A good tool can be something you take pride in, a pleasure to use and allow you to create/repair/maintain things of importance to you.
Have you ever used a rock instead of a hammer? Or maybe a dull saw, ax or drill bit? a short shovel? They end up being frustrating, slow and sometimes even dangerous.
I've been thinking about how people who live on farms develop tools as opposed to how people who live in a the world of big business develop tools.
This is a picture from the U.S. Forest Service of a, beaver slide, a tool used for stacking hay in Montana's Big Hole Valley.
A hundred years ago two farmers came up with this design. Why?
Because it worked better than raking hay into stacks by hand, it was expedient, it used the materials they had available...but most of all because it worked better than what they had done previously.
In the world of farming a tool is developed to fit a particular job. If you visit small farms you will see a variety of unique tools that farmers have built. or bought, to do a particular job. Why?
Because it worked better than whatever they were doing before.
You see the same thing in a good workshop and small businesses. One of my brother's in law was in the shim manufacturing business for awhile. He bought the shop from an old gentleman who had started it. Both the original owner and my brother in law after him created a number of specialized practical tools starting with the original electrical/mechanical and moving into computer controlled cutting/forming machines. He branched out from shims, wooden toys, to wooden toilet seats, interior of car doors and pallets. It was a profitable enterprise that I think ended up employing around 50 people before he "retired" to go back to flying.
On the other hand if you visit the Corporate world you will sometimes see a variety of *tools that don't work, don't fit the task they were intended for or don't have a task associated with them.
I will use *tools in a generic sense to mean; computers, computer applications/software and processes to perform jobs.
In big business there is an internal and external business of creating and selling tools. One of the differences between a business tool and a workshop or farm tool is that the people developing business tools often have never used previous tools used to complete the task, or have no direct knowledge of the task. Not always the case but not unusual either. Another difference is that it's sometimes (maybe often) hard to describe or understand the purpose of a tool in a business world. If I came to your farm and said here's a tool that will bale hay we both know what that means. If I come to your big business (or already work there) and tell you I have a tool that will help perform a task that no one, or at least no one person, understands that's a horse of a different color.
You might be amazed to know the time and money a big business would spend on a tool that is less efficient than the tool that was used before, or for a tool that has no use at all. A good Powerpoint presentation and some smooth talking can go a long way baby. Who knows maybe you could even learn to play a musical instrument using the "think system" like in The Music Man (1962)?
In a big business it's possible to hide in-efficiencies for a matter of time, or in the case of defense/government contract work maybe indefinitely. The end result is people conform their work to fit the tool rather than picking the best (most efficient) tool for the job. On the plus side whoever sold/developed the tool has a job and in some cases may be making a ton of moolah. At an individual level one still has the ability to create their own little personal beaver slide or whatever it may be to make their job more efficient/enjoyable.
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I got a Canon A310 camera yesterday. It's not an expensive model, but it so far it seems to do the things I need. The Canon is 3.2 megapixals (since that seems to be the spec most people talk about with digital cameras).
Whatever tool you get it seems like you need to decide on the use. For me I like to take mostly snapshot type photos and would like to have them in the 30 to 50 or at least less than 100 KByte range for ease of use on email or webpages.
For an example I took this picture of some hydrangeas with a higher resolution setting.
It's detailed picture but it uses about 5 times the amount of memory I would think practical for email/web use since it's over 500 KBytes or 1/2 MByte. You could fit two of these on a 3.5 inch floppy. On the other hand you could store 1200 of these resolution/size pictures on a CD...and a bazillion or so on a DVD. So I guess it all depends.
Here's a page All About Hydrangeas in case you want to read a little more about them.
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Next time I start planting flowers or shrubs/trees I hope to plan ahead a little better. A lot of times an amateur like me will take plants/shrubs/trees/bushes and plant them where they look good to based on their current size. A 12 inch camellia looks fine next to the fence until after a decade or so it becomes a 12 foot camellia.
