2026, Computers, crops, Farming Update, Nature, pets, Uncategorized, Weather

DIGGIN’ IN

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This week’s farming update from Ben

HAPPY VALENTINES DAY.

How about this weather! 

Way too warm for February. But the chickens sure enjoying having some grass and sunshine. The dogs, too. And if we can get rid of some of the ice between the house and shed, maybe Luna will chase the ball over that way instead of standing here watching it go. 

I’m thinking I’ll use the tractor loader and try to move some of the piles of snow and gravel from the grass back onto the the road. Although I’m pretty sure we’ll get some more snow this winter. I mean, it’s only February. We just never know anymore. 

At the college I had to create a new computer password. The muscle memory has not formed yet and it takes me four tries to log in.

At the local school district, their passwords have to be 15 characters plus all the special stuff. Seems like sometime last summer I couldn’t get logged into email and I kinda forgot about it. I don’t get that much email on that account so it didn’t really matter. Every now and then I’d try to log into a computer and get frustrated and just give up on it. Eventually I got around to trying to get the password reset. I can’t do that from home, it has to be on a district computer. So I tried that, and it still didn’t work. I talked to my boss who had me contact IT. That guy looked me up in the system and said “Huh!”. Hate it when people say that in regard to me… He said I wasn’t in the system and eventually sent me to HR. HR said I wasn’t assigned to a department and therefore, I ceased to exist. Well, I beg to differ! I use to exist. Yep, they knew that, but I don’t anymore. So it was a whole thing to start over and get back in the system. I got a new ID badge complete with a photo of my choosing from my phone, because the lady in HR readily admitted their camera takes lousy photos. So that was nice. 

Another guy in the room said he hadn’t seen an ID badge as old as mine in a long time. I was two versions behind. Huh!

A while ago.

So now I’m able to log in, using a password that’s a practically a short sentence. And no way to see it as you type (they’ve had some security issues in the past).  I check my email more often and I get a lot more emails too. Be careful what you wish for. 

This weekend is the 60th Annual National Farm Machinery show in Louisville KY. 

https://farmmachineryshow.org

It’s the largest indoor farm show in the world, with over 900 booths on “27 acres of interconnected indoor exhibit space”. Admission is free if you’d like to pop in. Expect to be overwhelmed. Many of the YouTube farmers I watch are there. Of course this has all the newest big shiny equipment on display. Oh, there’s a few older tractors for show, but this is the place to show off the latest and greatest. 

I spent a couple hours Friday in a meeting at the local Soil and Water Conservation office meeting with Angela and Jenna. After clearing all the tree’s and reshaping the waterway two years ago, I learned I really should have talked to them first. So last year Angela and I looked at a few areas of the farm and she put together a plan to stop the erosion and repair this gully in the pasture. 

Another project in the works

At the top, a small dam would be built, about 4 feet tall and 150 feet long. An upright pipe would be installed at the front with a drainage line running about 50’ downhill. That structure would collect the water funneling into this area, slow it down, and release it over several hours. That in turn, would prevent the erosion happening further downhill. At the bottom, the gully would be filled in, the area re-shaped, and a proper waterway built. There are some springs down there which would be directed into the new waterway once fully seeded and established. 

Because our farm is in the Zumbro Valley Watershed area, cost sharing would bring our actual cost down to about 10% of the total. Well that sounds like a plan! 

I also asked about a program called RCPP. Regional Conservation Partnership Program. I heard about this program last week at the soil health meeting. I have part of one field edge that has a pretty good slope too it, and every spring I get a small gully along the edge. The edge of a field where a person turns for the next pass, those areas are called headlands. I’ve tried to create a berm to keep the rainwater off the headland rows, but every spring I get a new gully. The RCPP program would do some cost sharing to create a permanent grass area there so rather than working up the ground of the headlands, I’d be turning on the grassy area. 

And since the office is having their annual tree and shrub sale, Kelly and I were discussing where we could plant some trees. One thing we thought was to plant a wind break where we put the snow fence. Guess what? Cost sharing for that too! It was a very good meeting! 

