Archive for May, 2009

There’s so much to like about South Carolina — and Charleston in particular — that I hesitate to point out some of the state’s issues.  Or, to be more exact, some of my issues with the state.  Nevertheless, I’m writing now to testify about one of them: Bugs.

I was out in the backyard yesterday, doing a bit of work on the shed and tinkering around with some custom bumper ideas for the new Jeep, and I was mercilessly bitten by mosquitoes despite a good coating of DEET-powered spray. 

A vengeful man, I promptly strung out an extension cord and hooked up a bug zapper in the middle of the yard. Then I went inside and proceeded to chase the Hobbit and tend to other matters for a few hours as night fell.

Sometime around 9:30 I heard a faint popping noise signifying the electrically explosive death of insects. I got up from my computer to look out the back window, expecting to see a few flitting things around the bug zapper, and the occasional spark from inside it.

But that’s not what I saw.  Instead, what met me was a sight unlike anything I’ve ever seen before: a swarm of bugs.

No.  Not a lot of bugs.  Don’t misunderstand me.  A swarm. 

Our house here backs up to a wide, bustling tidal marsh, and I think every single mayfly born of those acres of wetland had been drawn first to the zapper and then to the lit windows of the back of our house.  There were clouds of flying bugs roiling in the light, thousands of them crawling on the windows and fogging the view outside.  

Mayfly swarm (via Wikipedia)

It was disturbing.

It was also sad. Few mayfly species live longer than a day once they emerge from the water in their adult, flying forms — some have adult lives counted in minutes — and they were spending that precious time in my backyard (and on my windows), when they were supposed to be, um, reproducing above water. 

I watched them in stunned, awed silence for perhaps a minute before I knew what I had to do.  Quickly turning off the interior lights to prevent ingress of the swarm, I took a deep breath and jumped out into them. I ran as fast as my barefeet could carry me, inhaling only in a midpoint between house and bug zapper, where the swarm was relatively thin.

Brushing the happy little creatures away from my eyes, I got hold of the plug on the bug zapper and pulled it before rushing back through the buzzing cloud and into the house.

It couldn’t have taken but a few seconds, but in those two quick openings of the door, dozens of the little fellas got into the house. I’m pretty sure the majority of them came in on me, as they were landing on me as fast as I could brush them off while I ran.

Anyway, after having done my best to save the swarming horde outside, I swatted and smashed those that hitched a ride inside.

There is, after all, only so far a person will go for a bug.

Elanor turned one-month yesterday, so we had an amateur photo session (as in, taken by Mommy) to commemorate the occasion. We took monthly pictures of Samuel for the first year, and we really enjoy looking back at them, so we’re doing the same with his little sister.

I simply had to share one of the pictures that resulted when Samuel could no longer contain himself and had to join in:

Big Brother and Little Sister

Amazingly adorable, isn’t it?

Samuel has been a real good guy about sharing time so far. He has his moments, but all in all he’s doing great. “Sister crying,” he’ll report to us in a concerned but patient voice while we’re desperately trying to ignore her latest caterwauling. “Sister sleeping, SHHHHHHHH!” he’ll proclaim loudly beside her crib.

Not that it’s all sweetness. He has, on a couple of occasions, gone over to her when she’s crying and said, “Sister, STOP!” — which while naughty sure felt like the sort of thing I wanted to say.

It’s no secret I love my gMail. I can’t imagine using email any other way. Indeed, I’ve thus far refused to use it any other way. At one point a couple of years ago I was informed by some ITS folks here on campus that due to the switching of some systems I’d no longer be able to forward my .edu email to my gMail account. I immediately began to threaten insurrection, which eventually landed me in the office of the campus ITS Grand Poobah, who obligingly showed me how to regain my Googly goodness. As I said, I love gMail.

And that’s not all. I love iGoogle. I love Google Calendars, without which I’d likely miss many a meeting. Google Docs houses all my grade sheets and quite a few other useful-from-anywhere documents. Google Tasks is new but already infiltrating my work habits. Google Chat and Video has helped me stay connected in more ways than one. Google Books has actually helped me complete research for an article or two. Google Chrome has very quickly become my web browser of choice. Google’s Picasa runs my photo and video libraries. Oh, and their search engine doesn’t suck, either.

I mention all of this to admit my predisposition to Google-giddiness. When I’m trying out some new bit of software (or cloudware) from Google, I’m liable to go into it assuming a good outcome. Doesn’t always hold true — I still don’t care for some of their changes to iGoogle, and I don’t really get the point of Google Reader — but more often than not I’ve found that Google just does things right. And so it is with the latest bit of Googleware I’ve discovered: Google SketchUp, which is a free (natch) 3D-modeling program.

I first heard about SketchUp quite a while ago, and I’d always wanted to try it out. I have an architect buried in me — at one point I was certain I’d want to be one when I grew up, and I have several basic residential architectural design and engineering classes under my belt — and SketchUp looks like a great tool for playing around with house designs.

Still, I never got around to it (sorta busy, you know) until this weekend, when I was looking at my Jeep Commander and contemplating the few aftermarket accessories available for it, all of which strike me as too expensive, too poorly engineered, or both. Since I can’t hardly think about anything without wanting to improve it, I made a few sketches before realizing that a CAD (Computer Aided Design) program would make my life easier. I remembered SketchUp, quickly downloaded it, and I watched the first couple of tutorial videos on YouTube. Here’s the first:

Literally, within 15 minutes I was laying out virtual sheet metal.

It’s sweet. Honestly. I’m not a very clever guy, and I was spinning 3D models of a complex metal-and-tube bumper system in no time at all. I don’t know if it’ll go anywhere, but I have to say it was a lot of fun to goof around with. So chock up another victory for the Google Gods.

In other news, I got to sleep around midnight last night, and a caterwaulin’ child didn’t wake me until the sun was up. Seriously. It felt like hitting the lottery (at least in the short-term).

Probably means tonight will be another 3-hours-of-sleep extravaganza. Oh well.

I’ve taken the opportunity on redesigning the exterior of this website to also do a bit of work on some of its interior reworkings. Gone is an automatic resizing of images in posts, which was lovely in its way but didn’t allow me to take advantage of WordPress’ newfangled image inputting. (The removal of the auto-resizing has messed up some of my old pages, which I’m fixing slowly.)

The sweetest adjustment, though, has been the addition of the WPTouch plugin, which helps to automatically render the website for advanced mobile devices like the iPhone, the G1, or the iPod Touch (which I’m using to write this post). The plugin is smooth and easily customizable in a few key ways, like including a custom icon in the site header. Mine is my man-in-the-moon image, of course. Better still, I just discovered that if you’re viewing my website using one of those mobile devices — at least the Apple ones, I don’t know about the G1 — and you tell the device to add a link to the page from the homescreen (to make the site an “app”), WPTouch somehow manages to tell the device to use that custom icon. My iPod Touch thus has a moon-man button on one of my homescreens that automatically opens the web browser and loads the mobile version of my website.

It’s beautiful, and I hardly had to do anything to make it work. Go WordPress!