppers and tomatoes anyway.

I probably shouldn't be surprised that the spinach is going to be the first plant ready to harvest. In fact, I think it might already be grown enough to snip a few leaves for dinner tonight. But since the spinach was one of my under performing crops of 2011 I'm pleasantly surprised.

It'll probably be a race between the snow peas and the garlic to see who's ready to harvest next. The snow peas are easy, because once they start blooming you just wait until the pea pods are as long as you'd like them to be and start snipping.

The garlic takes a little more skill since you need to wait about 60-65 days from the time you plant and then reach down into the soil and pull them up by their roots and then leave them on rack in a low humidity room to dry out for a week.

I should probably have done a better job of labeling the garlic I planted 4 weeks ago from the cloves I put in the soil 2 weeks ago... but I was counting on the fact that it would be obvious from the top which plants were most mature. Looking at them now though, I'm not so sure that'll be the case.

Either way, there's a lot of garlic growing so I'm pretty sure we'll have a good garlicky summer without spending too much money on the onion cousin at the farmer's market.

Meanwhile, after weeks of wondering what the heck the tiny little winged bugs swarming over my spinach and peas were, the answer is pretty much what I'd assumed from the start: gnats. Fungus gnats, to be more specific.

That photos shows a few of them... but I snapped the picture in the late afternoon. They swarm in larger numbers earlier in the day. You can also click the image to see a larger version.

The gnats apparently like to chew on roots, which could explain why I didn't have a very successful spinach crop last year -- so I've decided to take action. I've got some Mosquito Dunks on the way, which are basically bacteria that you mix with water and pour over the soil to kill fungus gnats (and mosquitoes, obviously). I've also ordered some yellow sticky traps which apparently attract gnats with their color and then fill up with the little bugs as they fly to their sticky doom.

The strips I ordered are designed for indoor and outdoor containers, which comes in handy since I have some of each and there are gnats in both places (although the biggest infestation is in the containers on the roof).

Some tiny red mites are also re-populating the garden. I saw a few last year, but they seem to be coming back stronger this spring. Odds are that they're clover mites and nothing really to worry about unless they get into the house and start making a mess -- if you step on them or squash them, they leave bright red streaks.

I don't know if the mosquito dunks and sticky traps will have any impact on the mites one way or the other, but I'm not all that concerned about them.

Signs of life among the garlic chives

noreply@blogger.com (Brad Linder) — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 20:22:00 +0000

It's been about five days since I planted garlic chive, pepper, and tomato seeds in some indoor planters. Today the first signs of life started showing up in the garlic chive pot.

If the little green bits look small in that photo, try the macro view on for size.

Yeah, good luck finding them at all.

Still, I count at least four little green guys in there so far, and I'm hopeful that the pot will be bursting with garlic chives soon. I've also got a few planted in smaller pots that might be easier to transplant outdoors once the weather is consistently warmer -- but if it turns out I can get enough sunlight in my office I may try growing some indoors year round.

You don't find garlic chives at the supermarket very often, but they taste like a cross between a green onion or scallion and garlic. That's not surprising since garlic and onions are in the same family, and I've been meaning to grow some of these little guys since I first learned of their existence a few years ago.

But I hadn't ever actually tasted one until this week. The Farm To City organization in Philadelphia manages a buying club called Winter Harvest that lets you order food from local farms throughout the colder months of the year.

For most of the winter we get a lot of apples, potatoes, sweet potatoes, onions, and other hardy fruits and vegetables that are harvested in the fall and kept through the winter, as well as spinach which can be grown in cool temperatures, given the right conditions.

As springtime approaches, farmer start to add some new items to the mix, including leafy greens such as bok choy and bekana, and scallions and chives. I managed to snag a few garlic scallions before they were sold out, and picked them up last weekend. They didn't spend much time in the fridge before ending up in the frying pan -- although I sampled a few raw, because they're just good.

I'm looking forward to trying some of their home grown cousins in a few months.

Rooftop Garden update (4-04-2012)

noreply@blogger.com (Brad Linder) — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 21:34:00 +0000

It's been a busy week up on rooftop garden, where all the garlic is strong, the snow peas are good looking and the spinach is... well, a bit below average.

When I planted the first cool-weather crops in mid-March, it was unseasonably warm in Philadelphia and I think some of the little guys got a little ahead of themselves. Temperatures dipped pretty dramatically for a few days, and the wind picked up enough to blow over some of my snow pea starter plants and I'm not sure they're coming back.

Fortunately more plants are thriving than succumbing to the pressures of life on a windy rooftop, so I'm hoping to get some peas by May... or so.

Meanwhile, as more of a science experiment than anything else, I've been continuing to grow some peas indoors to see how they differ from those growing on the rooftop.

These guys were planted at the same time as the ones on the roof, but they've grown taller and their leaves haven't grown nearly as wide. They also seem to have thinner stems, and I have little doubt that they'd die almost immediately if I tried to take them outside.

Eventually I might try it just to prove my hypothesis.. and to free up the planters.

Almost all of the garlic I planted has survived the temperature swings. The only casualty so far appears to be one plant that either got dug up by an animal (squirrel, I suspect), or which wasn't planted deeply enough and was therefore stirred loose by a heavy rainfall or two.

Some of the spinach plants are starting to show their edible leaves... but they're growing slowly and I'm not particularly hopeful that they'll thrive. I tried growing spinach last year and didn't have much luck.

If this crop stays stunted as well, I might give up on spinach... at least until I have time to try some sort of cold frame solution which might allow the plants to grow in a less windy environment.

Meanwhile, I'm running a little behind on starting seeds for my summer garden, but I finally took the time yesterday to fill some seed trays and small pots with pepper, tomato, and garlic chive seeds.

These are all plants that need a head start before you put them outside, so it's recommended to star them off 6-8 weeks before the last frost.

Last frost in Philadelphia is usually around late April, but I might not be ready to transplant my little guys until May... which is fine, because by then I'll be able to decide which snow pea plants are under-performing and cut them away to make room for new plants.

I may also try to grow some green beans and bok choy this summer, but those plants can be directly planted into the soil outside so I won't be starting them indoors.

The biggest challenge for starting seeds in the house is that our cats love to chew on plants and knock over planters. So I have to find well-lit, sunny spots in the house that are difficult for the cats to get to. There aren't many of these spaces in the house, so I've made a little space next to some houseplants in my office... but I'm not convinced that spot really gets enough sunlight.