Check out the spurs on this rooster. 

You’ll poke your eye out with those things!

He is one of the roosters who’s kind of a bully to the hens. He’s pretty though. And isn’t that the way? All looks, no class. 

Last weekend I got the new shop exhaust fan wired up, and I put a new gasket under one toilet this week (a project I put off for two months because I’d never done it before and I had some concerns.) In the end, I spent more time cleaning off the old wax gasket and cleaning the floor around the toilet than the actual repair took. This weekend I’ll be changing the kitchen faucet spray wand and tubing. This is the fourth one I’ve ordered. The first three were wrong. Now we’re changing the hose as well. Kudo’s to Moen and their lifetime warranty for admitting their mistake and shipping parts to me no charge. 

WHAT WAS YOUR CHILDHOOD PHONE NUMBER?

WHAT WAS THE FIRST THING FOR WHICH YOU NEEDED A PASSWORD?

61 thoughts on “DIGGIN’ IN”

    1. For some of the really early online stuff one had to rewrite a couple of lines of code in the PC operating system. Then, using your dial-up modem, you could connect with “Gopher”, which originated at the University of Minnesota by specifying a terminal emulation, which if I recall was VT100.
      I don’t think there was a password involved, though, because the Gopher material was read only, at least to the casual user.

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    2. We still use our AOL account quite often. Man, all the displays they had around stores and all the floppy disks…
      And just yesterday I found a bag with an old modem in it. I remember starting at 14.4, and then 28.8 and then we made the big jump 56k!

      One winter morning, Kelly and the kids left for work, I got on the computer, and she got stuck in the snow on our driveway. I had the phone line tied up for half an hour. She was not real pleased.

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        3. they were the first music sharing olatform. they were declared illeagal but kept doing it anyway in defiance. they didnt own the right to share any music but allowed you to download it onto your computer and then onto cd assuming you didnt have free space on you computer for an extra 20 or 30 albums

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  4. TUxedo 8 2002
    my computer that required dos to be typed in. i cant rember the dos commands but they got you where you wanted to go.
    i had someone at a how to do stuff on your computer meeting show me that if you chose 4 numbers and an ending like &5 ans simply changed the starting 2 letters to represent the app you were accessing you could have a different password for everything but you could remember
    gmail gm, facebook fb etc…
    still use it.
    15 numbers and characters is nuts though. it is a different breed of cat. their brains work funny.

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  6. Rise and Shine, Baboons,

    LeMars6-4771, then soon after 546-4771. The system in 1960 was the name of each town in the county, a number, then the house number. This was a real step up from the party lines available in the country. Grandma’s party line ring was two shorts and a long. We had to know that so we knew when the ring was for her. If you answered the wrong riing pattern, then the person had to call back. It was pretty obnoxious because there were 5 or 6 families on a rural party line. If someone was not answering the phone rang and rang, you could not pick up, and it just rang forever. The phone rang in all houses on the party line, so it was just constant.

    I do not remember the first password, but it was probably at a job. I remember an IT guy explaining what a password was, maybe in 1998 or so. But surely I had some simple passwords before that. I just looked at him blankly. So he asked the name of our cat and how many cats we had. So the first password was Felini1. (Do not worry. This is a password I never use). I appreciate the fingerprints or facial recognition that now supersede a password.

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    1. I remember once, in a conversation about passwords and how difficult it was to keep coming up with new ones, comedian Paula Poundstone remarked, “Why do you think I have so many cats?”

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  8. 929-0193. First -word was probably for my AOL account back in the early 1990s. No idea what it was.

    I’ll posit that combination locks on school lockers were defacto passwords back in the day. I tried to remember one of my locker passwords from jr. or sr. high, but can’t. For some reason numbers like (L)36- (R) 24- (L)36 keep popping into my head. I think I had a combination that was similar to those numbers. And that was back in the day when measuring a woman’s “beauty” for adolescent boys was literally the woman’s body measurement.

