Welcome to Aron Schatz Dot Com!

I actually plan on using this site more often. I am planning a series of cooking videos highlighting my forays into making bread and sweets. Expect these to start next week.

I'm venturing into growing two tomatoes, a few peppers (sweet, one hot), and a cape gooseberry over the winter. I've got some small pots and will setup an area in the basement that can be moved to the sliding glass door for sunlight when possible.

I'll probably use daylight CFL with an incandescent mixed in for additional warmth and spectrum. I'll be sure to document the process as it goes with pictures. The two tomatoes are cherry variants (yellow pair and orange) which should do well in pots.

Up for grabs is the last pot. Comments are welcome for the type of hot pepper. I've got plenty to pick from that I've saved seeds from plants. Pretty much everything from the habanero to the jalapeno are in. Let me know what is fun to grow and I'll do it.

I don't actually eat any hot peppers, though. The pungency of a pimento is too much for me, let alone a spicier one.

I know it's been awhile since I've last updated this site, but there is a good reason. The house stuff is going steady, but slow. I'm looking around at all the projects that have to be done before I move in and still maintain the publications and ASE Adnet. It is a daunting task, but it will be worth it once I move into the house for good. There are a few needed things before that can happen. There are two beds and the master bedroom has its mattress and such. No sheets, yet.

The guest has the bed, no mattress. There is no place to eat. A kitchen or dining table is needed before that can happen. I'll probably start with the kitchen table since I always eat in the kitchen. Counter/bar height, of course. The deck is all nicely stained which took about 3 days of work to do. Crazy stuff.

The basement bathroom needs to be redone, I'm going to tile over the old tile (it is on concrete) and replace the door. All of the toilets need to be replaced since they are pretty low and small bowled... Not my style.

The master bathroom shower needs to be redone. The entrance is way too low. I need to take out the glass and finish the tiling up to the ceiling. Hopefully I can get a premade door.

More to come, but it is getting there. I'll post more often.

I'll expand on this post in a day or so. There were so many problems at closing time that I didn't get to close on June 1st. There were a variety of factors that lead to this... and the seller's realtor couldn't butt out of the thing. She refused to give the keys until SHE was paid. That's not how things work. She caused a huge problem (that the lawyers said wasn't a big deal). It caused grief and a loss of time.

Make sure you get a realtor that knows when to step out of the negotiation. After the contract is signed, only the lawyers should be the arbiters...

I should get the house today, though. We'll see...

The reason that I haven't been posting here is that I purchased my first home! It is a townhome in Bridgewater, NJ. It has two bedrooms, 3.5 bathrooms, and a full, finished, basement. The closing date is at the end of this month and it is almost time. I'm very excited. The basement is great for an office and entertainment area... even a workout area. The living room has surround sound all wired up and has TV mounts built into the wall. Pictures are coming soon!

Who knows what the sellers will leave in the house, though. Hopefully they leave some of the useful things in the house.

I've made a few updates to RGP to include more sources so you can find the best price on the web for many products. Example searches...

http://www.reallygoodpurchase.com/find/intel+core+i7+cpu
http://www.reallygoodpurchase.com/find/bra
http://www.reallygoodpurchase.com/find/alarm+clock
http://www.reallygoodpurchase.com/find/canon+sd3500is

I'll be sprucing up the site this weekend. In addition, I'll be working on some additional ASE items. It's all pretty much the same for me since coding flows well together. It is easier working on different problems to take away the boringness of working on the same thing for a long time. Multitasking is good for some people... I'm one of them.

May 5th, 1983. That's the date I was born. If you're thinking of getting me a present... don't. One of the things I'm not fond of is the feeling that since it is someone's birthday, you must give them a present. I also don't like selfish people that always ask for stuff. You aren't special, everyone has a birthday.

In my case, if I want something, I don't expect other people to buy it for me. I will purchase the item myself with my own money. Birthday cards are nice to go and phone calls go a long way as well.

When people ask, "what do you want for your birthday?" My response, "nothing."

NO! We had some really cold weather the past few nights and it looks like it got to the majority of my vine type plants. All my cucumbers, watermelons, and cantaloupes are dead or almost dead. I believe we had a frost one night.

It was really quick, too. One day they were going strong, the next, on the last legs. It is really terrible to see stuff like this happen.

Did anything like this happen to you? What did you do to stop it? I was thinking of a light cloth to keep the warmth in the ground. It should protect the plants from frost at the same time.

I also bought another set of seedling starters to get the replacements going. I've given up on the current plants and will make sure the new set are much more mature before they are transplanted.