I just planted a few new plants in the corner of our yard. One is a Russian Sage which I learned was perennial of the year in 1995. I also learned it grows to be about 4 foot by 5 and likes a lot of room, so I might have crowded it a little. It can be propagated by cuttings and is hardy down to -30 F, plus it's drought resistant. I think I can grow one of those. Sort of like planting a sagebrush in your yard in Eastern Montana.
That reminds me of a little story about the Burpee Seed Catalogue. Always liked looking at that when it came. Thinking about the strawberries, watermelons, flowers and all the nice descriptions of how gigantic, beautiful, juicy and delicious things were. One year, while we were living in Montana, we ordered enough seeds/plants from Burpee to get a "free" gift. I couldn't wait to see what our free gift was. We all got a bit of a laugh when we opened the package and found Burpee had sent us a free yucca plant, since they grew like weeds among the sagebrush in our front yard.
There's a picture of the type of yucca I was thinking of here Agavaceae - Yucca Family.
Here's a link to the perennial of the year for 2003, a Shasta Daisy 2003 Perennial Plant of the Year.
Next time....though, I'm going to read about how big a plant gets and try to place it appropriately. It would be smart to make a garden plan/sketch. Maybe in my next life I'll be smart.
My great-grandfather was a gardener, by profession, in Norway. I'm not sure if he worked for a private family or the government. I'll have to ask my Aunt and see if she remembers. I don't think I inherited much of his green thumb though. Luckily my wife is a good gardener, and I can grow some things pretty good. I love Sweet Pea (flowers) and Cosmos and they are easy to grow.
The Bozeman Sweet Pea Festival is a fun event if you happen to be in the area. There's some info and a cool cover page you could print on a color printer if you were so inclined here Sweet Pea 2004 Schedule of Events & Map of Lindley Park.
We've filled in some of our beds with grass because it was too much work (even in our small yard) to weed and keep up the flowers. The lady that owned this house before we did must have been a tremendous gardener, she had compost bins, and the soil in the beds was amazingly fertile. We grew some sunflowers that were huge and some really nice cosmos thanks to her work and that rich soil. I think now that the kids are getting older and we have more free time it might be fun to get some more plantings going. We do a lot of pot/container planting now (no weeding). I'm not much of a hand weeder. Give me a hoe, or a rototiller or some chemicals.
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Besides a lot of nice growing things in this part of the world I like this picture of a Northwest picture of some clamdiggers that my wife got me for my birthday one year.
For my money a razor clam is about one of the best things there is to eat. Hard to dig them up and the season is short, but great texture and taste. Regular clams can be pretty easy to dig. When I first came out here we went on a fishing boat with a friend of a friend. It was a 52 foot purse seiner and he had put a cabin on the very top part of it for better pilot visibility and wanted to try it out. Plus he wanted to take his wife and some friends on a few day tour of the San Juans. We got to go through Deception Pass in that boat (much more exciting than skimming through it in a power boat).
The main thing was though we stopped on some remote beaches and dug 2 or 3 five gallon buckets of clams. We ended up eating clams for breakfast, lunch and dinner all three days and I couldn't even think about a clam for a few years.
I heard on the radio this morning that some guy is attempting to start a commercial growing operation for geoducks. Now there's a clam for you...Geoducks. He was saying they pay 1000 dollars for a plate of them in China?
I'm guessing geoducks are considered some form of aphrodisiac. Some others are mentioned here SALON Departments: The Moveable Feast. I used to work with a Korean guy and that was a big joke for us. Everytime we or he mentioned some weird food item he'd say, "Oh that's an aphrodisiac." He told me they ate live tiny octopus. They would stick to your throat and then you'd take a quick swig of hot sauce to knock em down. That was the story anyway.
Kind of reminds me of the woman who told me she was in China and they served her some odd insect dish (like they all wouldn't be odd I guess). Anyway she was saying it was because she was the honored guest. I can't help but wonder if sometimes it isn't, "let's see if we can get this tourist to eat a pile of dried grasshoppers...we can tell him/her it's an honor." Reminds me of the time in Singapore my dinner hosts saved the eyeball of the fish for me. It wasn't bad. Kind of chewy.
Probably an aphrodisiac.
Have a good Thursday.
