Wednesday, April 12, 2006

Follow-up on cold frame

I got home from work before anyone else Monday evening. It was a nice afternoon, so I quickly changed clothes and eagerly ran out to the garden. The plants I'd put in the cold frame in March were now healthy, husky plants ready to go into the ground.

Even though soil conditions were too wet to till the soil, it was acceptable for planting, as I'd tilled it March 1 during a nice stretch of weather. After two days, the freshly transplanted broccoli and cauliflower are doing well. The deer haven't found them yet, and the dogs aren't prone to lay on the plants, as the soil isn't that soft, freshly tilled stuff, nor have I mulched the plants yet.

Unfortunately, one day I forgot to open the cold frame before leaving for work. Often, I just stick a 2x4 under one edge to provide a little ventilation and other days I prop it open or lay it open all the way. It was a hot sunny day and one flat of flowers were just about wiped out by the heat. They're still a wilted mess, with about half of them looking as if they'll survive.

Boot Camp

The major buzz in the computing world for the last week or so has been over Apple releasing a beta called Boot Camp. Boot Camp allows users of the new Intel chip powered Macs to repartition their hard drive and install Windows XP on their Mac. The catch, of course, is that to use Windows, you must boot into it.

When I bought my beige G3 Mac in March, 1998, I ordered it with an OrangeMicro PC card. The OrangeMicro card was a PC motherboard on a 7" PCI card that used the Macs ports, input devices, and peripherals. The really cool part of the setup was that you could have both the Mac and PC running at the same time and even cut and paste between the two environments. (Some of we adventurous sorts also could save from the PC side to the Mac disk, but that was flirting with disaster!) OrangeMicro quit producing the cards when emulator software, coupled with much faster computer chips, made the items like Virtual PC a more economical choice. However, with any emulator, you lose speed. I was never pleased with any of the emulators.

At one time, I had an Orange card in both the G3 at home and in an upgraded PowerMac 7500 at work. I could use my Mac then for my special education reports that relied on the Windows-only Access database program. It also eased packaging and preserved consistency of my MATH DITTOS 2 series sharewares.

It appears that when Apple releases its next operating system, Mac OS X 10.5, there's a chance that it may "catch up" to the setups I had in the late 90's. While Boot Camp requires rebooting into Windows, Apple certainly must realize the opportunity to gain market share with machines that can run both OS X and Windows simultaneously. With the Mac now running on Intel chips, the speed hit from emulation might be negligible, making a new version of Virtual PC that does the above a big winner for both Apple and Microsoft.

I don't have an Intel based Mac, so I can't comment on Boot Camp's attributes. I can see how it would save some users from having to tote two computers with them. But for the work I'd want to do, I'd need both environments running simultaneously...with the ability to share files and/or cut and paste between them. Currently at work, I do almost all of my work on a 12" Aluminum PowerBook, but also have a Compaq laptop running most of the time. I do network the two machines at times to share files.

So, I just thought I'd throw in my two cents worth. Go for it Apple and Microsoft. It will make a lot of folks happy in computerland.

A Contest

A friend sent along this link to a contest for teachers sponsored by Target.

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