In addition, the peppers and eggplant are nearly ready for transplanted. I'm almost done hardening off with them. It takes a week to get it done, but the plants will be less shocked when they get out into the ground. If you are using peat pots, I'd suggest cutting the bottom off to let the roots escape. On one of the packages, it said you didn't need to do that. Don't listen to that.

The roots need to get where they need to be. It'll take too long for the peat pot to decompose in the ground for the roots to expand. This was a crucial flaw when I transplanted. Don't let it happen to you!

I'm working out some details from the new product finding and shopping comparison website, ReallyGoodPurchase. ASE Adnet is branching off to make new web properties to help people find new products and services.

RGP does this with a simple to use interface and it is insanely easy to use. We've joined a few new data providers and will be pulling data from many different sources for this project. Give it a try.

Here are some example searches.

http://www.reallygoodpurchase.com/find/intel+core+i7+cpu
http://www.reallygoodpurchase.com/find/bra
http://www.reallygoodpurchase.com/find/alarm+clock
http://www.reallygoodpurchase.com/find/canon+sd3500is

The site is all SEOd up. All of the links (except the out links) are rewritten on the backend. Try it out and let me know how it works. We'll have the site complete in a few days.

Damping off is one of the worst things your seedlings can get. Many of the seedlings I transplanted into the garden didn't survive. I first thought it was a cold snap we had here one night. Now I'm pretty sure it was damping off.

Damping off is a disease caused by a few different types of fungi and can manifest itself by rotting the root of the plant. In addition, some molds can cause the disease and will be visibly attached to the plant. When the seedlings started to die, I pulled them out and the root was eaten away.

I thought it might be bugs, but the same thing happened to different varieties (all vine type plants). The root looks like it rotted away and the plant died off from the lack of nutrients. I'm sure it was damping off since I noticed fungus starting to grow on the peat surface of the growing medium.

One of the easiest ways to combat this is to make sure your seedlings stay in a slightly acidic growing medium. A small bit on vinegar in the water (not too much) can lower the pH of the growing area to minimize growth. Don't turn the water too acidic. You can get pH test kits from a variety of places. 5.5-6.5 is an acceptable level of pH.

Another thing is to make sure plants get a good supply of fresh air circulating. Put a fan near them to give them indirect airflow. This is good for two purposes. The airflow will strengthen the plant and inhibit mold/fungus growth since the top layer should be dry due to the wicking away of moisture. Don't over water the plants and always water from the bottom.

I've since removed the dead seedlings and raked the soil and direct sowed the seeds into the ground. Hopefully the outside will get them going since it is warmer. Have you had problems like this? Leave a comment!

This is a series of entries about the sites that I call "ASE." While Aron Schatz Dot Com may comprise part of that, it is mostly reserved for the sites under ASE Publishing. The first site I ever create was ASE Labs.

ASE Labs was released, in full, on September 2001 (bad month). That wasn't the actual start, though. I always read through many different hardware review sites at the time and I wanted to figure out how they posted their articles and generally was interested in computers. I wanted to create a site to post my own reviews of hardware with the added bonus of having to write the site from the ground up. I really didn't do any research on content management systems at the time (and if I did, I probably wouldn't be using my own), but this was fine as I was very interested in scripting with PHP.

I started with PHP3 which became PHP4 after finding out the new functions that PHP3 didn't have. This created a problem back in 2001 as many hosts supported PHP3, but not PHP4. For a few months of development, I ran the website out of my home connection. There were a few visitors here and there and I actually had a following since a few of us left a forum in protest over some things.

It's too bad the original people that help the site in the early days are no longer there. One of them still checks in from time to time, though.

After getting most of the site in working order (finishing a programming project is never 100% done in my book), one of the people I knew online had a hosting company. For $10 a month, ASE Labs was hosted on a shared hosting service with PHP4. I was still a Windows person back then, but the server was running Linux. This was my first real experience with Linux and it was positive.

aselabs.com was not originally registered by myself. Chris (the hosting person) registered it for me. I didn't take ownership of the domain for a year or so after.

ASE Labs might have been a computer hardware review site, but the real motive behind its creation was to make a site by myself. I've always had a thing for doing backend programming and it continues to this day. Today, I try to keep away from the publishing side to work on being a traditional editor that checks and reviews articles as well as doing the programming.

ASE Labs has had four versions of the site (not counting the numerous upgrades to those) and the latest, Version 4, is the best one yet.

ASE Labs started as a hobby and I'm trying to morph it into a true publication business. In addition to that, ASE Labs has spawn a few other things that are good. It was ASE Labs that spawned ASE Adnet, but I'll have another entry on that.

