Saturday I rented an 11hp “Billy Goat” brush mower from Best Rent All and spent about 5 hours this weekend mowing in and around the pasture. The horses are pretty picky eaters and the pasture is not well seeded, so there are areas where weeds and tree saplings are choking any grass that may want […]

… took a lot of energy. This was not a bad year for me, but it did wear me out a bit. The first half was dominated by our trip to Togo and Ghana. It took a lot of preparation to get ready. The trip itself was great, but quite exhausting. Work turned a bit […]

Note to self : turn off theme before updating the blog software. After I installed the update nothing worked. Internal server error. So I deleted everything and rolled back to the old version, turned off my custom theme, updated again … and everything worked just fine. We’re now on WordPress 2.7.

Between the news of the horrible tragedy at Virginia Tech (we’re all Hokies this week!), a slightly hectic, double trip to the beach and another offer on a new house, we’ve had a busy, weird time lately. Last week the kids were off from school, so on Thursday we drove to Atlantic Beach, to join […]

Whoopee – isn’t it amazing when stuff just works??!! Upgraded to the latest version of WordPress in a few Minutes. I also added the calendar plugin (see on the sidebar at the top). maybe that’ll be useful.

What a week: Snow and Tornadoes in South Africa and a deadly heatwave in the US. In the US, the Midwest and East Coast were cooking – New York declared a heat emergency with temperatures of up to 38°C/101F and a heat index of up to 110F/43°C. Here in Bahama it was sweltering, too, with […]

Yet another cold front moved in today, and the temperature dropped 20 degrees Fahrenheit in one hour. This cold front spawned some severe thunderstorms and at one point a 15-Minute hailstorm that almost covered the ground with chick-pea-sized hail. I like the effect of the hail in the flashlight in the picture above. More pictures […]

Don’t know exactly what’s come over us, but recently Laura and I have been listening to some of our records. You know, vinyl records, the black, 12-inch wide disks with grooves all over them. You put a needle on them and they produce a scratchy hiss with some music. You put one of those things […]

Good riddance to the Serbian mini-Hitler. Former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic has died in the detention centre at The Hague tribunal. The tribunal said he was found dead in his cell on Saturday morning and that although the cause was not yet clear, there was no indication of suicide. Mr Milosevic, 64, had been on […]

I just watched Robert Greenwald’s new documentary Wal-Mart: The high cost of low price. Greenwald also did Outfoxed a great documentary about Rupert Murdoch’s attack on American journalism. Now Greenwald skewers the world’s largest retailer with a relentless mix of very individual stories of family businesses that were ruined, workers who were intimidated and harassed, […]

Looks like another South American country is taking a left turn: Bolivia seems to have handed a clear victory to Aymara Indian candidate Evo Morales, a socialist and admirer of Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez: Several polls give him 42-45% of the vote ahead of his nearest challenger, former President Jorge Quiroga who, the polls […]

This is great news – especially for the family of Susanne Osthof: BERLIN (Reuters) – A German woman abducted in Iraq three weeks ago is free, her brother told German n-tv television on Sunday. Archaeologist Susanne Osthoff, 43, who spent more than a decade working on excavations in Iraq, disappeared with her driver on November […]

Both are depressing: Kanzlerin Sauerkraut climbs behind the wheel of that stalling, choking, smoking dumptruck that Germany is these days. Good luck, you’ll need it. 53 members of the Bundestag from her own “coalition” voted against her. I give this arrangement no more than 2 years. This government will probably fail not so much over […]

We woke up this morning at 5:30 because Julia was not feeling well, and noticed the woods behind our house were burning. Across an area of about an acre (roughly a third of a hectare) the leaf litter on the ground was burning and the fire was rapidly spreading in a wide swath across the […]

The recent Sony rootkit scandal takes all that’s wrong with our “brave, new world” of networked computing: spam, viruses, spyware, malware, sloppyware (=Windows) and adds a major technology and entertainment corporation’s bad attitude about consumer’s rights. Earlier this year, Sony sold music CDs with copyright protection software that installs a rootkit on Windows machines, making […]

Remember those paper-and-ink-based information storage devices with the multi-page user interface? Yeah – books! I just read Richard Clarke’s Scorpion’s Gate – the first novel I read in years – and I could not put it down for two nights. The man sure knows how to spin a yarn, but the way the story comments […]

It’s a beautiful late summer day in North Carolina, gasoline costs $3.20 a gallon, and I reached a personal fitness milestone today, by biking 3 miles around the property in under 30 Minutes. Not that anyone rally cares, but that’s where I was at last Winter, when my bike broke (the free hub). It took […]

This should be good news for the petro-fuel users. Let’s hope it is reflected in the price at the pump soon: Two petroleum pipelines that supply gasoline and other fuels to the Triangle area have returned to service and are increasing their service to the region. Plantation Pipe Line Co. is up to 95 percent […]

Last weekend Laura went to see the new Tim Burton/Johnny Depp movie. She had been very anxious to see it, and she seems to have really enjoyed it. I am looking forward to seeing it one of these days myself. But today I heard about a movie I really want to see as soon as […]

Here we go: I finished the new dress for this blog. It’s just the WordPress default theme with new graphics. I am not much of a graphic artist, but it’s good enough for now. The hardest thing about amateur graphic design is to resist the PowerPoint effect. That’s what happens when the VP of Marketing […]