I guess we'll know for sure in a few weeks... if the cats haven't jumped four and a half feet in the air to topple over the planters by then.

Winter/Spring rooftop garden 2012

noreply@blogger.com (Brad Linder) — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 18:12:00 +0000

It's been unseasonably warm in Philadelphia for the past few weeks, so my rooftop garden is already off to a pretty great start. About two weeks ago I soaked some snow peas for a few days to get them ready for planting, and a week and a half ago I turned the soil in the planters I'd left on the roof since last year, added about an inch of mushroom compost and put some peas and garlic cloves in the ground.

Garlic shoots started popping up almost immediately. I'm wondering if I should have put the garlic a little deeper beneath the surface -- but I've got garlic hanging out in my closet so I'll probably do a second planting next weekend and try digging a little deeper this time.

This is my first year growing garlic, and to be honest I haven't done a whole lot of research. Much of what I read about growing vegetables in containers last year proved to be only partially useful at best. It turns out my rooftop has its own rather unusual microclimate and I suspect the best way to figure out what will grow well there is to keep seeding as many plants as possible.

To give my plants a little shade, I've placed the planters up against the only wall available. It's on the north side, so the plants get a nice southern exposure... most of the time. At certain parts of the day the sun dips below the high-rise building directly southeast of us and everybody gets a little more shade.

But when the sun is out it gets very bright and very warm. I've already realized that I have to water the plants more often than I would if they were in the ground because the planters dry out pretty quickly.

It's also very windy on the rooftop, so plants have to be pretty sturdy to survive.

Last year I discovered that snow peas I directly seeded outside came up with nice thick stems while those I started indoors had long, thin stalks.

But since I had some extra sprouted seeds, I figured I'd try a few indoors anyway just in case cold weather returned and decided to wipe out everything I've planted on the rooftop before the little guys were established.

As it turns out, the seeds I started indoors are suffering the same fate as last year's. I suspect if I tried to take them outside they'd wilt and fall over just as quickly as last year's.

At least part of the problem is probably that it's hard to find places to put seed trays and pots in the house that are cat-proof. While the cats rarely actually eat the plants, they do like to paw at them, turn over small planters, and play in the soil.

I suspect it's also just not windy enough inside, and the temperatures don't get as hot and cold, which makes it tough to prepare the little baby snow peas for the harsh realities of life on the roof.

Anyway, long story short, my goal at this point is to find plants that aren't only container-friendly, but which also have relatively short yield times. That will allow me to plant as many veggies as possible directly in outdoor planters since I can plant snow peas in March, hopefully get a harvest in April or May, and start peppers and beans in May and hopefully allow them to grow up around the snow peas so that by the time the weather's really warm enough for the summer veggies to thrive I'll have gotten sick of snow peas and I'll be ready to cut down those vines.

You'll notice there's a lot of "hope" in that last paragraph. I'm not really sure this will work. Technically you're supposed to plant peppers indoors about 6 weeks before last frost and then transplant them outside. I'm just not sure that any plants I try to transplant will actually bear much fruit.

I mean, I'll try it, because there are more seeds in my packet than I really need for direct seeding outdoors. I'm just not sure it will work.

I may also break down and pick up a few plants from a nursery to transplant, but I'd like to grow as much as possible from seed, just so I can actually figure out how best to grow things three stories up in the urban wilderness of Philadelphia.

Speaking of which, despite limited success with last year's spinach crop, I've decided to try a few leafy greens again this year. There are a few shoots of what could be spinach popping up... but it could also be weeds. You'd be amazed just how many weeds find their way into pots placed on a rooftop thanks to bugs, birds, wind, and trees.

Last year's green onions also don't quite seem to be ready to go away.

Book review: Visit Sunny Chernobyl

noreply@blogger.com (Brad Linder) — Sat, 17 Mar 2012 17:18:00 +0000

Visit Sunny Chernobyl: And Other Adventures in the World's Most Polluted Places by Andrew Blackwell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It sounds like a silly idea at first: visiting seven of the most polluted places on the planet and treating them as vacation spots. But from the moment he hits the ground in Chernobyl and as we follow him to Canada, Texas, the Pacific Garbage Patch, Brazil, China, and India, Blackwell is an engaging story teller, combining anecdotes with facts, philosophy, interesting observations about environmentalism and the environment, and his own personal journey.

It's also fascinating to take a guided tour of some of the places you're least likely to ever visit, including the patch of water in the Pacific where enormous amounts of trash accumulate and few boats ever travel and the radiation zone around Chernobyl.

At times Visit Sunny Chernobyl feels like 7 essays that would have made great magazine articles strung together into an aimless book. But there are two strong themes holds the stories together:

Humans aren't just destroying the environment. We're part of it, and we have to live with the consequences.
Even the most polluted places in the world have their charms... people who love them, still live in them, and make the best of what they're given.

Visit Sunny Chernobyl is surprisingly upbeat for a book about environmental disaster tourism. Instead of focusing on the devastation, Blackwell focuses on showing the world as it is, not as it should be or even could be.

That's not to say we shouldn't try to avoid life-threatening environmental catastrophes and reduce pollution. But that all sort of goes without saying... so it isn't said much in this book, which makes it an unusual alternative to most books about the environment I've read.

This is why we don't spend much money on cat toys

noreply@blogger.com (Brad Linder) — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 16:42:00 +0000

This week I picked up a few items from IKEA and assembled a new standing desk for my office. As you might imagine, there was a bit of cardboard packaging left over.

Fortunately, it hasn't gone to waste.

Puck and Ollie have been making good use of the cardbaord as a kitten tunnel for hiding, running, and general purpose silliness.

Sure, we've bought the kids plenty of little toys from the pet stores over the years. But nothing amuses kittens as much as a cardboard box, no matter what shape or size it is.

If you watch closely, you'll notice that at one point before she pounces, Ollie is poised on her back paws with her front legs lifted in the air before her. I'm pretty sure this defies at least a few laws of physics.

My new standing desk workstation

noreply@blogger.com (Brad Linder) — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 22:15:00 +0000

For the past few years I've spent a lot of time sitting in a chair staring at a computer.

When I was younger I worked in retail and stood behind a cash register or roamed a sales floor for 8 hours a day. When I worked as a full time radio news reporter, I spent my fair share of time sitting at a desk to make phone calls, write stories, and edit audio. But at least I left the office from time to time to go interview someone, cover a press conference, or head to a breaking news scene.

