Archive - Mar 2008 - Blog

Welcome to the March 29, 2008 edition of Dirty Fingers. We received only a few submissions this week. We are considering cutting back to every 2 weeks, or perhaps once a month in order to have more entries per issue.

Jamie McIntosh presents Cats in the Garden posted at Suite101: Organic Gardens blog, saying, "Teach your cats which parts of the garden are off-limits, and enjoy their companionship outdoors."

Kay Stephenson presents Spring Ephemeral Plant Profile: Rue anemone (Thalictrum thalictroides) posted at Native in the City.

Jeremy Zongker presents 90 Low Cost or No Cost Activities to Entertain Your Kids All Summer Long posted at Destroy Debt.

Thank you for reading! Submissions are requested for the next issued. Submit your blog article to using our

I ran across this web site, Water 4 Gas. The first thing I thought was scam scam scam scamity scam. So, of course, I wanted more information. First, you have to remember that NET stands for Not Entirely True, so don't believe everything you read on the sites you get when you search for more information. Here are my findings:

Not much useful. Everything I found in my Google searches were from people selling the product. One page was from a blogger, like me, who wanted to know more. However, it looks like all he did was read the pages from the people selling the product and decide that it was a good thing. That is not what I was looking for. I was some solid research showing me that the thing works or doesn't. When I searched for "run car on water kits scam" I got mostly sellers trying to boost their sales by cashing in on the sceptics looking for real answers.

I also found several groups where someone would say "Is this a scam or not" and then they would discuss and a bunch of people would say that it is a scam and some would say "I don't know, it could be real." I am trying to remain objective and want real research.

I next turned to the trusty old library. Every library I've ever belonged to allows its members to search journals and databases as well as book. I searched the journals. These products run on something called Brown's Gas, so I searched for that. Google's Patent Search came up in the results with a patent related to the technology. A patent just says "we own this, you can't make it." There is no research that says that it actually works. That comes later.

Next I ran across an article called "Investigating Brown's gas, a tiny TV generator, and more." by Don Lancaster (Electronics Now; Feb98, Vol. 69 Issue 2, p22). One section of the article was on Brown's Gas use in torches. In that article I learned that Brown's Gas does exist. It can be created by electrolosys and that, as they claim, you can breifly place your hand in front of the flame without burning yourself. He does caution against actually doing this though, and I second that caution.

The sellers of this technology claim that they can melt tungstun with it. This claim seems to be bogus. They also claim that it changes temperature based on the melting point of the product it touches. This seems to be based on bad science. I don't fully understand the science, so I will leave the discussion of this to others who do.

Hydrogen Fuel Cells are on their way. Many are asking for it. Bush signed the Hydrogen Fuel Initiative in 2003. You can buy the Fuel Cell X7 Hydrogen Car Design Project Kit and make your own model hydrogen car. This does not mean that the claims that you can add a simple tank of water to your car fuel system and get better milage are true. Many of their claims are faulty, so I say it is most likely a scam. If you want to give it a try and let me know what you find out, feel free.

I might waste my money on one just to see what it is. I'd first need someone who knows more about internal cumbustion engines than just "the gas goes here" type knowledge that I have. Living in Oregon, I don't even really have to know how to pump gas. I'm not allowed to pump my own.

I get a message on one of my forums. She tells us that she was at the Portland Airport when she saw this purse. I thought it was so funny looking, I had to share. Hope you all enjoy it as much as I did! Take a look at it.

If you buy one, let me know! I'd love to hear how you like it!

My veggie diet does not seem to be working. The family is not on-board, so that could be a problem. When there are leftovers, I can't let them go to waste. I have to eat them. All those frozen chicken chimichanga's in the fridge need to be eaten too. And when we go out to a restaurant... You know how few places you can go to get actually vegetarian meals?

