Blog Archive October 2010

I've started keeping a column searching Twitter for the term "cattle" on Tweetdeck in order to find stuff to blog about.  What I've come to learn is that ~85% of the traffic on Twitter that has the word cattle in it has absolutely nothing to do with cattle.

~40% of it is related to people's fascination with cattle prods.  There are some sickos out there.

~15% is related to checking in to Southwest Airlines flights.

~10% evidently there is a rule that you must check in to Twitter every time you go to Texas Land & Cattle.

~10% is using the word cattle to describe any sort of oppressed people who are being “treated like cattle.”  It’s a good thing we don’t actually treat cattle the way we do those who are oppressed.

~5% is related to Australian Cattle Dogs.

~5% is related to a little band called Cattle Decapitation.  They’re a quaint little band I’d describe as easy listening for work.  Take a moment and check them out at the link below.  Make sure to turn up your speakers because there's a really interesting quiet part at the beginning...

Cattle Decapitation

We’re migrating servers within Rackspace over this week.  Our hardware, while powerful, is four years old and ready to be replaced.  I got the notice that our new servers were online about 11AM on Tuesday and the next thing I knew, I was heading to bed at 1AM this morning.  Wednesday was a blur, about the time I thought it must be getting close to 7PM it was midnight.  The ability to go manic for a while is quite valuable in times like this.

As stressful as moving 200GB of data on live sites is, this server move is MUCH smoother than my last one…

Our previous web host was cheap and bad.  We had been with them since about 2002 but it was purely due to the fact they were cheap as you could imagine (cheap in dedicated hosting is a relative term, we were still paying $1,100/month).  Over the months of Sep-Oct 2006 they had numerous outages and it became apparent that we needed to find a new host.  There was a clause in the contract that we had to give them 30-days notice prior to moving.  So, we gave them notice on a Friday that we were going to switch web hosts.

That’s when I was almost ruined.

They flipped the switch on our servers at 4:30PM that Friday right before they left for the weekend.  We had no access to anything.  There might have been a chance we could have gotten them online for a week or two for a smooth transition but my ability to track down the company owner’s personal cell phone number (they didn’t answer the phone on the weekends) sort of nixed that.  We had to buy our hard drives back from them the next Monday.

I wire transferred them the extortion money payment to get my hard drives back and had them overnighted to my house.  In hindsight, I should have taken a plane to Sacramento and picked up the hard drives myself.  I’m severely low balling it when I say there was more than $100,000 in information on those hard drives.  But, again in hindsight, it’s probably best I didn’t go due to the odds I’d be doing a life sentence in California for strangling the owner of a small hosting company.  To say I’m only half kidding on that would be inaccurate, one fifth, tops.

Once the hard drives were in my possession, I then put them on another FedEx truck to Rackspace in Dallas.  We were finally back up and running the next Friday afternoon.

For the record it literally physically affects me whenever I even think about that week.  Much to my wife’s chagrin, I always burp whenever speaking of it.  We’re talking about five years of work in a cardboard box in the back of a FedEx truck.

The moral of the story?

Screw Hostik.

Test

Full Story @ BBC News

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Images from Google Earth have confirmed that cattle tend to align their bodies in a north-south direction.

…

The researchers surveyed Google Earth images of 8,510 grazing and resting cattle in 308 pasture plains across the globe.

"Sometimes it took hours and hours to find some pictures with good resolution," said Dr Begall.

The scientists were unable to distinguish between the head and rear of the cattle, but could tell that the animals tended to face either north or south.

Their study ruled out the possibility that the Sun position or wind direction were major influences on the orientation of the cattle.

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PHA Phenotype

On Wednesday, a man who knows much more than I told me he doesn’t feel there’s a PHA phenotype.  He then proceeded to recommend two bulls from a set to me based on what I said we’re looking for.  After he went back and checked, both of them were carriers.

It has an impact on phenotype.

“Do No Evil”

The hippies are in an uproar over this story about Google legally lowering their tax rate claiming it violates their “do no evil” slogan.

Wait, what?

I refrain from getting political on here but what the heck has happened to this nation when legally keeping the money you earn out of the hands of the government is the slightest bit evil?

Everyone Has a Website?

That’s the way it seems until you try to find information on a ranch that just built a $100k+ sale barn for his production sale.

There are times in life I’m happy to admit I have no clue what’s going on.  Anything dealing with dairy cattle falls into that category.

What do you breed an Ayrshire cow to in order to make more nurse cows?

Two months ago a family that used her for milk for their eight kids needed something to do with her when they moved to attend seminary.  We now have a well fed F1 Guernsey x Ayrshire heifer calf (BTW, that’s as far off the charts as you can get for things I thought I’d never say) and a halter broke nurse cow.

I’d breed her Brahman but that’s an awful lot of time to develop a glorified recip.

So, what breed would you cross an Ayrshire to in order to make more nurse cows?

Have you seen this story?

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The two Lone Star States don’t have a great deal in common, except maybe in Atascosa County, Texas, where for at least the past five years the quarter page instruction sheet that accompanied absentee ballots carried not the Texas flag, but the flag of the other Lone Star State -- Chile.

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Click here for more versions of it.

Yeah, that’s where I’m from.