But I've been a full time blogger for the past few years, and if my home office wasn't on the third floor and my kitchen on the first, I could probably spend 10 hours or more glued to a chair.

This isn't healthy.

For the past year or two I've been waking up early to work out for 30 to 60 minutes before showering, eating, and getting to work. I'm glad I've built a morning workout into my routine, but it's not necessarily enough to offset the health effects of doing practically nothing for the rest of my day.

My sitting posture is also pretty awful, and I suspect I'd be in for some pretty serious back pain if I kept to business as usual.

So I decided a while ago that I'd like to try a standing desk, but I was a little put off by the high cost of existing solutions. One problem is that I'm relatively short, so a desk that's standing height for some people might not be standing height for me.

I also wasn't sure I wanted to stand all day.

I started looking at adjustable desks such as the GeekDesk or JayMil Sit-to-Stand desk, but $1000 seemed like a lot of money to spend on a solution that I wasn't sure I'd be able to use.

On February 1st, I decided to just try raising my keyboard, mouse and monitor by propping various items on top of my existing desk. The first attempt didn't work out very well, but I found a few boxes that were almost the right height, and then grabbed some spare wood from the basement and created a stand a few inches high to elevate those boxes a bit more.

The end result? The setup was actually so comfortable that I wound up using it for over a month.

Since the desk wasn't easily adjustable, I basically stood for most of my work days during that time, and only sat down when using a laptop or tablet.

At the end of the first day at the standing desk my legs were killing me, but I actually had more energy at the end of the work day than I'd had in ages. After a few more days, I was able to stand for 8-10 hours without my legs aching, although my feet do still get sore. I haven't entirely decided whether it's better to wear shoes or not to wear shoes while working at the desk.

I also found myself taking lunch breaks for the first time in years. I mean real breaks where I go down to the dining room and sit down with a book to read and eat.

Since there was no sitting at the computer, I learned to value this break in the middle of my day which allowed me to relax for a brief period before returning to work. Short relaxing breaks are good on the feet, legs, and the mind and I should have been taking lunch breaks before -- but somehow it always seemed easier to just grab some food and then sit down at my desk and eat by the computer.

Anyway, the wine crate and spare lumber solution was never meant to be permanent, but I was still reluctant to spend $1000 on a new desk.

Fortunately there's another option. IKEA sells a series of adjustable tablet legs called Vika Byske that can be extended as high as 42 and 1/8th inches. They're some of the most expensive tablet legs IKEA sells, but at $30 each, I was able to pick up 4 legs plus an inexpensive tabletop for less than $200.

I splurged and bought a reasonably comfy bar stool for another $90 so that I can sit at the table from time to time if my feet get sore.

In order to adjust the legs you need to twist them one at a time, so the IKEA desk isn't as easy to raise or lower as one with an electric motor. But it's a heck of a lot cheaper, and since it is adjustable I was able to use the desk for a day or two, decide that it was a little too high, and then remove everything from the tabletop, lower the legs, and try again.

Now I have a desk that's comfortable to stand at for an extended period... and as an added bonus, it doesn't offer the same storage options that my old IKEA desk did, so it's a lot less cluttered.

The desk was a little wobbly at first, and I can't anchor it to the wall because it's up against an exterior wall that I can't drill into. But I discovered that if I placed the back of the tablet tightly against the wall and then lengthened the front table legs a little so that the back of the tablet presses firmly against the wall, the desk no longer shakes.

Unfortunately that means I can't run any wires behind the table. And since cable connecting my monitor and desktop PC isn't long enough to run around the side of the table, I had to place the PC on the tablet -- where I'm noticing that it's actually pretty noisy. But I may replace the PC one day or at least get a quieter fan, while I'm hoping to use the desk for many years.

A side effect of my month with the wine crate solution is that I've gotten used to using a single monitor instead of a dual-screen setup. I bought a 21.5 inch, 1920 x 1080 pixel monitor a while back, but I'd been using it alongside an older 1280 x 1024 pixel display -- which was kind of overkill. Really I just need enough space to run two apps side-by-side or view multiple websites side-by-side.

Ideally, I'd like a 2560 x 1600 monitor, but right now those are expensive enough to make motorized standing desks look cheap.

But the 1920 x 1080 pixel display is really almost good enough for my needs, and it uses less energy and takes up less space than my dual display setup, so I've put my old 1280 x 1024 pixel monitor in the closet for now.

Soon I may look for a riser that will lift my remaining monitor a few inches higher. While the desk is at the perfect height for typing, I'd like to be able to look straight ahead at the display instead of slightly down.

Anyway, long story short: since I started experimenting with a standing desk I've had more energy, fewer back aches, and I suspect I'm building muscle in my legs. I've learned to value the time I do take to sit down and relax, but to treat it as the exception rather than the rule.

The Hunger Games Trilogy

noreply@blogger.com (Brad Linder) — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 17:09:00 +0000

Note: I'm still experimenting with how best to write about books without reading spoilers. I think I've largely managed to do that here, but if you don't want to know anything about the series other than whether it's worth reading, the answer is yes.

Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I just spent the last week reading The Hunger Games Trilogy by Suzanne Collins. It's the first time I've read three books in a week since I was a teenager and didn't really have much to do with my free time other than read books for hours on end... but this tale was so engaging I found myself making time to read, during lunch breaks, before bed, before dinner -- I couldn't put the books down.

That's largely because Collins does a great job of pacing her story. Each book has 27 chapters divided into 3 sections per book. So it doesn't take long to finish a chapter, and more often than not you're faced with a cliffhanger at the end which makes you want to extend that lunch break until you read just a little more so you can find out what happens next.

The characters are also all very alive... until they're not, and then sometimes they're even more alive in the reader's mind. There's a lot of death in these books, which isn't surprising because it's a series about war, starting with aftermath of a war that had led people to do atrocious things to other human beings and later about another war... which doesn't seem much better even if the cause seems more noble.

Collins's books present a coming of age story in a post-apocalyptic world where there's no such thing as a happy ending. It's sort of what you would get if you crossed Harry Potter with The Handmaid's Tale and throw in a bit of Lord of the Flies and the reality TV show Survivor as well as a healthy dose of criticism of said reality TV culture.

That might not sound like the sort of thing that'd make for a fun read, and maybe it isn't. But it's engrossing.

