Onion Grass: The Harbinger of Mowing Season

Welp, the onion grass has started coming up in my front yard. That means that it won’t be too long before I have to mow.

I’ve learned after a few years on my property that onion grass pops up in late winter/early spring, mostly goes away during prime growing season, then pops up again in the fall just before everything goes dormant. So it serves as sort of a bookend for the growing season. This year it seems a little early, I guess because the winter has been mild. We’ll see if the lawn follows suit.

Every year I tell myself I’m going to remember the first (and last) day I mow the lawn. And of course, I never write it down, so I never remember. I do know it’s always after my annual March Madness trip (which for me, is kind of an “enjoy the last week of winter and its associated lack of yard work” trip). This year, I’ll record the dates here for posterity.

I guess this means I’ve only got a month or so to put the deck back on the tractor. I’ve put that thankless chore on the list for this weekend.

Speaking of the March Madness trip, ESPN Bracketology has us seeing two #1 seeds again, for the second year in a row. This really sucks… (Why does it suck? Because we like to see competitive games, not #1s blowing out #16s.)

$#%!!? FAR

It’s Faculty Annual Report (FAR) season again.

Last year, FAR season was not fun. The FAR mysteriously “lost” a bunch of faculty reports (my theory was that it never saved them in the first place, but I digress), and many unfun hijinks ensued.

The author of FAR still works here, but he’s been sucked into the Peoplesoft black hole (don’t get me started), so yours truly ended up with the bulk of the FAR hassle last year. This year, yours truly is going to be out for most of FAR season with a newborn, and to put it mildly, that doesn’t break my heart. But that’s not the real point of this entry… Really, I just wanted to document a coupla things for future reference.

The FAR app displays 3 different due dates to users, and these dates change every year. The past 2 years, I’ve had the fun of updating the due dates, and each time it’s taken a bit of searching around to figure out where the dates are stored. Long story short:

The due dates live at [server-root]/etc/far/due_date.txt. This file can be human-edited, but there’s also a module within FAR that allows certain users to edit these dates via the web. To get this ability, your username has to be present in the table FAR.FAR_AUTH. Then, in the FAR app under the “Report Options” dropdown, you will see an option titled “FAR Due Dates”. Select this, and you can edit the due dates from there.

Also, it seems like every year, UMBC adds more academic departments, so it’s fairly common to get requests to add these departments to FAR. FAR maintains its own lists of departments (should it really do this? Probably not. Will it ever get fixed? Probably not). To add one, just add it to the table FAR.FAR_DEPARTMENTS.

That’s all for now.