There's more to ASE Labs, but that's all you get for now. I've enjoyed the trip down memory lane.

The Amazon EC2 experiment is well underway and I'm liking the results so far. It generally feels like a true dedicated server. There are some weird things (like IP address issues), but it is pretty good.

ReallyGoodPurchase.com is getting some new programming and the first bit is an easy link system. Here are some sample links for gardeners.

http://www.reallygoodpurchase.com/link/growtomatos
http://www.reallygoodpurchase.com/link/homehydroponics
http://www.reallygoodpurchase.com/link/hydroponicsecrets

I've been doing a bit of reading on hydroponics and it might be an interesting thing to get into. What say you? Check out those products and tell me what you think!

I went with my father to eat at a local diner. For the past few years, this specific diner grew very tall, and very hardy, sunflowers. There are a few variables that work in their favor. The dirt is very close to the building. This is very important since the roots can be kept warmer over the cooler nights and keeps the plant growing bigger and healthier. Since the building is on a major road, there are no trees to block the sunlight. In addition, the building is on a east-west facing road. The sunflowers get full sun, all day. They don't call them sunflowers for nothing!

Last year, they had huge heads with tons of great seeds. We took a few (with permission) and saved them for next year... Which we lost during the winter. Back to the start of the story, we saw a few sunflower seedlings popping up through the dirt.

The owner said that he didn't start planting the seeds for the sunflowers, so what we have here is a new generation of plants that started as nature intended. The seeds from last year fell on the ground and now they are starting to germinate and grow.

I grew sunflowers last year, but they weren't nearly as big or hardy as these. The owner allowed me to dig up a seedling to plant by our house. Who knows if it'll do as well, but at least we've got the proper seedling to try it with.

The owner also gave some tips. Use coffee grounds and egg shells in the ground to help the plants. Sounds like a good tip, we'll try it this year.

The registration process for Amazon EC2 was pretty simple. Most people probably have an Amazon account already, but if you don't, you'll just sign up for that. You'll also need a credit card and a phone number. More and more places are verifying you using a phone call.

After you sign up, Amazon waits a bit to send you confirmation that your account has been activated. Mine took about 45 minutes. You are given a simple guide to get your started, but the best way is to just dive in and see how everything works. Let me warn you; If you aren't familiar with server administration, just stay away. Seriously, there is no way to understand all of this without administration knowledge. Maybe these entries will help you, maybe not. Comment away if you want help.

There are many AMIs (prebuilt images) to choose from. Most people will probably stick with the CentOS install, but I selected the up to date Ubuntu Karmic server build. My dedicated servers both run CentOS, but I was thinking of moving to Debian (or Ubuntu) so this was the perfect time to see if it would fit. I run Ubuntu at home as well.

Once the instance was initiated, I was able to SSH into the server with the public key from the EC2 dash board that was created. After that, the instance is yours to do what you want.

I proceeded to make a new user and install the basic LAMP server. After about an hour, it was up and running. http://www.reallygoodpurchase.com It works! Remember that you SHOULDN'T shutdown the instance when you're done or it will just go away. It doesn't save.

Another thing that you'll probably want to be aware of is the use of Elastic IP addresses. Each instance is given a DNS name on creation that has a IP address assigned to it. To really use EC2, you'll need to create an Elastic IP address which is basically a "static" address for your virtual machines. Elastic IP addresses can be remapped to whatever virtual instance you have. More on this will come on another entry.

I'll have pictures and such to go through making an instance and setting it up for use. It really is easy once you get over the worry that you'll do something wrong and cost yourself a fortune. Amazon did a nice job on EC2, so far...

To start the experiment, I need a domain name to start adding content and such. I previously purchased "reallygoodpurchase.com" as a spoof for Best Buy (from the old Safe Mode comics at ASE Labs). While the name might be a goof, it'll service its purpose for the Amazon EC2 experiment. Since the affiliate marketing stuff will be on EC2, reallygoodpurchase.com should be a good fit for the time being.

We're talking about email marketing. This means the use of an email marketing auto-responding service... or roll your own. There are times when it is cheaper and easier to outsource your needs and this is one of those times. I'll report which company I picked in a future post and how well they do.

The experiment will run for at least a month. In addition to just using EC2 for the website, I'll also investigate the use of S3 for snapshots. If it works out, I'll start backing up the two dedicated servers ASE Publishing and ASE Adnet currently use to that as well. Backup and restoration are very important in this field and if S3 makes the job easier, that's fine for me.

Once the domain and website are up, I'll post another entry. Here's to a good experiment!