As we follow the protagonist Katniss Everdeen through the story, it becomes more and more clear that while she's the heroine of the story, she's also the victim -- and nothing that happens will change that. It's all the more tragic because she's clearly operating at the center of the conflict and on the sidelines at the same time.

As a 16 and 17 year old, she's a pawn in a game that she barely understands. She's a fighter, and a survivor and from time to time she has flashes of charisma and brilliance that bind the characters around her (and the reader) to Katniss... but she also makes rash decisions, jumps to conclusions that are often wrong, and leads us on a journey that could turn out so many different ways that it should probably come as no surprise when Collins concludes the story in a totally unsatisfying but completely logical way.

Following the story from Katniss's perspective, reading her thoughts, it's hard not to feel like a confused teenager reading the story -- but it's hard to imagine anyone thrown into the bloody world of the Hunger Games making any more sense of the situation, be they 16 or 60.

Part of what makes the story work, and makes the plot twists so unpredictable is that we're following Katniss down every wrong turn she makes... because they make sense, while the situations she finds herself in don't.

Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed reading these books -- although I probably could have lived without the love triangle that felt kind of unnecessary to the plot.

How many people do you know that meet their true soulmates as a teenager? Yes, extreme conditions lead to extreme emotions, so I suppose Harry and Ginny really could spend the rest of their lives happily together after defeating Voldemort, and I suppose it's possible that Katniss could find love, comfort, and maybe even some happiness with Gale or Peeta... but while boys are fawning over Katniss she spends much of the story not even bothering to examine her own feelings because she's got better things to do, like feeding her family, trying to stay alive, or fighting to the death.

So the growing tension over which boy she'll choose that grows as the series reaches its conclusion feels kind of superfluous. It doesn't exactly ruin the story, but by the end, you can't help but feel that the romance was more of an afterthought than anything.

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Review: In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives

noreply@blogger.com (Brad Linder) — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 17:10:00 +0000

In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives by Steven Levy
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

As a tech blogger and journalist I've been following Google pretty closely since 2006, and I was using their products before that. But for the most part I've focused on the parts of Google that everyone sees: the finished products. Steven Levy took a peek behind the scenes and paints an intriguing picture of a company that's combined openness, secrecy, and innovation to create an empire out of products that work extraordinarily well... but which scare the pants off of some people who stop to think about just how much information Google has about all of its users.

I'm a big fan of Levy's skills at turning highly technical topics into engaging narratives by focusing on the people behind the products. But in Google's case, that's an awful lot of people. At last count the company had around 20,000 employees, and while Levy didn't interview them all, unlike some of Levy's earlier books, In the Plex feels more like a series of distinct articles than a comprehensive story.

But most of those articles are worth reading and I enjoyed getting a feel for the people behind the search engine, email system, book scanning product, and high profile decisions to enter... and then exit China, among other things.

There's no way to avoid the fact that this book feels like a work in progress. It was published in April, 2011 -- when Google's social tools included Buzz, Orkut, and Latitude, but months before Google Plus or Search Plus Your World arrived on the scene.

But In The Plex paints a picture of how the insiders at Google think and provides a framework for understanding some of the things that have happened since the book's publication -- and a picture of what happens when a startup out to change the world becomes the established player that already did.

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Review: Force of Nature (on the greening of Walmart)

noreply@blogger.com (Brad Linder) — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 21:46:00 +0000

Force of Nature: How Wal-Mart Started a Green Business Revolution-and Why It Might Save the World by Edward Humes
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

There are a lot of reasons to hate Walmart, and while Humes skims over them he doesn't ignore them. The company puts smaller stores out of business, squeezes its suppliers so that it's tough to make a profit (but it's tough to say no to the biggest retailer in the world), doesn't pay its employees a living wage, faces more gender discrimination lawsuits than I can count... and the list goes on.

But over the past half decade Walmart has also made some astonishing strides toward greening its business.

The sheer economies of scale are astounding. Walmart has enough locations and employs enough people that simply turning off the lights in the vending machines in employee break rooms saves $1.5 million per year.

Any small change the company makes has a huge impact. So when Walmart decides to reduce packaging, make vehicles more fuel efficient, use organic cotton, or make other changes, it can generate millions of dollars in savings and/or have far-reaching effects on the environment.

Things get even more interesting when the company starts looking at ways to encourage suppliers to make their industries (dairy, fish, clothing, electronics, and others) more sustainable.

Of course, the fact that Walmart can have such an impact is also evidence that the company is by its very existence bad for the environment. Walmart and other national and international retail chains depend on shipping supplies and finished products across huge distances in huge quantities -- and many of those items are things that nobody really needs in the first place.

It's nice to think that the solution is to end the era of big-box retailers and go back to mom and pop stores, but that doesn't seem very likely given the current state of affairs, and Humes paints a pretty good portrait of a company using its clout to generate the next-best thing: a world where mass produced products aren't simply stocked on store shelves as if they sprung from the ground already finished. Instead, retailers like Walmart are taking an active role in determining the environmental impact of everything they sell -- and soon may be taking more steps to ensure that consumers also have access to that information to help make better informed choices.

I'm not sure that I'm any more likely to shop at Walmart after reading this book, but it does make me feel slightly better about the direction our consumption-based economy is headed.

My carbon footprint is smaller than most people's. I don't own a car. I work from home. I don't eat meat. And for the past year I've been buying most of my produce from local sources at farmers markets.

But it will take a lot more than my personal choices to change the world... and while Walmart and stores like it are certainly part of the problem, some are also starting to become part of the solution... to a degree.

Humes could probably spend a little more time in this book discussing the areas where Walmart has fallen short of its environmental promises -- and in other areas as well. But he does a good job of describing the process of Walmart's greening since 2004 by putting human faces on the story and profiling the people that are making things happen... or at least trying to... or at least saying they're trying too...

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Mini-review: A Princess of Mars

noreply@blogger.com (Brad Linder) — Sat, 24 Dec 2011 16:40:00 +0000

A Princess of Mars: John Carter of Mars, Book One by Edgar Rice Burroughs
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

After seeing a couple of trailers for the new movie John Carter I was wondering what the heck I just saw... and decided to give the first book in the series I try.

It takes a hefty amount of suspension of disbelief to read a sci-fi adventure written a hundred years ago. There's a lot that Burroughs clearly gets wrong about gravity, energy, and of course Mars. There are also some baffling elements such as the idea that human-like species could have evolved independently on multiple worlds, but the Barsoom series is hardly the only offender there.

