The idea of a tiller is pretty easy to understand: a gasoline-powered engine moves blades that chop up the ground underneath them.    Actually operating a tiller, especially when you’ve been sitting on your butt all Winter, isn’t quite so easy.   It’s like trying to ride a bucking bronco.  It’s jumping all over the place and you’re holding on for dear life and hoping to keep it moving in a straight line.   Depending on how you’ve set up the tiller it might also bite deep into the ground and that presents it’s own problems because trying to get the heavy tiller up and out of the hole it dug itself deeply into can be an even bigger challenge than keeping it moving in a straight line.

But back to the hands.  They started aching like mad because I had to keep holding up a lever to keep the blades moving…and do it for 2 hours.  They’re just not used to that sort of work right now.  I had to sign something soon after finishing the tilling and could barely control the pen that I was using to sign the papers.  Of course now, twelve hours later, the rest of my upper body is one large ache.  I haven’t used these muscles in a long time apparently because I feel every one of them now.

I’ll take it though.  It was a fantastic day and I was able to get a nice head start on the garden this year.   Pleasurable aches if there ever were any.

I haven’t started the planning as of yet except for one thing: I’m planning on not double digging the garden by hand this year.   It just takes too damned long and I’m not convinced it helped as much as “How to Grow More Vegetables” said it would.  My average yields have been fantastic regardless of the method of soil preparation.  So this year I’m planning on tilling again to save time.   I can’t say it will save my back or save in hard labor as those big tillers are a real wild ride but it certainly will save me a lot of time.

All of the other planning is going to start happening very soon though.  Need to get those seeds ordered….

The seed catalogs have started streaming in and given the near subzero temperatures we’ve had the last several days I’m really starting to look forward to the return of the warm weather and the chance to get my vegetable garden going.

In rendering HTML output JasperReports inserts various anchor tags of the form:

<a name="JR_PAGE_ANCHOR_0_1">

It doesn’t use these with href attributes but it does use them for some purpose.

Our global CSS file indicates that anything that is inside an anchor tag should be underlined.  This would make sense assuming that anchors are used for links (a pretty good assumption).    We also use the Dojo JavaScript framework and the Dijit ContentPane widget allows using the ContentPane (normally used with a DIV) to show external content.   That external content can be “scrubbed” to allow it to play in a nicer fashion with the overall site design.  That is where the problem occurs.

The scrubbing of the content coming in to the DIV, to filter out things like styles, TITLEs, and other tags, is where IE seems to have issues.  Those anchor tags mentioned previously, and which look fine in IE when previewing a report inside of the iReport designer, now all have text inside them underlined.   The quick fix, or so I thought, was to remove the A tag from our global CSS file.  That fixes things until someone hovers over any text at which point another CSS rule comes in to play for a:hover and all text is again underlined.    Probably time for another CSS tweak…

Seriously.  I’ve been trying to research some Weblogic 9.2 issues I’ve been dealing with and Google results return a lot of hits to the BEA forums.  Clicking on one of those links brings you to the Oracle forums….at the top level of the forums.   It would appear that those postings were never moved.  Again I understand this given the difficulty of moving from one system to another but they should have kept the old system in place for those of us who need to get answers for our Weblogic problems.

The odd thing is that Oracle kept the BEA edocs site in place with the same URL.  Why didn’t they do the same thing with the forums?

Update:

Thanks to Justin for pointing me to the read-only forums.  They are located at the following url:  http://forums.oracle.com/forums/category.jspa?categoryID=202

They still don’t have them at the original URL so that a Google search will bring up the posts but at least they have the data available.

Last year we had a pretty successful garden and I’m ready at this point to start again.    Looking through the seed catalogs is driving me nuts.  I’m deciding on what to plant, where to plant it, and when.    The one thing I can’t do is actually plant anything    I do have plans to start seed indoors again this year.   It was a successful experiment last year and I learned a thing or two (like: don’t water from the top unless you want lots of fuzz and fungus.  not a good thing to be sure).

There really is nothing like a fresh green bean.  And damn it my mouth is almost watering thinking about them.  But it seems so far off….

Today I went out and bought some Bobbex-R to spray on the corn in the hopes that it will keep the critters away. The stuff certainly isn’t cheap so I hope it does work. By the smell I’m sure it will

• Silver King Hybrid white sweet corn
• Incredible Hybrid yellow sweet corn
• Seneca Dancer Hybrid bicolor sweet corn

We also planted three different kinds of beans from Cooks Garden:

• Emerite pole beans
• Royal Burgundy Bush beans
• Filet Nickel bush beans

I also planted the Cook’s Custom carrot blend and yellow sweet spanish hybrid onions from Vermont Bean Seed.

Thats it for the garden this year. I’ve had enough planting fun for one year