Right Brain Feed

 Late afternoon lighting or the perfect exposure can make a great photo. Another way to also really improve a photo is to try and “capture the moment”, to try and tell a story with a photo.  Here are two pictures of cute fluffy chicks. One has better lighting, and the yellow chicks really stand out. The other has dark chicks huddled in a corner, but the moment that is really captured is my old canine friend that loved to stick her head in and watch the baby chicks. For me, that memory being captured really makes the photo great (to me).

 The colonial pipeline shutdown has really shook Asheville, panic buying hit big time last week. No gasoline for sale within 20 miles of where I live. Even my entitled self that doesn’t depend on my car to get to work is a tad worried.  But that’s not why I decided to blog about it. I’ve been using gasbuddy’s outage map, it appears to rely on humanoids reporting if a gas station has gas available, but it’s pretty naive about accepting devious human input as being all truthy. For instance, I ran a test and it let me as a devious unauthenticated anonymous user report that a station 10 miles away had gas. With the current outage and panic, the gas station I changed was fairly quickly changed back to reporting no gas as soon as someone who showed up at the station reported the station was in fact sold out.  What they should do is only accept as valid a authenticated user (in theory we cheat/lie less when we aren’t anonymous), and only accept a users update from a cell phone w...

 I’ve tried growing carrots a few times, with measley meager results. By the time they get going, the summer is pretty much done. It’s annoying (in a first world problem sort of way) to be buying carrots at the store/market/farm stand all summer because mine in the garden are so pitiful.  I read about a method that seemed so weird and bizarre, I just had to try it. I lay out sheets of paper towels, wet them down and sprinkle seeds on them. I lay wet paper towels over the seeds, layer between wet cardboard, then shove them in a garbage bag. In 10-14 days,  check to see if they’ve sprouted. Once they sprout, lay the paper towels out on a prepped garden bed, cover with a little soil and they grow… in theory This method has the added benefit of being able to more evenly spread out seeds, so no thinning needed.  I tried it with brown paper dividers this year, so my layers are cardboard divider, then paper towel, then seeds, then brown paper bag. I found a local heirloom s...