technonaturalist

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What’s been happening at Wannabe Farmstead? Feels like a lot. I was out with the dogs at the oval when it occurred to me:

• I can sort out and adjust training “schedules” in my head fast from observing the dogs while working with them
• I can work out learning styles and interests of the kids from observation and interaction and work out where to go and things to do that they might find interesting
• I can work around family stuff with minimal dramas
• I can do things for clients on time (provided they get me what I need when I say I need it by)
• I cannot organise my own way out of a paper bag

I should probably do something about that last point.

1. when you have autonomous big kids who can set themselves up, poke head in every so often
2. make sure they know that the glass jar the brushes stand in is the paintbrush rinsing jar and that they shouldn’t use drinking glasses
3. ditto palettes, so they don’t substitute food bowls
4. choose non-toxic paints in case the above happens
5. never leave toddlers unattended. Ever.

All post clean-up. The projects are stuck fast to the table due to having been quite wet. The toddler had spread paint all over the table and was happily gooping it around. Was contemplating getting a photo but opted to not have him tracking paint around the house as we were heading out.

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The conclusion to the sorry chicken saga.

Where to begin. Can’t begin at the beginning, that’s already been done. See above. So, let’s find a point in the middle to start. Firstly, after Tempest’s last two chicks (the yellow one she’d hatched and the small Australorp she adopted) died, we worked out it was those bloody fleas. The adults weren’t so badly affected by all appearances, though the eggs were fewer and further between, so maybe they were affected. We seem to have bathed the heads of the other chicks in olive oil in time to prevent an outbreak of chick killing proportions. JJ also put some concrete slabs under the roost, as apparently this helps break their life cycle or something. We like to go with naturalish preventative measures and remedies as much as possible for everything, saving The Big Chemical Guns for when there is a situation that warrants it. This was one of those situations.

Came across a problem someone else on Drupal dubbed “ghost field” in one of the issue queues. My issue with ghost fields came about while setting up Profile2 to use in my profile (strangely), but the problem happens in other modules as well.

The problem

1. create a profile type (or modify the main one)
2. add a field
3. delete the field (I don’t recall seeing any difference between saving data in the field or not)
4. try to add a new field with the same name, get an error saying the field name is already in use, but it doesn’t appear in the “Add existing field” list

The solution

1. manually edit the database. I use phpmyadmin. Whatever works
2. find the tables field_config and field_config_instance, browse them and delete all incidences of the “ghost fields”
3. fields can now be recreated

After deleting the ghost field instances the php fatal error and associated debug messages I’d been having trouble tracking the source of (Entity was getting blamed) disappeared, quite conveniently.

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There was much excitement and trepidation at Wannabe when Chess, our bossy little evil Pekin bantam went broody, and amusement when the more demure Tempest decided that she, too, would also like to hatch some eggs.

We were pretty thrilled to have broodies, as one of our long term plans was to increase our flock naturally, including letting the broodies raise their chicklets, and bring in new blood every so often to prevent too much inbreeding. This idea has since expanded to JJ planning on developing his own chicken breed.

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It’s the hottest driest summer ever in Australia (except in Queensland and northern WA where they’re experiencing floods, and meanwhile in Europe where they’re having longest coldest winters with craziest snowfall). Here in Perth most of our rain happens in winter with drips and drabs here and there in late autumn and early spring. We don’t usually get rain in summer. The last few days I’ve felt quite at home while a large number of my friends have been complaining of the oppressive, stifling, terrible humidity.

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When my little big boy and his agemates hit kindy age (normal 4 year old kindy), I commented to a long time friend from back when Southies (better known now as Perth Natural Learning Network, website in the works and there is a Facebook group

) first started up sometime near the beginning of 2007 that their social life had suddenly exploded with everyone’s kids having birthday parties and playdates and whatnot. She quite enthusiastically said yeh, she loved it. I also find it enjoyable, though at the time for me it was more of a conscious noting of the fact that I had a child that was getting towards the stage of “big” (ie school aged) kid. I was slowly but surely moving out of the realm of “mum of babies and toddlers” and into “mum of big kids” land.

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Mostly for family, as I mentioned in the last post we’re usually with one of our families at Christmas time. This year is a rare occurrence, the last time it happened was almost 6 years ago when I, at the end of gestating 5yo, decided flat out that I was not going anywhere.

Firstly, let it be known that we have no Christmas tree (though I am seriously contemplating one of these Fruut trees). My family, who love their Christmas trees, may or may not be aghast to discover this was the best I could do:

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The lovely Ursula (also known as SulaMoon) over at deviantART gave me and another friend of hers pearwood a dragon for Christmas.

I think it’s agonisingly cute. Ursula is an amazing artist.

Just on the subject of Christmas critters, I did a whole blog post on my Christmas present but that was wiped when my host got itself taken out.

So. the provider I’m using for my reseller account got itself taken out by a zero day exploit, which apparently wiped out their main drive and most of their backup drive.

My possibly incorrect interpretation of the email they sent out suggests that the attack was just on the one server. I’m wondering if they were silly enough to have the backup drive in the same machine or if they were just unlucky enough to have triggered the attack or had it running while doing a backup.