So, I've altered my plan a bit. I'm limiting my meat intake. That is not all that difficult. The pyramid says I should be eating 7 ounces of protein a day. Some days I eat no meat. Most days I'm below the 7 ounces. Today I made dinner, so it was vegetarian. It went over well. Elizabeth said it was really good. I thought it was ok, but I'd like to futz with the recipe a little and make it better.

It was called "Sweet Potato Cakes." I'll give the full recipe after I futz with it and see if I can make it better, but it was shredded sweet potato, carrot, zucchini and potato, seasoned and held together with egg and flour and then pan fried. They did not stick together well enough for my taste, so I'm gonna see if I can fix that. Also, since they have egg, they may not technically qualify as veggie. Definitely not vegan. I'll post the final recipe here for your enjoyment.

Hey all. In an early blog I asked for input on what you thought this site needed. Being a new site, and only getting around 15 visitors a day, I didn't expect much of a response. I wasn't surprised. That's ok. I did get one persons response that confirmed that my thoughts on the subject seemed to be good. I moved forward with that in mind.

As some of you may know, I'm a student teacher. I'm in a masters program called the Inclusive Elementary Educators Program. This program trains me on how to deal with every student in my classroom. I will end up with a masters in special education as well as teaching credentials in early childhood education (3 years old to 3rd grade), elementary education (3rd grade to 8th grade in an elementary school) and primary specicial education (age 3 to 8th grade in any school).

Why am I bringing this up? Well, it is my way of saying Spring Break is here! Since break is here, I'm working my hiney off trying to get some things done on the site. I altered the way the blog backend worked. The old way allowed for many people to have blogs. It was overkill for my single blog and had some issues that I did not like. The new system is made for a single blog. It also has some issues, but I think it is more to my liking. At the same time I set up a couple of other changes.

Even if you don't have an account, you can now leave comments. If you have an account, it will not ask you to confirm you are a human though. I also installed a program that will allow you to inject HTML into your comments.

The main thing I've been working on is the plant index I was talking about last week. It is fairly simple at this point, and I've only put one plant into it. I also don't think that the data is currently completly correct, as I futzed with it to make sure things were working properly. I'll be correcting that data and adding other plants into the database over the next week. I don't think I'll do it tonight, but I might do some work on it. First I want to get the images working on it. That is the last little tweak I want to do to it before I call it complete. You can check it out though. Part of this new system is that you can add some of the data to it. You can of course add comments, with or without an account. If you have an account, then you can add links to other sites with useful information about that plant. You can also add in pictures, or will be able to when I get that part finished.

Check it out and let me know. The one plant I have in it now is the Luffa Gourd. You can see it at http://tiredgarden.info/plant-index/luffa-sponge. If you have any comments about it, I would love to hear them. This is your chance to help mold the site. Once I create the index, it will be much harder to make changes.

I am making some changes to my blog on the back-end. For most this will not change anything. If you use the feed, this will change where you feed too. I'll let you know what the change is, when I know.

Also, until I get it finished, you might notice that the entries are disappearing. I am moving them to the new spot on the back-end and they will be visible there when I am finished.

Some links will change, but I'll set the old links to autoforward to the new location.

Thanks for your patience.

Jason

UPDATE: I've moved everything over to the new spot. The only things that should change on your end are the following:

The blog location of http://tiredgarden.info/blogs/tiredgardener has been changed to http://tiredgarden.info/blog

All future blogs will be filed under http://tiredgarden.info/blog/[Title] instead of http://tiredgarden.info/blogs/tiredgardener/[title]. I left the current blog entries in the old directory structure so as not to break links.

The RSS Feed did not change.

Thanks,

Jason

Welcome to the March 22, 2008 edition of dirty fingers. This is our first edition and we received some very good submissions for it. Read them all, and enjoy!

Lucynda Riley sent us two fun crafty articles from her blog, A Crafty Nature: Tin Can Herb Pots and Terrariums.

Nichole Halsey entertains us with a discussion of our compulsion to hover over our babies: Simply Irresistible, she's so fine theres no telling where my money went? posted at Bad Human! Don't take chemicals from strangers!.

