Aren Cambre – Page 91 – Aren Cambre's Blog

Crappy Trees

My property is filled with crappy trees.

My back and side yards have 9 sugar hackberry trees, two of which are large. Sugar hackberry trees are horrible urban landscape trees. They have brittle wood that breaks in wind and ice storms, their leaves get galls from a parasite, they are frequent hosts to mistletoe, and they just look bad. These trees would be fine on borders of expansive properties, but they are wholly inappropriate for urban lots.

One of our large hackberries split down the middle during the last storm, so we have to get it removed. Another large hackberry is choked off by vines, and it naturally leans as if it is poised to fall on the house. That one needs to go, too. Since we are spending major bucks on those two trees, we might as well get rid of the remaining, smaller hackberries before they get out of hand. Due to all the electrical wires in the back yard, I have to hire professionals to take care of all these trees.

The previous homeowners planted a silver maple in the front yard near the house. This tree species is about as bad as sugar hackberry trees. They are weak-wooded, and their roots are bad on sidewalks and foundations. This tree would have been fine in the back corner of a lot or on an open field, but 8 feet from the front porch is a horrible place. If that’s not bad enough, the tree was placed so that it blocks much of the view from the front door, and it does not shade the house in a meaningful way.

Hackberry and silver maple trees are so bad, they are among the nine unprotected tree species in the Dallas tree ordinance.

There is an overgrown Carolina laurel cherry shrub in our front landscape. It is about 15-20 feet high. This shrub shades most of the front landscape, making it impossible to grow quality landscape plants. Furthermore, it has a horrible problem pushing up root suckers. No matter how much you pull out these suckers, they come back. You have to rip out whole roots to stop the root suckers.

After the hackberries, maple, and laurel cherry are gone, I will be left with a mature American Elm, a mediocre redbud (it’s bloom is unimpressive, and it looks trashy the rest of the year), a great juniper (currently being choked out by hackberrys), and a craggy pecan.

My Nova turned 250,000

UPDATE (Dec. 21, 2020): That was actually 350,000. I discovered detailed maintenance records after the crash.

My ’74 Nova turned 250,000 yesterday:

Grammar

I am a “grammar god.” What are you? Find out here: http://quizilla.com/users/BaalObsidian/quizzes/How%20grammatically%20sound%20are%20you%3F/

Mizz Jones learnt me reel good in high scool english.

Hidden Messages in Programming Textbooks

Introductory programming courses usually start with an example program called “$g(Hello World).” Hello World uses variables named “foo” and “bar.”

Innocent syllables? Not.

Foo and bar come from $d(FUBAR), an old military term meaning F—– Up Beyond All Repair.

So nearly every intro computer science textbook hurls an expletive at new students.

And now you know the rest of the story.

Geeking at the Gym

I have a Compaq iPAQ 3970 PDA. It was given to me about a year and a half ago by SMU because we were going to write a PDA-based ticket writing software for the SMU police department. I wasn’t going to write the software, but as a web geek I was supposed to provide support and knowledge.

The project never got off the ground.

Now I use the PDA to be my Outlook calendar, contacts, and task list when I am not at the office. It’s incredibly useful for this.

My favorite use is a gym workout tracker. The PDA comes with a scaled down version of the Microsoft Excel spreadsheet program called Pocket Excel. After I use each exercise machine at the gym I jot down the weights I used and how many repetitions I managed into my spreadsheet. (Click on the spreadsheet to see how wimpy I really am.) Over time I will graph my workout results to see if I am improving.