Burroughs doesn't offer much in the way of character development or even a very complex society. Really? Everyone on the planet speaks the same language and has the same telepathic capabilities?

The tale is also rather violent.

But you know what? It's still a fun read. If there's one thing Burroughs manages to do, it's to grab your attention and keep you wondering what happens next.

I wasn't sure at first whether I'd pick up the next book in the series, but after reading the last few pages I don't think I have much choice.

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Book review: The Deal From Hell by James O'Shea

noreply@blogger.com (Brad Linder) — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 20:13:00 +0000

The Deal from Hell: How Moguls and Wall Street Plundered Great American Newspapers by James O'Shea

O'Shea may think he's written a book about how profit-driven, ego-centric people ruined some of the nation's largest papers, but that's because his own biases are at work here.

Actually what this book does is paint a picture of why it's hard to run a newspaper as a for-profit business with the goal of constantly increasing revenue.

He belittles the bosses that want to print the stories "people want" involving celebraties and gossip rather than important news of conflict, politics, and holding government accountable. But he side steps the question of paying for that coverage.

In a perfect world, readers that want to support different types of news would pay for the publications where it exists. Or advertisers would pay to reach those readers. But one problem that people consistently ignore is that advertisers have long been throwing money away on traditional media because there's simply no way to gauge how readers are reacting.

Online ad rates aren't lower because they're less effective, but because they're more effective... but they don't pay enough to support the kind of journalism great papers have produced over the years.

Whether intentionally or not though, he makes a pretty strong case for a public broadcasting style form of member-supported public interest journalism.

Update: OK, I got to the end of the book, and it turns out O'Shea *does* realize that the problem is that journalism emerged as a profession with a non-profit ethos and a for-profit business model. He's now heading up the non-profit Chicago News Cooperative, which I hadn't realized when I started reading. It may very well be a model for the future of news.

That said, it still bugged me how much he belittled local news coverage and praised national and international reporting as a matter of course -- he also tended to paint all online news with the same brush as second class citizens, even though he's now heading up an online news outfit.

He also largely paints a problem without offering a solution... and misses some of the problems in the process. Yes, newspapers have always been delivered to consumers at ridiculously cheap prices considering the costs of printing and distributing them, not to mention reporting the news.

But even if ad revenue wasn't declining, people that have gotten used to getting news for free or cheap online and through broadcast media would probably be drifting away from paying for the print editions.

This book is definitely worth reading if you're interested in the current state of the news industry, but it shines brightest when O'Shea is recounting his own personal experiences in the center of the storm. It's kind of dry reading when he slogs through the financial management of the papers he's talking about and the finer points of the deals that were made.

Like any good news story, it's the people that make this book interesting, not the numbers.

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Crypto

noreply@blogger.com (Brad Linder) — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 18:32:00 +0000

Crypto by Steven Levy
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Steven Levy has an amazing talent for taking complicated, technical material and turning into engaging narrative.

I'm not particularly interested in cryptography, but knowing that Levy was interested enough to write a book about it prompted me to pick up Crypto and give it a try.

Not only does he manage to take a complex issue and break it down into (mostly) easy-to-follow language, but the he weaves a story that's not really about codes, cyphers, or security, It's about people -- as all of the best stories are.

Levy brings the people behind the story to life, and lets you know what makes them tick, and that's what makes Crypto fun to read. Incidentally, you end up learning a bit about codes, cyphers, security, and more along the way.

It's also fascinating to see how a small group of people in the 1970s envisioned a future with eCommerce, online bankings, electronic mail and other digital transactions we now take for granted. At the time there was little hard evidence that cryptography had any real use outside of national defense or games.

That said... the story Levy tells unfolds over the course of 30 years, so there are a *lot* of people to get to know over the course of this book's 350 or so pages. While that might not sound like a lot of pages, the book feels longer than it is, because every chapter or two you find yourself starting a new story -- and I sometimes found myself struggling to remember some important detail or person that had been introduced several chapters back when it became important again later.

I'm not sure there would have been a better way to structure things... Crypto is a complicated topic with a complicated history. But while I enjoyed reading this book, I'm not sure I'll want to read it again anytime soon.

Still, it's a compelling enough read that I look forward to picking up another Steven Levy book soon.

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Rule 34

noreply@blogger.com (Brad Linder) — Sun, 30 Oct 2011 15:55:00 +0000

Rule 34 by Charles Stross
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Stross does a good job of fleshing out the near-future world first introduced in Halting State, and of introducing new characters.

The second-person narration does a good job of trying to get you into the head of the characters, but it falls a little flat at times when used as a device to describe things that you would already know if this was really *you* we were talking about.

Still, the most impressive thing here is that Rule 34 is a character-driven story that hypothesis the implications of technological, political, and economic advances over the next decade or so on life, crime, and policing.

I just finished the book though, and I'm already thinking about going back to read it again -- because while the loose ends are tied up at the end, this book is rather dense with information, and knowing who was doing what and why would probably go a long way toward explaining their apparently inexplicable actions earlier on. Maybe...

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Rooftop garden tour (October, 2011)

noreply@blogger.com (Brad Linder) — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 15:45:00 +0000

The last time I wrote about the urban container garden on the roof of our Philadelphia apartment, I was dealing (poorly) with an infestation of bugs that had attacked my Asian greens. I never did come up with a good solution for that problem, but I have to admit I didn't try very hard.

That section of the garden has become something of a science experiment in the past few months as I let the greens go to seed to see what the seed pods would look like. Maybe I'll try growing leafy greens again in the spring, but the growing season on the rooftop is almost over for now.

Eventually when we build a deck on the roof I'd like to create a small cold frame that we can use to grow cold-weather vegetables such as spinach, but for now the garden is in a race against nature to see how many snow peas it can produce.

Overall snow peas have turned out to be my vegetable of the year. By sowing a fairly large number of seeds (given the small space) directly in the soil I've managed to get a pretty good crop this fall. The pea pods mature very quickly once the plants are full grown and I have to pick a few every day -- sometimes even twice a day.

It usually takes 2-3 days to pick enough for a meal, but so far I've been happier with my fall snow pea crop than with anything else I've tried growing on the roof.

The climate probably has a lot to do with that. This fall hasn't been too warm, too rainy, or too cloudy -- although we've had a bit of each condition.

