Category Archives: Miscellany

Balcony Garden: Day 0

Ever since I moved into an apartment with a balcony last summer, I’ve been itching to put a container garden out there.  But last year the growing season was already well underway, so I’ve had to wait impatiently all through the fall, winter, and spring until the danger of frost is gone.

Now.  Now is the time.

From the PBS plant sale I picked up two tomatoes (a cherry and a Roma), two bell pepper plants, one basil, and a hosta.  I there are also some lettuce seeds and a pair of mots who you’ve already met.  The mots are going outside for the season.

From the left: the basil and the bell pepper plants, the tomatoes

From the left: Mot 1, lettuce seeds, Mot 2, hosta, Mot 3

This is an east-facing balcony, so it’s iffy whether the tomatoes will make any fruits.  We will have to wait and see.

Paying for an Online Newspaper – Follow-Up

One of the most fascinating things about getting Freshly Pressed the other week was all the comments people left about the New York Times digital paywall.  They ranged from “I can’t afford the subscription fee” to “Guys?  It’s actually pretty easy to get around the page view limit” to “I happily subscribe because we need to support newspapers.”

There were a lot of people who were willing to pay for the Times even though they could have hacked it.

I wonder if it is valid to compare the New York Times’s business model to Netflix and iTunes.  I know that it’s really easy to steal movies and music over the Internet (and I don’t want to go there), but these two sites make it convenient to pay real money for them.  What are peoples’ motivations for choosing iTunes over the Pirate Bay?  I know mine is that I want to pay money for this stuff, because it’s good.

Also compare the recent phenomenon on Kickstarter.  Kickstarter is a fundraiser site that people can use to raise capital for starting creative projects.  The webcomic Order of the Stick gives away its content for free and keeps itself funded by selling merchandise.  Recently, artist Rich Burlew raised quite a lot of money on Kickstarter because fans adored his strip so much that they were dying for the chance to give him money.

Is this an anomaly?  Or is building up the goodwill of your readers the business model of the future?

Mother of Thousands

My little plantie has plantlets!

My plant is a Mother of Thousands (Kalanchoe daigremontiana), which I got as a freebie from the American Society of Plant Biologists meeting last August.  It reproduces asexually by making baby plantlets on the edges of its leaves.  Eventually, the baby plantlets will fall off and form new plants that are genetically identical to the original Mother of Thousands.

Freshly Pressed

Wow, WordPress, I’m honored.

Yesterday, Paying for an Online Newspaper got Freshly Pressed, and it turns out a lot of people have an opinion about paying for the New York Times.  I’m happy to see so many people in the camp of “their news is so good, I want to support them.”  This bodes well for the future of journalism.

Thank you everybody for checking Steam Trains and Ghosts out!  You can expect more rantings and ravings of a mad scientist-in-training in the future.

Paying for an Online Newspaper

I finally caved and bought a New York Times digital subscription.

Remember the furor when the Times went to a subscription model for its website about a year ago?  No newspaper had ever successfully restricted their online content like this, because people wanted it free.  Living on a grad student stipend, I didn’t want to pay for it either, so I limped along on my 20 free articles a month.  Now the Times has announced that they’re reducing the monthly free articles from 20 to 10, and you know what?  I want that news.  The New York Times has some of the best news on the Internet, and I’m willing to pay for their world-class editorial board and analysis.

Which brings me to a couple of hypotheses.  First, that the Internet is getting more mature and people are figuring out how to make a business out of it.  Second, that people are willing to pay for the really good content online.

It’ll be interesting to see how decreasing the free articles to 10 plays out for the Times.