At long last, here are the promised photos of the new raised bed. I built one of these this Spring using some 2×4’s that I had lying around and all measurements were done to work with the boards I had. The latest bed was built using 2×4 pine studs (slightly less than 8 feet long) and were done to match the dimensions of the first bed. There was a little waste, but not too much.

When we bought the house, there were a number of raised beds already built. These were taller than the ones I built, but were not as large. A few years of experience with these beds led me to make a few changes when I built my own.

First off, I was careful to use untreated wood. The original ones appear to have a few pressure treated boards. There is some evidence that some pressure treated woods can leach pollutants (like arsenic) into the soil and from there into your food crops. For such small beds, the plants are never far from the boards, so that is something to avoid.

It is true that the boards will eventually rot and the beds will fall apart. In fact, this has been happening for a few years with the original beds. The biggest problem is that the upright supports are concealed inside the bed, in direct contact with the wet soil. When I moved some of the old beds to make way for the expanded patio, I found that these pieces were in fairly bad shape.

When I built the new beds, I moved these supports to the outside, so that they would avoid contact with the wet soil. The horizontal pieces are in no more danger than in the original design but at least will be held in place until the day that they rot all the way through. This is not as clean of a look as the previous beds, but makes more sense from an engineering standpoint.

Another thing that I did was to make the beds larger. While I did not know it at the time, it turns out that the original beds were too small for some of the helpful plant groupings that we wanted to do. Having slightly larger beds allows for more flexibility in growing companion plants. Next year we hope to take better advantage of that in the new beds.

Despite that, I think that, when the time comes to replace some of the old rotting beds, I will go back to tall beds. These low beds do still require a fair bit of stooping. They also do not provide adequate discouragement to our dog.

Still, for less than US$20, I was able to build an 8 foot by 3 foot raised bed that should last us for several years. Not too shabby.

And one last thought on this project. You will notice in some of the photos that the new beds are surrounded by bare earth and weeds. That is what happens when you are not aggressive enough in reseeding after you remove a big pile of dirt. I still need to pull weeds and reseed before the first snow in hopes of reestablishing grass there in the spring.

Tschuess.

Another week has gone by without much tangible to show for it. I did some repairs on the futon frame that my sister gave to me and which now resides in my studio. It could use a bit more reinforcement, but it is sturdy enough for the use it will be getting for the next bit. I also started building another raised bed for our garden. (I promise to post pictures just as soon as that is done.)

I did a little bit of work on the new album. I did not do any work on the mystery project. I was going to make progress last night, but instead I got home from work and read until it was time to cook dinner. I know. I am so lazy.

I have been doing some fiddling around on my website. I updated WordPress and PodPress. I managed to break things in the process. And to fix them. And to fiddle about with the PodPress settings, since this upgrade reset a bunch of things to their defaults.

I also finally looked at the whole album playlist thing again. If you have been reading for a while, you may remember a post several months ago where I complained that playlists would not open within my web browser. I discovered that, at least if you are a Mac user, you can go into Quicktime Preferences (available within Quicktime or within System Preferences) and set things up so that the Quicktime browser plugin will be used for M3U and SMIL playlists. M3U even lists the track numbers and allows you to jump to specific tracks. To do it, go to Quicktime Preferences->Advanced->MIME Settings. From there activate MP3->MP3 Playlist and Miscellaneous->SMIL 1.0.

I also want to respond to a complaint that I have received from a couple of people. The last two albums have been released using AAC (Advanced Audio Coding) rather than the more widely known MP3. Some people are having difficulty playing these files. I do not know why your computer does not have an AAC Codec. If you are using a relatively modern version of Windows, I believe that Windows Media Player includes support for AAC out of the box. Mac definitely does, since Quicktime/iTunes includes AAC.

So why am I doing this to you? Why am I not just following the herd and using MP3, which everyone seems to support? Because of the licensing. Distributing media using MP3 requires you to pay a licensing fee (which only really applies if the enterprise grosses more than $100,000.00). And that is just based on the patent holders which originally participated in the consortium; a couple of additional ones have made their presence known this year.

There is no licensing fee for distributing AAC encoded media. Ever. Again, assuming that no additional patent holders show up.

Yes, I could use Ogg Vorbis instead. Though it is possible that there are unknown patents involved in that. And never mind the fact that the people who do not have AAC on the Windows PC almost definitely are also lacking Ogg. Not to mention just about everyone else who has downloaded my music so far.

And do not even suggest WMA, since that is both proprietary and not readily available on Mac or Linux.

So that means that I will continue to put up new music in AAC and will likely move the old MP3 files over to AAC as time permits. Video will likely be H.264 (Advance Video Coding).

AVC is also included in modern releases of Quicktime/iTunes, so it is at least supported on Mac, Windows, and a smattering of consumer media devices. AVC does not have a licensing scheme that directly address the “free” market. It appears that so long as my titles are no longer than twelve minutes in length or so long as I have fewer than 100,000 “subscribers”, I will not be charged a fee. This is probably the best I can hope for without switching to Ogg Theora which, again, most of my readers probably do not have a codec for.

But of course this is simply distracting me from my many projects. Hopefully tonight will see a bit of real progress being made. Hopefully.

Tschuess.

Script Frenzy is over. At last. 30 days of script writing madness.

How did it go? Well, I did attend all of the write-in’s that I organized. Turnout was disappointing. I do not know if it is just June or if I am just not charismatic enough to energize people into action.

My final count is 12,200 words (including a new Captain Morgan short). Yes, I fell short of the 20,000 word goal. I am a bit bummed, but only just a bit. I tell myself that it is good to do one of these things and not quite make it. And I did actually get some good writing done. Now I just need to keep making progress.

So what happened this past month? Other than what I already posted previously? Well, I actually got an amazing amount done. I finally finished up my two year old project to expand my patio. For the past two years it has been a mud hole of varying sizes, as I dug out a bunch of lawn that had been killed by sun reflecting off of our pale tan house. Now it is all rocked and edged with landscaping timbers. It looks pretty nice, if I do say so myself. I will hopefully have some pictures to put up soon. In the meantime, you will just have to take my word that the seven-and-a-half tons of gravel that I moved a few weeks ago makes a fabulous patio.

Kristi and I have also been doing gardening. Finally. After failing to plan anything for the past several years, we finally were on the ball this year. Tomatoes. Peppers. Eggplant. Basil. Turnips. More basil. More peppers. Watermelon. Cantaloupe. Squash. And I (also finally) put in a peach tree in our front yard. On top of which one of our mystery trees has turned out to be a plum tree. We have quite a few plums set and growing bigger every week. The apple is going nuts, too. It is looking pretty amazing.

Part of the gardening was building a new raised bed and moving quite a bit of the soil/composted sod that was left over from digging out for the patio. Yes, we composted the sod. Yes, it worked. I still have a bit more soil to move and another old bed to weed and rebuild. And possibly another new bed to build, if I get some more lumber picked up.

And I finished a few random projects around the house. Simple projects that have been on the back burner for a year or more.

Oh, and I made a batch of witbier with some friends. That is currently bottle conditioning in the basement. I had a glass today while I was working on my script and it was pretty good. It should be even better later this week when we have a few people over for a barbecue. Hurrah beer!

So yes, I have been busy. Maybe not on Script Frenzy, but I have been very busy and very productive.

Now I am tired.

Tschuess.