However, we found that other creatures enjoyed this patch of ground as well. We noticed dawn raiders in the form of cute rabbits wandering about, and realized a garden full of fresh lettuce and carrots would be seen as their personal salad bar. And our own cats decided the ground made for a giant easy to use litter box.

So, once more to Home Depot, and I returned home with some “rabbit fence”. This is a wire type fence about 28” high. I attached some boards to the garden box, and stapled the fence to the boards. A couple of simple gates, made wheelbarrow wide, completed the mini farm.

So now our future salads are well protected from four legged interlopers. With marigolds at the corners to help keep the bugs at bay, the ground has it’s first splash of color and life.

It’s spring here in the Northwest, which means it is raining most of the time, with water pouring off the house and onto the grass I will soon need to mow. So what if we could somehow capture that water and use to water the garden, I thought. And then realized that we modern internet savvy people are, in fact, idiots in comparison to people who lived only a few generations ago.

I began my search for a barrel on the internet. It’s interesting to consider sometimes how we lived before this rather bizarre invention. I can remember telling people in the mid 90’s of how, one day, they would see internet addresses on the side of UPS trucks. They scoffed. My prescience did me no good, at least financially, but at least I can sip some tea and feel smug for a moment.

I found many professionally made plastic barrels with spigots, all at rather high prices for something I see as being very simple. And when you add shipping, it gets a bit crazy. So, I thought again, what if I make my own? Self-sufficiency… such thoughts are frowned on in this age of experts, professionals, and licenses.

I discovered that bottling companies purchase large quantities of fluids in food-safe 55 gallon (and even larger) containers. They often throw these containers away, or sell them for very low prices. The nearest source was over 2 hours away, however, and I’m rather lazy about driving that far for a big piece of plastic.

A few days later, while wandering the local hardware store looking for some bit for the house, I overheard someone talking about “barrels, like you can use to collect water…” and followed the sounds to discover a dozen or so blue 55 gallon drums out back for sale at $20 a piece. I managed to stuff 2 in the car, and trundled home with a happy grin. Buddha provides.

Next, I drilled two 1 inche holes, one a few inches from the bottom, one a few inches from the top, slightly offset. The top hole is for overflow, the bottom I attached a $2 brass spigot from Home Depot. They offset is so the overflow doesn’t dribble on the faucet. I then just drilled many tiny holes in the steel cover, redirected the downspout to the top of the barrel and voila. The most difficult part was getting the whole thing reasonably level.

After about 36 hours of Northwest drizzle and spritz, I had I a full barrel of nice free water. It won’t be enough to water the garden all summer of course – I’m not raising cactus after all. But anything that lowers the bills without much money or effort is well worth doing.

First came the winter storms full of large amounts of snow, ice, snow, rain and more snow. We had a grand total of about 20 inches of snow here in the South Puget Sound area of Washington state. This was highly unusual and broke all records. And it was very cold on top of that, which made for some miserable snow shoveling episodes.

To add to the fun, since this was so unusual for the area, there was virtually nothing effective done to clear to the roads. For several days, the roads were solid ice, except for the areas where the ice had broken forming pot holes. Driving on this excuse for a road surface was an exercise in skill, luck, and probably stupidity. Better to stay home and wait it out. But taking pictures of the beautiful scenes was a must.

After a few weeks of this winter wonderland, the temperature rose and the snow began to melt. All seemed well. Until too much melting started to happen in the mountains. Several feet of snow had fallen, and now it was melting and pouring into many of the rivers in the area, which began to rise at an alarming rate. This coincided with the jetstream pointing a firehose of rain in our direction. So, for the second time in a little over a year, we had another 500 year flood.

Most of the interstates, and small roads were closed in this part of the state. Getting to work was again an exciting adventure, best avoided for those with brains and a cable modem. However, even the damaging floods had their own particular beauty.

