In designing a little on-line chat program accessible through a web browser, I came across what was one of the most frustrating problems in my software development career. Read the rest of this entry ...
When Cartoon Network first came onto the scene it was owned by the Turner Network and had access to the entire Turner library of animation. This included a large chunk of Warner Brothers cartoons (Looney Tunes / Merrie Melodies up to 1948) and (I believe) the entire Hanna-Barbera library (Scooby-Doo, Flintstones, etc). Naturally Cartoon Network became to be known as just a network that reran old Hanna-Barbera cartoons. Frustrated with this image, Mike Lazzo (a producer at CN) asked Turner if they could create their own shows. Read the rest of this entry ...
Last week there was a massive internet outage with Comcast (my internet provider). Users complained about it here. The typical rants that are (sadly) true: All major ISPs over-subscribe their networks, the support personnel are clueless, etc. Well, yesterday the same thing occured again. Read the rest of this entry ...
I've been working on learning JavaScript over the last month or so and I've come to a point where I've started to delve into the hot topic of "Asynchronous JavaScript, DHTML and Server-side Programming", or as some pundits have termed it "Ajax". The 'x' is supposed to stand for XML since one of the primary enablers for this technology is the JavaScript object XMLHttpRequest (though you can use it to return any type of text). Read the rest of this entry ...
Did my first bit of yard work today and it got me thinking about something I was mulling over last summer: Converting from a grass lawn into a clover lawn. Doing a google search turned up the tidbit that clover lawns are trendy this year. I guess clover lawns used to be an American tradition in the early 20th century, too.
The benefits of clover lawns are numerous:
- Don't have to water (as much)
- Don't have to cut as much
- Is generally softer than grass
- Relatively pest free
- Don't have to fertilize
- Clover improves the soil by releasing nitrogen back into the soil
- Stays green longer
- Clover is aggressive and can grow dense enough to keep out weeds
- Resistant to dog urine
It all sounds great, but I doubt I would be able to just wait for the existing clover patches to take over my whole lawn as it might take a century or two. Yep, it seems that I would still have to kill the existing weeds and overseed with clover to really get somewhere. It's a shame because I'd like to do the least amount of work possible (aka "none").
If this year, clover could be ultra-aggressive and take over the lawn, weeds, grass and all, I wouldn't mind. Wouldn't mind at all...