The amount of work I put into trying to grow sweet peppers this summer, on the other hand, is barely paying off. I've picked about three peppers so far -- two with very thin skin and one nice and juicy red bell pepper which was a bit on the small side. I'm hopeful that two last peppers that are hanging on will fully ripen before it gets too cold for the plants to survive.

Halting State

noreply@blogger.com (Brad Linder) — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 21:08:00 +0000

I've been reading science fiction and speculative fiction stories since I was a kid. But I've tended to have a soft spot in my heart for the stories of the past... set in the distant future. Authors have a lot of freedom when they're writing about a distant world we're never likely to visit in our lifetimes... even when that world is earth after a major technological advancement.

The best stories often just take one simple idea and try to run with its implications. What if we lived in a world with robot servants? What if we discovered we could teleport across short distances?

But every now and then contemporary science fiction authors take a much more plausible idea and run with that instead.

When I first read Neuromancer I was blown away by the complete world William Gibson imagined where cyberspace was real. But he wasn't predicting a far-flung future. He was looking at the existing technology of networked computers in 1984 and imagining one way that technology might evolve -- and what some of the implications could be for society.

And so a million cyberpunk novels were born, and I went back to reading classic science fiction stories.

But this week I read Halting State, a 2007 novel by Charles Stross that does for augmented reality what Neuromancer did for the idea of cyberspace. And for the first time I was really impressed with the implications (both good and bad) of this technology which is available today, but which is still in its infancy.

As a technology blogger and reporter I've been covering augmented reality apps for computers and smartphones for a few years. But I've never been particularly impressed.

Sure, apps such as Layar, which allow you to point your phone's camera down the street and see information about nearby restaurants or tourist attractions pop up over the top of the picture are fun to play with for a few minutes. But right now you have to hold your phone in front of your face and look at it instead of the road ahead of you to get the most out of these apps. Just make sure not to walk into that pole that would be in your peripheral vision if you weren't relying on your phone's narrow-angle lens.

With today's technology, there's almost always an easier way to sift through data than using augmented reality. There are hundreds of apps that will show me a map or list with those same restaurants or tourist attractions -- and those apps help me make decisions much more quickly and efficiently.

But Halting State imagines that by 2018 your smartphone will stay in your pocket and link up to a special pair of glasses that will give you a heads-up display with all the data you could ever need. Walk into a gaming convention and instead of enthusiasts wearing costumes, you can flip a button and orcs and dragons will enter you field of vision. Police officers can use a different augmented layer reality to pull up information they need while on patrol. And of course nobody with one of these setups need ever get lost, since you can see the directions floating right in front of your face.

Halting State isn't just about augmented reality. It also projects the future of video gaming and live action role playing games, distributed computing systems, and a few other trends that might or might not take off. But the world of Halting State feels very plausible based on today's technology and shows why people are so excited about making apps like Layar, even if they don't seem very useful today. In the future they might be.

Of course, as 2018 approaches, this book could end up looking a lot like a 1950s story that imagines human beings colonizing the moon and fighting Martians. Things don't always turn out the way you think they will in the future.

But I enjoyed Halting State and I'm looking forward to reading Rule 34, the second book in the series. It was published in 2011, and I'm wondering if Stross has made any changes to his world of the future to keep in line with the changes in technology over the past few years. You also have to love any author that apparently titles his book after an xkcd comic.

Endings are hard

noreply@blogger.com (Brad Linder) — Sun, 25 Sep 2011 15:35:00 +0000

As a radio producer I've often struggled with the difficulty of ending stories. It's easy to start a story. People often say just start at the beginning, but there are plenty of different places to start .You can start with an idea, an event, a character, an example, or any number of different elements

Ending, on the other hand, is difficult -- because in reality stories don't end. You can end an argument or a thesis by stating the conclusion at the end. But that's not a story. One of the only honest ways to end a story is by using the cliche "only time will tell." Because when reporting the news we're often coming in at the beginning or the middle.

Ultimately, it will take years to know whether that new pilot program, art project, environmental regulation, medical advance, or other change will be judged kindly by history. Even if we're starting to see positive results today, we don't know what will happen next... and that's the reason I find myself laughing so often at the trite endings I often hear in news stories (because the trite and vague ones are often true) or at the phony-sounding endings that try to draw conclusions from the insufficient facts presented in the story.

It's not something I've had to think about as much as a blogger, because I've decided that (at least as a tech blogger) it's enough to just lay out a series of facts and stop writing when I feel I've presented enough. But these aren't stories. I struggle as much as anyone with figuring out how to end narrative stories.

But I've been spending more leisure time with fiction recently, and I've found a few interesting approaches there.

One of the reasons I tend to enjoy TV shows more than movies these days is that I like the idea of fictional narratives that are open-ended... like life. Movies tend to have contrived endings that tie everything up in a neat bow. But even when a story comes to an end in a good TV program, it's really just the end of a chapter, and you know another chapter is coming next week... until it doesn't.

Unfortunately show sometimes get canceled before they have a chance to wrap anything up. This too is like life. You don't always get all the answers you're looking for before you move on, but it's still a deeply unsatisfying experience to watch a TV show that's been canceled, knowing that you're going to be left with unanswered questions when you work your way to the end.

Hulu recently started showing episodes of Charlie Jade, a TV show produced about 6 years ago that ended after one season. Most of the major plot lines were tied up by the end, but the writers had clearly planned a second season because there was a big reveal at the end that would have left fertile ground to keep exploring. I suppose in some ways that might be a truer, if less satisfying ending than one where there's nothing left to explain.

Because let's face it, what happens after you bring down the big corrupt organization, win the big game, or defeat the bad guy? Life doesn't end with happily ever after... things keep happening.

Every now and again I find myself frustrated with all the work I have to do and I daydream about early retirement. But it's not like I'd sit still forever. Sure, it'd be nice to read a few dozen books without work to distract me, but eventually I'd go stir crazy and try to find something else meaningful to occupy my days.

Earlier this year I read Lev Grossman's The Magicians. It attempts to take the idea of a world where magic exists to its logical extremes. Sure, in the Harry Potter books students have to go to school and take classes in order to learn how to use magic, but in The Magicians, the process of learning magic is far harder and more complicated than learning languages, algebra, or how to drive. Anyone can do those things, but it takes a ridiculous amount of hard work, both intellectually and physically, to get things right in Grossman's world.

