Don Marti

Thu 18 Dec 2008 11:40:51 AM PST

Ants and MLP

They laughed when they came downstairs in the morning and saw me reading The Ants and The Art of War. But the ants went away for quite a while. Now they're back. Linepithema humile, the Argentine Ant, is most abundant inside California homes in cold, rainy weather. A few counter-ant measures.

Never kill an ant while she is giving you information. Humans can't smell ant trails, so the only way to know where they are is to watch the ants. Kill the ants who are now using a trail, and the trail is still there.

If food gets mobbed with ants, don't kill them. Brush off as many as possible, near a bait site. They probably won't take the bait since they're full, but they'll lay a trail home. Then wash the food item and the location where it was stored, and either throw the food away outside if you're not saving it, or temporarily put it in a different place away from an ant trail.

Don't put bait near food. Put bait along the trail to the food, or just off the trail, away from human activity. (Grant's works.) Typical kitchen cabinets have a gap between the floor and the bottom of the cabinet, behind the toe kick -- an ideal bait site if you can get to it. Don't put bait where it will get wet or where people will touch or move it.

Disrupting trails with chalk or scented products is only a temporary fix, and makes it harder to find good bait spots.

Time to close some tabs.

Real Linux elitists check out the (300MB) kernel git repository to go hardware shopping.

Think of "climate man" as a one-man carbon tax. Enough of this kind of thing could help push up the security expenses of coal-based power plants and help make Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal—no technology, business, or politics required. But that would be cheating.

Here's how not to increase trade show attendance. If you're going to send in fake attendees to make your exhibitors happy, at least give them different business cards.

Drizzle can make a table called ☃.

Sun Tzu said, "To win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the acme of skill. To subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill." But he's wrong. That's not the acme of skill. The real acme of skill is to get what you want but have your enemy think it was his idea.