General

Madeleine Begun Kane presents Yard Yarns (Limerick and Haiku Prompt) posted at Mad Kane's Humor Blog. This prompt is prompting us to get our creative juices flowing and write something interesting.

Theodore Pappas asked us to post Gregory McNamee's article Seed Banks: The Seeds of Salvation posted at Britannica Blog, saying, "A fine post on ... seeds--and the importance of "seed banks.""

Thank you for reading! Submissions are requested for the next issued. Submit your blog article to using our

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Alright, I really want this site to be useful for people. I enjoy blogging and writing articles, but if people do not find them useful, I'll keep them to myself... no I won't I like to share, even if you don't want me to!

Anyway, I would like to know what people will find useful in this site. I have a couple of ideas for things that I want to work on. What do you think of my ideas? Do you have any ideas of your own that you would like to share with me? As a webmaster, it is important to me that my "customers" (that's you) are happy with the product they are getting. Any input I can get from you will allow me to make a better product for you.

My ideas:

Plant index: I am planning on making a detailed index of plants. This will include planting details, descriptions, and will allow you to comment and add pictures and whatnot. I would probably start with one group of plants (gourds for instance) and expand to other related to it (squash, cucumbers, and the rest of the family) and then other families (corn and other grasses, legumes, sunflowers, etc).

Sustainable Tips: This list of tips would give ideas for how to make your life more sustainable. The tips will rotate on the front page.

Carbon Footprint Tracking: There is some software I can get that would allow us to track our carbon footprint. It is a lot of work to properly track your footprint, and I'm not sure I'd follow through with tracking it regularly. I'm not sure how well others would either. Let me know if you would like to see this tool, and I'll include it. I'll first have to understand how it works though. I've done very little play with it, so I'd have to spend some time learning.

Discussion Forums: I can easily add discussion to this site, but as it stands now, I don't feel there are enough visitors to warrant the overhead. I don't get many comments on the blog entries which makes me wonder if a discussion form would be used.

Please use the comment function on this page, or if you want to keep your comment private, use the contact form. But either way, PLEASE give me your feedback!

I was 2 days into my vegetarian attempt and Elizabeth and I decided to go out to dinner. We headed over to Clackamas, as Elizabeth wanted to buy something for Emma's room. After we took care of her stuff, we headed to dinner. We found a buffet up the road called HomeTown Buffet. I thought that since they were a buffet, it would have some choices for everyone, so that is where we went.

I started with a salad. I was happy that they had a nice mixed greens, as well as the normal iceberg. The rest of the bar was lacking. They did have my favorite part: Mushrooms. But it was a short bar with little variety. They did not even have honey mustard dressing. I got blue cheese, which I enjoy as well. I did manage to make a good salad.

I wanted a little soup to go with it. Chicken Noodle and black bean. Black bean sounds good. Stir it up and up floats a piece of pork fat. Skip the soup I guess.

Next I headed for the main course. I had seen the taco bar. A bean burrito or taco sounded nice. Then I looked at the sign for the beans. "Pinto beans and pork." Pork and beans on a taco? Yuck. I don't really like pork and beans to begin with, but it really does not sound right on a taco. Looking around the main food bar I found some BBQ beans. Not really what I had in mind, but it would do.

That was not enough. What else can I get? A baked potato sounds good... they had bacon on them. Looking around I found starch and some veggies. When I saw the green beans, I expected them to have pork in them. They did not, but like most of the rest of the veggies they were over cooked. The mashed potatoes were acceptable.

Now on to desert. They had a great desert bar. I was really impressed by how much this restaurant caters to the typical American. Lots of meat, lots of fat, lots of sugar, a little veggies. I guess that is what people expect in an American restaurant, so that is what they have to serve. Quick, greasy, fattening slop. I will probably not eat there again.

One of the beauties showing up in my garden.