Chris von Simson

The musings of Christopher von Simson

Documenting Progress in the Garden: Yikes, Invasive Non-natives

I have decided to start a blog of the garden progress. There are so many details, and I know I’ll just forget them. Tonight I started posting questions on GardenWeb to begin the process of identifying plants which are new to me. Wow there are lots of invasive non-native species I need to control. Oh well, I guess I’m a non-native too…

Where to begin? Photograph, Identify, List, Uproot, Recycle. I’ll have to let Fairfax County do that last part, but thankfully they have some great resources here.

OK, here goes.

Lamium Purpureum, the Purple Dead Nettle (wikipedia)

Acer platanoides, the Norway Maple (wikipedia)

Hedera Helix, the English Ivy (wikipedia)

Vinca Minor, the Dwarf Periwinkle (wikipedia)

This list will grow…

First dictated post in Apple Mountain Lion

Even with my slightly accented English this dictation seems to work pretty well, and with a few minor edits is a great way of being able to dictate more and and get more writing done I guess. 

Harvest Monday

This week saw the de-thatching of the lawn, mowing of said lawn, double-digging a new vegetable bed in heavy clay to two feet deep, moving an existing bed, and cleaning 100 old bricks. My harvest Monday is tiredness and a strong sense of satisfaction :)
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It’s apparently become a tradition among Gardening Bloggers to write a post on Mondays about what they harvested, or are doing with their harvest.

Jeremy’s MicroStrategy Blog. Always worth reading.

Jeremy’s MicroStrategy Blog. Always worth reading.

Seth's Blog: Consumers and creators

The number of consumers is gradually approaching the number of creators, according to Seth. True, but for letters and emails, and some facebook updates and tweets it is already 1:1. Maybe the metric can be updated to talk about the number of channels on which we create: start with pen and paper for letters, then add phone, email, facebook, twitter, and keep going…

Maybe another ratio is frequency of touchpoint, or permission for notification, permission for Home Screen. How close are you to the ideal use scenario of getting checked multiple times per day?

To close: how nice it is to have Seth spurring thought :)

More inspiration from Seth Godin

My current focus as a Product Manager is all about understanding and articulating the use cases. I have my hunches about how a product will be used, for sure, but it is very exciting to know that the next few months will provide real data on how many more people use the product.

Bloom (Disney Remix) (by Pogo

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Got the domain sorted

Well that wasn’t too terrible. Thank goodness for iwantmyname.com and tumblr for making it much easier than it used to be.

Now I just need to come up with interesting stuff to say. :)