Given how hard he makes it seem during the first half of the book, I was almost disappointed with how natural it seems to become for the characters as the story progresses beyond their school days. By the end of the book I wasn't sure I was looking forward to a sequel at all -- although Grossman made it clear that the story wasn't over -- whether you ever read a second book in the series or not.

That probably had as much to do with the fact that the protagonist was a jerk as it did with the conclusion of the story though. It's kind of disconcerting to read a story through the eyes of a character you don't like, even a you come to sympathize with him throughout the course of the story as he's hit by various highs and lows and seems to learn and grow a bit as a person.

It turns out The Magician King, the second book might be a much better story than the first. I say might, because I honestly can't decide. But instead of taking the difficulty of magic to its logical extremes, it takes two other things there: the idea of living with the knowledge that magic is real and the idea that stories really don't end.

Without giving away too much of the plot, one character struggles desperately to learn all the things learned in the first book without the aid of a magical university, while the other learns that the story doesn't end when you get to happily ever after -- but if you keep looking for more adventures you might have to deal with the consequences.

This book, which I finished last week has an excellent, if maddening ending. It leaves you wondering what happens next... and again kind of has me hoping that there isn't a sequel, because I don't think it's necessary. There are a million possible ways the story could continue to unfold -- just like real life.

I found myself enjoying The Magician King more than I'd expected I would and a large part of that is that it answered the question of "what comes next" after the first book in a way that felt real... and difficult... and painful. I'm not sure it was a fun book to read, but as a thought experiment it worked quite nicely -- even though it presents a world I'm not sure I'd want to live in for a lengthy period of time.

One of my favorite TV programs had two pretty great endings. At the end of season 5 of Buffy The Vampire Slayer, there was an ending with a bit of finality to it as the show left its original network and ran the risk of permanent cancellation -- but even the death of a major character which completed a story arc didn't answer the question of what the world would be like after that death.

The series did come back and two seasons later there was another conclusion -- this time with a much more open nod to the idea that anything is possible next. It's not surprising that the producers eventually decided to continue the story in comic book form, but even if they hadn't the story would have continued in the minds of many fans because there were so many places for the story to continue going.

Anyway, this is just something I've been thinking about a lot thanks to the aforementioned TV programs and novels I've been consuming recently (and I'm not a fan of passive consumption where you don't at least take a little time to shout at the author or do a little thinking when you put down the book or shut off the TV)... so I don't have any real good point to make at the end of this particular blog post. I just wanted to leave a note pointing out that good endings are tough... because unlike reality, stories that have authors and readers inevitably have to end somewhere... and they usually end on unsatisfying notes.

Google Panda 2.3 and recovery

noreply@blogger.com (Brad Linder) — Sat, 30 Jul 2011 16:11:00 +0000

The good news is that Liliputing appears to have recovered much (but not all) of its search engine traffic. The bad news is that I have no idea if any of the hundreds of changes I made to the site had any impact at all, or if I just wasted an awful lot of time.

For the past few years Liliputing has been one of the top resources on the web for news and information about netbooks, tablets, and other affordable mobile computers. But a few months ago search engine traffic started falling off a cliff, and the changes seemed to coincide with Google's launch of a new search algorithm code-named Panda.

While Panda was designed to help separate high quality web sites from low, there are plenty of examples of false positives. I could be biased, but I'm pretty sure Liliputing was among them. The site is full of original articles including dozens of the most detailed computer reviews you'll find anywhere on the web. We never copy and paste content from other sites, and in fact, I've avoided even posting press releases or block quotes longer than a few words.

Anyway, I've been documenting the steps I've taken to try to convince Google that Liliputing is a "high quality" website -- and in fact, some of those changes really have improved the user experience, so I'm glad I made them. For instance, there's no reason you should be redirected to a new URL every time you click on an image in a gallery.

A week ago I started to notice that search engine referrals were close to what they had been a few months ago. I was cautiously optimistic, but figured I'd wait a few days before declaring victory.

The last few changes I'd made to the Liliputing really seemed like they might have made a difference. I reduced the number of links in the sidebar, header, and other areas of the site so that overall there were far fewer links on each page. I used Google's new tool for specifying how URL parameters should be handled to reduce pages that were essentially indexed twice. And I identified every post on the site that had fewer than 100 words and either added a "noindex" attribute or updated the post with new information or more details.

That last change was one I'd been putting off because it just seemed so daunting for a website with more than 7,000 posts. As it turns out, I only had to edit a few hundred articles -- and when I did, I realized that some weren't just light on information -- they were also outdated.

That little exercise has changed the way I think about blogging. While Liliputing is still largely a news site, every time I write a new article I try to imagine what someone would think if they found this post 3 years from now. Would it still offer useful information?

Because search engines don't surface a series of posts in chronological order the way they were written, you have to assume that it's possible someone will find your article with absolutely no context. That means you should give them enough information in each post to fully understand the topic -- or at least links to follow to get more information.

This doesn't mean you need to post a full review each and every time you mention a tablet or netbook. But it does mean it's not enough to just mention the model number and assume everyone knows what you're talking about.

Anyway, so when traffic started to pick up almost immediately after making those recent changes, I figured I'd finally cracked the code. After all, Google's only real advice for dealing with Panda so far had come down to: Write better content, and get rid of low quality content.

Today I found out that Google rolled out a Panda 2.3 update at pretty much the exact time that Liliputing was regaining its search engine traffic.

So while I'm glad I made many of the changes I did, it's possible web traffic would have recovered anyway.

It's also possible that the only reason Liliputing has started to recover is because I made those changes and Google rolled out an update to Panda which recognized the changes.

From what I understand, Google pushes out Panda updates manually. So even if I made dramatic changes to my site in early July, just days after the Panda 2.2 update rolled out in June, Google may not have noticed until Panda 2.3 was ready to go.

In other words... I wish I could tell you I've cracked the Panda code. But I'm not sure that I have. All I know is that Liliputing is doing better than it was a week or two ago... but that the biggest thing I've learned is that we need to continue building an audience of loyal readers by broadening the scope of coverage and using social media and other tools so that we get enough traffic to keep the site running even when search traffic is on the low side.

Liliputing still hasn't had a full recovery. I'll be honest, I never monitored my traffic stats closely enough before Panda to know how much of my traffic came from Google and how much came from other sources. But overall traffic is a bit lower than it used to be. That could be from a decline in Google search. It could be due to the fact that I've essentially told Google not to even bother looking at hundreds of pages on my site. Or it could just be due to the fact that traffic tends to dip in the summer anyway.

