Although it's nearly impossible to find on L&I's website, there's a PDF buried on there that lets you add your home to the Philly Circular-Free Network!  This means that, in theory, the people that go around stuffing fast food takeout menus and those big bundles of circulars (that go right in the recycling) will be fined if they continue to do it.

The fillable PDF is available at http://webapps.phila.gov/li/UpdDocs/No_handbills.pdf. Too bad you still have to print it out and fax it in (two sheets of paper) or mail it in (one sheet and an envelope)...

I came across an interesting site today called 350.org that attempts to get the message of global warming across by using numbers instead of words. Specifically, they focus on what is widely considered to be the red-line number for atmospheric carbon dioxide measured in parts per million. A number of NASA scientists contend that if we can get ourselves down below 350ppm, we will fare much better in the long run.

One of the best things we can do here in Philly (besides biking instead of driving!) is to plant a tree.  I just received a bit of information from our Newbold Neighborhood Association with some important dates and deadlines for being considered for tree planting this year.  From the NNA:

TreeVitalize Planting
Fall 2008
New trees are coming to Newbold, and we need your help!  While dates and details are still to be announced, we will definitely need lots of help in the coming months to prepare for our first neighborhood tree planting.  Volunteers are needed for varying tasks ranging from obtaining tools and food to flyering, recruiting to organizing volunteers, and leaning a hand on the big planting day.

New Tree Applications
We are now officially collecting tree applications for our Spring 2009 planting!  Applications must be submitted no later than October 1st.   Apply no matter what! Even if you think it may not be approved, let the city decide, you might be surprised!

Hazard Trees / Tree Planting & Establishment Workshops
October 21-22, 2008
A complete agenda and registration is available at: arborday.org/treeplanting.  If you register, please record your priority code as 7026.
These workshops will help you: assess risk associated with defective trees, select proper tree species and cultivars for your area, and determine impact of pruning, other cultural practices on tree defense systems, evaluate soils and site conditions, develop proactive programs and policies to mitigate risk of tree failures, and overcome transplanting problems.  Early registration runs through October 14th.  Please call 888-448-7337 if you have any questions or to register by phone.

Apparently, the city doesn't like guerilla gardeners who put their own trees in, and they'll come and chop down unregistered trees (or so I've heard...)  So, do it right and fill out an app!  I know I will be...

Sunday, Sept. 7, 2008, 11am-6pm
2nd & South Streets

From www.GreenFestPhilly.org: GreenFest Philly is a one-day street fair FREE to the public.  Over 200 exhibitors and 20,000 people are expected at the area's largest environmental event. The event features vegetarian food, sneaker recycling, live music & entertainment, kids activities, bicycle valet, yoga, local produce, organic pastry contest, composting and recycling, Eco Exchange Fashion Show & Clothing Swap, Water Quality Symposium and Eco-Film Forum.  This year's theme is water quality so grab your reusable water containers and fill up at our no-waste drinking water stations.

Anybody else want to go/volunteer?  Maybe get some freebies--like the sweet rain barrel I picked up from the Philly Water Department in their effort to reduce the strain on our waste water system.

The hops are flowering!  After watching vine after vine shoot off from the crown for months, it seems all of these cones appeared overnight.  I planted one variety back in March, and another in May (I'll be damned if I wrote them down...  Cascade and Willamette sound about right though.)  The ones that were given some elk antlers to grow up found their way onto some chainlink fence, and really took off.

Next year, the plan is to cut a few pieces of the rhizome to start some more sections.  I'd really like to string some lines across the yard to have the hops grow crazy all over the place.  Some advice from my friend Ed (who gave me the later-planted rhizomes) is to wait until the hops are slightly papery to the touch before picking them.  Right now, they smell and taste chlorophylly, but they should start to dry out soon.  It looks like I'll have enough to lightly hop one batch of beer, so some weekend very soon we'll be getting out the big pots to boil down some of Philly's finest.

I have some rosemary, sage, and oregano growing, as well as a year's supply of rose petals ripe for the picking.  I wonder what some combination of these would taste like?

He's got a lot of nerve...

I love this guy!

I worry, though, that others don't. I worry that he'll meet with the same resistance to common sense that Jimmy Carter faced when he asked Americans to turn down their thermostats and drive less. Watching the Daily Show, I saw McCain's craptacular crow-eating when he said maybe inflating our tires isn't such a bad idea after all, coming a day after his forehead-smackingly oblivious Harley-Davidson address in which he called on Americans to do their part to waste gas and funnel money overseas.  "Hear that rumble?  That's the sound of your pensions paying for rich oil sheiks to ship their Lamborghinis to England for an oil change."  Great job, McDoucheCain.  Does anybody have a pair of those hilariously large flip-flop costumes from 2004 left over? I'll just paint his name over Kerry's and start walking around the city. 

