Mostly, I just want to drive the car without having to build it myself. (See, that’s a bad analogy, and an indicator of where my brain is right now.)

Before taking the plunge into some of the more expensive options, I tried MotionX GPS Drive ([iTunes link] / $2.99 plus $24.99/year or $2.99/mo. for turn-by-turn and voice guidance). I like the model because it allows you to pay as you need it from within the app, but the fact that I only get EDGE coverage 90% of the time (living outside AT&T’s 3G coverage in Indiana) made it painfully slow to download maps, and in a test drive across town last night, I took a purposeful wrong turn and drove for a solid 3 minutes after the app announced “Re-routing” and not updating before I restarted the app.

The data issue, coupled with the troublesome delay in re-routing, led me to the conclusion that one of the more expensive solutions with onboard maps was the answer. I studied every app in the App Store, read reviews, read independent reviews on the web, watched demos on YouTube, and talked to a couple people before making my decision this morning. I narrowed my selection to TomTom U.S. ([iTunes link] / $49.99 on sale through 12/28), Navigon MobileNavigator ([iTunes link] / $59.99 until 1/11/2010), and CoPilot Live ([iTunes link] / $19.99 on sale). My first PND was a TomTom One XL, so I was familiar with its positive and negative attributes, and some reviews I’d read expressing concern over out-of-date maps was a strike against it. CoPilot Live’s interface was one of the ugliest I’ve seen, and I ruled it out almost immediately based on that. So this morning, I purchased the Navigon app, since it was the most positively reviewed both on the App Store and other sites I read. Using it to navigate from home to the coffee shop in Indianapolis I use as my remote office was utterly flawless, the voice guidance was clear and easy to understand, and the couple of stops I made along the way off-route were handled immediately and without incident.

I don’t think I’m going to spring for the $24.99 lifetime traffic add-on, because I don’t commute anymore, and Inrix Traffic ([iTunes link] / free) seems good enough for now; I checked it last night around rush hour, and it listed (and mapped) all the reported traffic accidents, congestion, and construction around Indianapolis that I could incorporate into my drive if necessary.

Navigon appears to update the app frequently, which might make for a painful download when they do because the maps are contained within the app (it weighs in at 1.47GB, which I still had plenty of room for on the 3GS), Coupled with a $25 Arkon dashboard friction mount from Amazon (the most solid I’ve found so far without investing in a ProClip system for $75), a car charger, and retractable 3.5mm audio cable (until the Griffin noise isolation cable arrives—I have a ground loop in the Prius that makes al kinds of noise), that makes me pretty happy.

Norman E. Borlaug, the plant scientist who did more than anyone else in the 20th century to teach the world to feed itself and whose work was credited with saving hundreds of millions of lives, died Saturday night. He was 95 and lived in Dallas.

You’ve probably never heard of Mr. Borlaug, or, if you have, you were probably introduced via Penn Jillette, but ol’ Norman was an amazing man I regret never meeting.

So with Patrick Swayze and Jim Carroll, that’s the trifecta, right?

Some of my favorite memories took place standing at this man’s feet, and some my favorite photos I’ve ever taken were from that spot, too.

There’s a link in the header on the site to get to them, or you can always go to http://jasonbaldwin.us/photos to see what’s new.

Other than the first planting of French Breakfast and Cherry Belle radishes, which I’ve harvested, everything is still in the ground and doing well. I’ll be harvesting icicle and Easter egg radishes in about a week, and turnips not long after that. I’ll need to cut down the collards and do something with those, too, while they’re still young and tasty.

If all the pepper plants bear fruit, I’ll be up to my eyeballs in bells. Tomatoes, too. And don’t get me started on the zucchini.

• Genovese basil, to use primarily as a pizza topping
• Mammoth dill, as a flavoring agent in my ongoing fascination with all things pickled
• Chives, both garlic and traditional
• Flat-leaf parsley
• Rosemary
• Thyme
• Oregano

I started the seeds in early March, not long before I left for SXSW, in Planters’ Pride Peat-Free Greenhouse Kits.

Oregano in the greenhouse kit

Parsley in the greenhouse kit

A few shoots appeared before I left, mostly from the basil, but by the time I returned, the tray I’d used for the faster-germinating herbs—basil, chives and dill—were ready to be transplanted. I used Planters’ Pride FiberGrow pots and MiracleGro Potting Mix, and now, almost a month later, they’ve almost recovered from my less-than-skilled transplanting job and will be ready to set out next week after the freeze we’re expecting mid-week.