Eventually, the rains abated, the waters receded, and life is again returning to normal. But someone said that things like this come in threes. So I watch the skies, and listen to the trees, wondering what fun nature has in store for our little part of the world. Whatever it is, I’m sure it will be filled with beauty, wonder, and maybe some more excitement.

Someone had been taking census information, and modeling the data in RDF.  But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Some estimate there are over 30 billion web pages on the internet.  One of the problems with all this information is that most of it is incomprehensible to a computer.  Not in regards to how to present the data, but in regards to what the data means, and how it relates to other data.

This brings us to the idea of a Semantic Web.  This won’t create artificial intelligence, but will allow computers to manipulate the available information for useful ends.  The idea is to relate and use data regardless of what application creates or maintains that data.

Take for example a simple culvert under a road.  One group may install the culvert, another inspects it for safety, another group cleans it, and yet another samples the water flowing through it to check for pollutants.  Each group may use a different software application, even a different database format.  But it would be quite useful to link all these facts to the original real world object.

So along comes the Resource Description Framework or RDF.  RDF is about representing knowledge in a distributed world.  The basic unit in RDF is something called a Triple.  It’s composed of a subject, predicate and object.   You can think of a Triple as a sentence.  The sentence has a thing being described (a web page for example), a specific property (the subject on the page), and the value (which might be tamales.  Mmmm…tamales).

While this seems simple, making it machine readable is the real purpose behind RDF.

RDF can be represented in many ways, with XML being just one of those representations.

And finally, we come to our final new term for the day - SPARQL (pronounced “sparkle”.)   SPARQL  is a quirky kind of SQL used to query RDF information stores.  As long as you’re familiar with SQL of any sort, SPARQL should make prefect sense.

RDF isn’t perfect, and doesn’t solve every problem.  But web searches of the future will need to be more intelligent, and meaningful.  With the proliferation of web sites, massive databases both governmental and private, and everyone under the sun adding content galore, we’ll need better ways to make sense of it all.  Perhaps RDF or it’s progeny will be the answer, perhaps not.

So, while looking for one thing, I found something else far more interesting, and potentially more useful.  Maybe tomorrow I’ll start looking for that Census data model.  Or maybe I’ll look up tamale recipes.  Who can say where the web will take them next.

Now, aside from the fact that someone really needs to build a big OFF switch on the outside of the holodeck, or at least have it fused somewhere in the basement, the episode did have a thought provoking ending, in a Matrixy sort of fashion.   Picard surmises that perhaps they too are living in an artificial construct of a world, perhaps even running as a simulation on a box sitting on someone’s desk.

Later in the nineties, a movie came out by the name of The Thireenth Floor, which took this idea a bit further.  Enterprising techno geeks have created a simulation of 1930’s Los Angeles,  where they pop in and out of having numerous adventures.  (If you haven’t seen the movie, spoiler ahead here).  In the end, the hero learns that he is in fact a simulation as well, created by uber geeks from the 21st century.  A simulation running in a simulation.  And who knows how many shells there are.

So that brings us to 21st century now, where a team of a physicist and computer scientist have created a simulation of the United States.  So far, they “only” have about 100 million residents modeled.  Each “synthetic American” has a modest 163 variables assigned to them.  They are currently using the simulation to analyze the spread of disease or fads - I’m not sure what the difference between the two is actually - and hope to have all 300 million of us in there in the next six months.

Now, I’m sure they don’t have any fancy brain-to-computer interfaces just yet, but it does make one imagine a time when we can “jack in” to alternate realities of our own creation.  Already, people get lost in on line gaming, such as World of Warcraft, EVE OnLine, and alternate lives such as Second Life.  As these simulations become more and more realistic, many people will become lost, and may even forget their “true” selves, sitting on their comfy couches, until the cable company cuts of their broadband access.

And such visions of what is possible do make one wonder, if we are not in fact a simulation, running on some super computer in some kid’s room.  I just hope he remembers to pay the cable bill.