Overall, something's changed and it would be nice if I knew if I had anything to do with it.

As I watched my visits and page views climb over the past week, I imagined I'd write a post this weekend declaring victory and explaining how I managed to show Google that my site was a high quality site (which isn't the same thing as gaming the system or tricking Panda... because Liliputing really does have thousands of pages of high quality, well-researched, original articles).

Instead all I can say is I guess I'm happy that things are improving and if you're lucky and/or worked hard, maybe you'll see the same thing on your site?

Update: So it occurs to me that there's a framework under which this all makes sense: Google is intentionally trying to kill SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

That would explain why there have been so few stories about publishers making changes to their sites and then recovering after they were hit by Panda. It would also explain why most recovery stories that we do hear seem to happen at a moment when Google is rolling out a major algorithm change: because it's not us... it's Google.

In other words, Google doesn't want webmasters to make specific changes to their sites in order to make their content easier for search engines to discover. It's Google's job to find the best content, no matter how your web pages are formatted. Instead, Google wants publishers to focus on creating good content. Period.

Which is all fine and dandy. But when Google changes its algorithm in a way so that publishers that have been cranking out good content for years are suddenly penalized, the only rational response is to try to figure out why they've been penalized and take specific steps to get back into Google's good graces.

I never paid much attention to SEO before Panda. I figured if I continued to publish content that was of value to my readers, Google would find it and direct even more readers to it. Once Panda hit, I suddenly had to start looking for SEO best practices.

If you'd asked me a few months ago if I would be OK with Google rolling out an update that specifically makes it tougher for people to game the system using SEO practices, I would have said sure. But if you had told me that the way Google was going to do this was to make dramatic changes to try to identify high quality sites from low quality sites and that there was a decent chance that some websites would get caught on the seventh circle of Hell by accident for up to 5 months, I probably would have felt differently.

Infestation

noreply@blogger.com (Brad Linder) — Tue, 12 Jul 2011 22:59:00 +0000

The battle for the rooftop garden continues. While my green bean plants are still shorter than I would have expected at this time of the season, they're generating some full-sized and rather tasty beans.

The Pai-Tsai, on the other hand, seems like a lost cause. I had hoped that I could find a hot weather alternative to bok choy to grow in the rooftop, but it appears there were some bugs waiting for me to make that same decision. They've mounted a pretty serious assault on these Asian greens.

The bugs could be aphids, but honestly, I'm new enough at this that I'm having a hard time identifying them. I'm going to try spraying some more garlic water on the leaves and then I'll probably give some soap and water a try, thanks to a suggestion from +Laura Garnick. But I won't be too disappointed if nothing edible comes of this experiment. After all, it was just an experiment.

I have several pepper plants growing and they all seem to be putting on some extra leaves after a long period of just sitting around and doing nothing. But the only one that's really starting to grow peppers is the plant I picked up at the start of the growing season from the GreensGrow nursery. The kids I started from seed indoors are taking things at a slower pace.

The green onions I planted this spring are also finally starting to look like food. I really thought they should have matured by now, but it turns out things never move at the pace I expect in my little rooftop garden.

The beans of summer

noreply@blogger.com (Brad Linder) — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 22:43:00 +0000

There's still a fair bit of greenery on the rooftop, but the snow peas, bok choy, and spinach are done for the season, and the green beans, peppers, and pai-tsai are starting to come in... but not as quickly as I would like. I think that's going to be a recurring theme on the rooftop garden until I figure out how to provide a little more protection from the sun and a better watering method.

I may also need to find pots with better drainage -- I realized after watching green bean leaves shrivel up and turn yellow/brown and pepper leaves fold up at the edges that I may have been overwatering.

Anyway, I got enough snow peas to make 2-3 meals. Hopefully I'll get a better yield when I try again this fall. The few peas that we did get were absolutely delicious though so it was worth the time and effort to grow them, I guess. Oh yeah, and it was also a learning experience.

In late May I pre-sprouted some green bean seeds and then stuck them in the soil. They shot up like nobody's business within just a few days.

Just a day or two later they started to look like this:

And then this:

For a little while the beans were living peacefully with the bok choy and snow peas in a container garden that was overflowing with green.

I started seeds in two of the pots while planting peppers in two others. This is what the garden looked like in late May when I had peas, peppers, beans, bok choy, scallions, and strawberries all growing:

A little over a month has passed since I took that photo, and the rooftop looks quite different now. The beans and peppers have taken over. I've removed the snow peas and placed the stalks around the soil for mulch -- although there's probably not really enough of them to make any impact.

The beans which shot up quickly haven't grown nearly as tall as I would have expected. I suspect that might have something to do with my having overwatered them early on. The brown leaves are starting to give way to healthier looking green foliage, but I would have expected the plants to grow more before flowering.

Still, it looks like we've got a few tiny green beans headed our way. I'm not holding out hope to get a huge crop, but I'd like to be able to cook at least a meal or two.

One of the pepper plants has also started to grow a real pepper, and it looks like a few more may be on the way.

Again, the plant is shorter than I would have expected. I might have to do some homework to figure out if it will continue growing once it bears fruit or if there's any advantage to snipping off the tiny little peppers before it drains too many of the plant's resources.

As promised on the package, the pai-tsai greens I bought at the Asian supermarket do seem to be thriving in the summer, unlike the bok choy I grew this spring, which is a cool weather vegetable. Unfortunately I don't seem to be the only one who's noticed. The leaves are riddled with holes that appear to have been chewed by bugs.

I've been spraying the plans periodically with garlic-infused water, but I might have to look for something a bit stronger. I'd like to keep things organic, so I don't plan to use any pesticides though.

The leaf-to-hole ratio is actually getting better as the plants grow. When they were tiny, it seemed like the leaves were covered in chewed-up holes. It looks like as they grow larger the bugs are having a harder time keeping up. Or maybe the garlic water really is doing the trick.

I'm not sure if I'll actually end up eating any of the pai-tsai at this point, but I'm trying to decide if it's good to have something that the bugs like to eat hanging around so that they won't chew on the peppers and beans, or if I should get rid of the leafy greens so that maybe the leaf-eaters will just go away.

The onions are continuing to grow in... but I think I may have bunched them too close together initially. They seem to perk up a bit when I thin them out a bit. I probably need to do more of that.

So far the summer season has been more about learning and experimenting than harvesting and eating. But the summer is still young.