Dill and chives in FiberGrow pots

Basil in FiberGrow pots

Which brings me to this: I was walking through the living room while my grandmother was watching Martha Stewart a week or so ago, and one of the guests was Jon Traunfeld from the University of Maryland, who was showing off the Salad Table™, developed by the Maryland Cooperative Extension and the University’s College of Agriculture & Natural Resources. It’s a freestanding table/box made of lumber that allows growing lettuces and other vegetables in relatively shallow plots from March to November. I’ve had problems with rabbits and other critters in the past, so a raised garden was particularly intriguing.

I downloaded the PDF instructions from the University’s website, visited hardware stores to price and purchase materials, and finally got it put together and moved to the patio yesterday. (I strongly encourage you to visit the Salad Table page and read through the instruction so what I’m writing makes more sense.)

My modified Salad Table™

In the interest of fiscal responsibility, and my desire to fit everything I bought into my Prius, I had to make some changes.

• Because I didn’t want to bother with tin snips to cut the hardware cloth, I changed the dimensions of the table to fit the width of the aluminum screen and the hardware cloth.

Screen and hardware cloth

• Instead of the 10′ and 12′ boards called for, I used 10 2“x4“x6’ studs ($0.88 each on sale) in building the table, which resulted in a table that’s four inches wider, three inches longer, and 1.75″ taller than the PDF instructions would produce.
• I was having trouble with the screws I’d bought to hold the wood together, so I used 8d 2.5″ galvanized nails, which seem to be holding better than the screws did.
• In the interest of winter storage, I made the legs removable by attaching them with 5/16“x3 1/2″ hex bolts.

Legs made removable

• To make the table more portable, I installed two rigid 2″ casters on one end, and two 2″ swivel casters with brakes on the other.

Casters

• Stability was an issue, so I added braces to the long sides of the box, attaching the 2“x4” studs with 5″ hex bolts.

Total cost of the table: $48.87 ($10 less without casters, and that doesn’t include any seeds, growing medium or fertilizer)

It’s supposed to dip into the mid-twenties later this week, so I won’t be planting until at least Friday. I went seed crazy, and have about 15 varieties of lettuce to try, from buttercrunch to radicchio to Black-Seeded Simpson, plus red and gold beets, cherry globe and French breakfast radishes, spinach, collard greens, and purple-top turnips. I’ll transplant all the herbs into one of the sections, and I picked up more seeds to start Thai basil, cilantro and spearmint. I’m working on a planting schedule based on planting-to-harvest times, so I have something I can harvest all summer and fall.

I’ve never really built anything like this, and I’m tickled with the way it turned out. I’ve also never grown anything from seed, so I’m thrilled that it’s gone so well so far.

I’ll continue to post updates on the project as it progresses. If you care to follow along, bookmark the site or subscribe in your favorite RSS reader.

Until I found that my last full backup on the Time Machine drive was from February 12.

I found the original drive that I’d replaced with the now-failing one, and 20 minutes later (a new personal record for replacing a laptop hard drive), I had a bare drive I need to recover. I couldn’t find my SATA-to-USB dock, so I ripped open an old Western Digital external 2.5″ drive enclosure, and after restoring the last Time Machine backup to the good drive (5 hours later, but I’m not complaining), I hooked up the failing drive to see what was recoverable.

I tried Disk Utility. No dice.

I tried DiskWarrior. Again, no luck.

I remembered tales of putting a failing drive in the freezer to salvage it, so I tried that today. Five hours in the freezer while I drove to Fry’s to procure a new hard drive, and DataRescue II was able to read the whole disk, but the drive warmed up too quickly to do a complete recovery (yet). So I’m going to go buy some cans of compressed air and drip the coolant on the drive as it tries to do the recovery.

I don’t think I lost much; all my media resides on external drives, my mail lives on the server, my bookmarks are on Delicious, and I was already able to copy my iTunes library files to a safe place. Still, there are some things I won’t be able to replace, and it’s frustrating.

My biggest concern right now is tracking down all the installers for the apps I have, and all the serial numbers, license files and other registration information. That’ll be the hard part if I have to rebuild. Oh, and the five or six years of e-mail archives I hadn’t gotten around to uploading to the server yet. I hope that’s recoverable.

Oh, well. It could have been worse. It could have caught fire.

The moral of this story? BACK YOUR SHIT UP.

Update: Dammitalltohell, I’m going to have to set up my web development environment again. CRAP. That was a nightmare the first time, and it’ll be a nightmare again, I’m sure.