Grass seed germination

We had a patio poured last fall and they didn’t get done in time for me to plant grass. What a mess over the winter with 2 dogs!  About 3 weeks ago I tilled a good portion on my back lawn where the trucks had been, sowed seed, put on starter fertilzer, covered with straw, watered, and waited. And waited. And then waited some more. Very sparse germination and what did sprout was thin and spindly.  This is not typical for my usually very green thumb.  What made it more disturbing was that my neighbor 2 doors down had this lush new law in about 3 days!  What thuh?!

For some reason it never occurred to me that seed has a ‘best before’ date on it just like my beer.  And that date is only about 6-12 months… TOPS.  After that storage time, grass seed loses about 10-25% of its germination potential every year.  Given that my seed was closely approaching driving age- OHHHHHH, that explains it.

So I chalked up that first go-round as practice and yesterday raked off the straw, loosened the soil with a garden rake, re-sowed new seed, etc. Now the waiting happens again and if thing go right, my dogs will have new grass to tear up in about a month.

May 18th, 2009 Filed Under Steve's Thoughts | No Comments »

Microsoft says hackers seek to attack PowerPoint users

http://www.reuters.com/ BOSTON (Reuters) – Microsoft Corp said on Tuesday that hackers are seeking to attack users of its PowerPoint presentation software for Windows PCs and released patches to protect them against the threat.

The world’s No. 1 software maker said that a version of PowerPoint for Apple Inc’s Mac computers is also vulnerable, though it has yet to find any evidence that hackers are actively seeking to exploit it.

Microsoft defined the threat as “critical” — the most severe on the scale by which it ranks vulnerabilities to its software.

Hackers are seeking to exploit the vulnerability in PowerPoint by persuading the intended victim to open a tainted PowerPoint file — that they either download from a Website or receive in an email, according to Symantec Corp, the world’s top maker of security software.

“At that point, the attacker would then have complete control over everything the user’s account has permission to do on the system,” said Alfred Huger, a senior researcher with Symantec.

Huger said that Symantec has so far only observed a limited number of hacker attempts to exploit the vulnerability in PowerPoint.

Microsoft did not release a patch for Mac computers, though company spokesman Christopher Budd said that one is in development.

(Reporting by Jim Finkle; Editing Bernard Orr)

May 14th, 2009 Filed Under Steve's Thoughts | No Comments »