Personally, this is why I'm addicted to gardening. It is perhaps one of the easiest ways to take some responsibility, by reconnecting you to the process of creating food and by removing yourself from a system that mass-produces poison and convinces people to eat it.  I ate my first tomato from the garden tonight, and it was deliciously unremarkable.  It tasted just like any other tomato, which is great!  People have an ill-conceived notion that anything home-grown will automatically taste richer and jucier than their shipped-in counterparts, when in reality there is very little difference.  The real difference lies in the externalities, which I will talk about in a few days.

It's nodda tumor!

Either way, the garden continues to grow.  For some reason, quite a few of my tomatoes have this weird cracked indention on their bottoms, making it look like two or three tomatoes fused together.  Maybe I have found the perfect mutant strain capable of producing some high-quality tomacco plants.  The hanging tomatoes don't have this problem--only the inground plants.  I still think I stunted all of my tomatoes early on by missing a day or two watering them.  Next year, I'm doing it right with a seed germinator (plans to follow shortly).  I'm using only compost tea and fish meal on the edible plants, but the rest of the garden gets Miracle-Gro which the non-edibles love.  I'm getting ready to head out to Wyoming for a week, so everything got fed last night and the yard got weed-whacked.  Hopefully when I return, it'll look as good as ever (if Becky remembers to water everything...)

What a difference a little paint makes.  I've been too busy moving into our new house and gardening outside to keep up posting on here, but it's time I start again.  Becky and I have been living in blissful abundance since our CSA shares from GreensGrow have started coming in.  I'm trading them a bit of my computer expertise for the food, so really everybody wins.

English ivy and brick really go well together

I've been kicking around some ideas lately as to side cover for the house.  English Ivy seems to be pretty common, but tends to send our tendrils that are quite capable of breaking down the stucco siding. After seeing the power of bamboo roots in drilling through, I'm a bit wary of even the lowly ivies.  But, with some low gauge braided cable, a very nice grid could be constructed that would let the ivy climb far enough away from the house.  This would create a wall of shade for my exposed wall, although it wouldn't do much as far as insulation is concerned.

This winter, the task will be to cut a door onto the stretch of roof on the second floor.  This will give me access to the outside to build my stairway to the real roof.  Once I have this set up, the real work on the green roof can begin.  The most recent numbers point to a 10-20% reduction in heating and cooling costs.  What I really want it for is the active filtering that it does to rain water so I'm not collecting nearly as much of the pollen, soot, and other crap that comes down from the skies.

One of my many trashpicked prizes I've held on to is an Ikea shelving frame that will become my seed germinating rack come spring!  This will add to its list of previous uses such as an AV rack and laundry shelves, but I have a feeling it will remain useful in this capacity for many years.

Useful Links:

• Building a Tiered Growing Stand
• Starting Seeds - Nice Rack!

This is more a note for myself than a walk-through, but if anyone finds it helpful, great!  I finally got around to recreating a Windows 2003 virtual machine to be a secondary domain controller, and I noticed that it wouldn’t replicate.  It had been a while since I’d had to fiddle with Active Directory replication problems, and I forgot that there are two registry settings that must be enabled to let the RPC requests through the firewall.  I also noticed that DC2 was missing it's NETLOGON and SYSVOL shares.  So, the following registry entries must be created, as well as firewall entries (do it on the domain controller group policy!) for ports 53212 (cfdc) and 53211 (cfdb).

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\NtFrs\Parameters]
"RPC TCP/IP Port Assignment"=dword:0000cfdc 

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\NTDS\Parameters]
"TCP/IP Port"=dword:0000cfdb

After this, I used the techniques listed in this post on WinSearchIT.  I deleted all of the automatically generated links from AD Sites & Services.  Then I ran their first configuration command which came back with error 8441.  I guess AD automatically attempts to regenerate the links.  I then forced a full sync as in step 4.  I did this both ways, with DC1 {DC2 guid} and then DC2 {DC1 guid}.  When I checked the shares listed on DC2, both NETLOGON and SYSVOL had reappeared and were fully populated.  The links in Sites and Services were also regenerated, and both worked as expected when told to Replicate Now.  Huzzah!  Time for a beer.

To all those who upgraded from 4.6.2 to 4.8.0 without a hitch, I salute you.  Maybe it was a custom module that threw a monkey wrench into the works, but after upgrading I was left without the ability to actually log in to any of the sites.  If I created a new user, I could log in fine, but without any admin or host privileges...

Oh well--aside from Text modules, there wasn't much content (yet) on any of the portals, so I just copied the skins back over and all is well.