    The nice thing about combination locks was you never had some anonymous virtual person on a website telling you it was time to change your password just because they said so. 😦

    Chris in Owatonna
    (Glad there are apps like LastPass that simplify passwords to a degree)

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    1. Your comment brought a recollection that my high school student ID number was 61340. In other circumstances I doubt I would have even remembered we had ID numbers in high school. Funny how memory works sometimes.

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  9. We had two different phone numbers – the change happened when I was in junior high – but since I use the last four digits of each as PINs for several accounts I will not list them here. My first password was probably for my first email account but I don’t remember what it was. And I really have no clue what my school locker combination was. I had a hard enough time remembering it when I was in school.

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  11. Mom and dad said because we were the only farm out here, we didn’t get a party line.
    Home phone was 282-0553

    Odd how some phone numbers stick in our heads.
    282-6153 is still the Farm Service office.
    Learned that 40 years ago. I think it’s the rhythm of the numbers.

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  12. Like K-Two, I won’t divulge those old phone numbers. We had a party line though, and it was annoying. Mrs. Beer talked on the phone a LOT. When it rang, it was usually for her. She was home much of the time, though. I don’t think she had much of a life.

    I had a log-in for the AS400 (DOS) when I first worked for DNR in 1994. I don’t remember exactly what it was, but that was where I was first assigned a user ID. They used a combination of letters from my first and last name that was eight digits long. I made up the password. Passwords were simpler back then. I know the one I had was probably one word, like “grapes.” Or “music.”

    OT: I went to Hopkins Center for the Arts and saw Sierra Hull and The Milk Carton Kids last night. Great show!

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  14. The Dickinson ND public school system was recently scammed out of 4.9 million dollars from the building fund after bad actors accessed the emails of trusted construction vendors. The FBI is involved.

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    2. Last year, the church to which I belong was the victim of a scam that routed about $30,000 to Russia before it was discovered. “What’s gone is gone.” But, an obscure clause in an insurance policy resulted in a payback of $10,000. Other accounting safeguards have also been put into place.

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  15. We didn’t get a telephone until I was thirteen (1956). I don’t recall what our phone number was, but I do recall the number of one of my neighborhood friends – 982921. She lived just a few houses from us. We’re still in contact a couple of times a year via email, and she and my sister have lunch once a month.

    I have no memory of what my first password was (are you kidding me?). I do recall at some point being so irritated by the ever increasing demands for a more complicated – and consequently more secure – ones, that I ended up with “MAjorPAinintheass24/7.”

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  17. The first phone number I remember was the one for the house we moved into when I was about four. It started with Dupont 6. And yes, I do use the final four numbers as PINS and in passwords sometimes, so I’ll keep those private. Later on, the home phone number after a move was Dupont 6 5989.

    I was first asked to create a password for a work e-mail account in about 1986 or so. It was six letters, all lower case. I chose it by testing out how easy it was to type in quickly, with the letters kind of close together.

    Once in those early years, we had an employee who was on leave and I had to ask her for a password to her e-mail because there was an urgent need for something that had been sent to her. Over the phone, she told me her password was phlegm. She said she thought if anyone was trying to guess her password they wouldn’t be likely to think of that.

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  18. One account I used to have required a sixteen character password. I used Sixteencharacters?! – which was more characters than I really needed, but it required a “special” character and I decided to throw in two of those.

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  20. I’m terrible remembering most of my passwords because I don’t have to use them on a regular basis. Even my padlock that I keep on my gym bag is problematic (I now have that code listed on a post-it note on my phone).

    I can, however, remember my 14-digit library account number. And I can remember my license plate thanks to PJ (she recommended the mnenomic for it)!

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    1. I bought a padlock at Axman to put on the locker door at the YMCA. There was a sticker on the back that tells you what the padlock combination is. I left the sticker on. The likelihood that people are looking to steal something is remote. The likelihood that they will turn over all the padlocks to see if the combination is on a sticker on the back is even more remote.

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