In defense of the county, they’re using a visual classification system.  The flag has all the right colors in just about all the right places so two of the three judges approved it.

T wenty

That’s how many online sales will be held on Saturday when you count the sales that last through the weekend.

W ednesday Sale Average

R.A. Brown Ranch had another stellar sale, probably their best ever.  Selling commercial bulls in bulk for $4,000+ is pretty darn impressive by any measure.

• 142 Angus Bulls - $4,620
• 259 Red Angus Bulls - $4,080
• 78 SimAngus Bulls - $3,420
• 88 Red Angus Females - $3,050

This was the first time in a few years I couldn’t make it.  I got some news on Tuesday before I was supposed to leave that prevented me from thinking straight enough to drive safely.

News my wife says I’m not allowed to blog about.

So I'm not.

I s It Really?

The "Enough is Enough" blog post and the similar thread on Steerplanet by Zane from Z-N-T cattle is one of the more interesting blog posts I’ve seen in a while.  He makes some excellent points and it’s hard to not agree with him.  The problem is it’s just another verse of the same song that’s been sung ever since electronic communication began.

E-mail is great but what happened to the personal touch of regular mail?

Texting is nice but what about the personal touch of a phone call?

Facebook is nice but what happened to just calling your friends on the phone to keep up?

I promise I’m not trying to throw him under the bus, resistance to change is natural and I feel it too.  The problem is that attitude is just so prevalent in ag over so many things that it's hard to give it too much credence any more.

However, he's dead spot on about the lack of targetting for the pig, sheep, and goat ads.

N ebraska

Now that you guys have finally agreed to pay the fee for leaving the rest of us to rot with Texas in the conference you were the leader in forming, please accept this invitation to break the knife off in them this weekend.

S horthorn Calf

I’ll just say it, I don’t really like Shorthorn cattle all that much.  I’ll consider changing that opinion the day I finally see one used commercially down here.

That being said, I’m just flat out entranced by this calf (link) that sold for $17k the other night.  I’ve probably watched that video two dozen times now just admiring the beauty of it.

We recently passed up 20,000 sale lots indexed by sex and sire in our sire price report database.  Until the past two months it was highly biased toward breeding stock due simply to the types of information that have been available.  However, we now have a good database of show steer prospects as well.

For the record, I realize all you Midwest jocks are liars.  There’s no way every single one of the calves you guys are selling this fall is sired by AI studs, you’re not fooling anybody.  However, that doesn’t really matter for the sire price index because the difference a sire makes on the price of his calves is actually what is being tracked.

Sire Price Report for Steers

One a side note, with 499 online steer lots counted, the average price for steer sales since September 1st is $3,029.

On a personal note, 20,000 is like twice 10,000.  We were just hoping for 10,000 and then BAM, we find out it's 20,000.  Seriously, a doct person ought to tell a guy to sit down before they tell him it’s 20,000 when he was only expecting 10,000.  I mean, we have the ability to handle 10,000, we’ve done that before, but 20,000?  How do people do that?

McDaniel Cattle Company will hold their private treaty sale this weekend October 17th at the ranch in Indianola IA.  Included in the set are full sib sisters to AI sires such as Interstate and Manchild...

	Lot 1 Full sister to Manchild. A freak of a Shorthorn Plus that is even more impressive from behind.
	Lot 2 This Mainetainer by Bojo out of a Meyer 734 cow is as big ribbed and impressive as one will find. TH tested free, yet the hair and stoutness of a carrier.
	Lot 3 SLC Sooner sired out of a former Supreme Female Iowa State Fair, this baldy high Maine is also a maternal sister to our $48,500 high seller is 2008.
	Lot 9 Full sib to the Interstate bull we owned by McDaniel Cattle and Curtis Wiedel. Her sister last year stood reserve behind an Interstate daughter that won the Iowa State Fair Supreme title.

For more information contact Alan McDaniel at 515-979-1894, Chris Hixon at 641-891-9329 or better yet...

Visit McDanielcattle.com

This is more rambling than a blog post.  I’ve been doing a lot of database tuning over the last week and you tend to forget how to communicate with human beings when you start doing that kind of stuff.  It’s part of why good programmers are almost always borderline Asperger types.

Blog Roll Updates

We added the Humphrey Agrimarketing Solutions, R.A. Brown Ranch, Primetime Agri-Marketing, and JJB Cattle Company blogs to the blog roll.

New Online Sale Calendar

There’s now a link on the right of the front page that will take you to a calendar of online sales.  Do you like that little calendar icon?  You better, Istockphoto went up on their rates again.

Thank You

I’d like to thank every tax payer for the rebates that encourage companies to replace industrial lighting with more environmentally friendly alternatives.  The old lights they take out of the warehouses work great in the barn and they’re dirt cheap.

Grothues Ranch

While hauling the lights mentioned above down to the ranch, I stopped by the neighbors to see the calves at Grothues Ranch.  They recently bought Tidal Wave from Sullivan.  She always has a solid set of cattle but they have one of the best one-month old American calves I’ve seen in quite some time on the ground right now.

Old Bull

As if killing five bull calves and two cows last season and then going sterile mid-way through the breeding season wasn't enough, the old Brahman bull we sent packing in May sent us one last insult from the grave.  A full brother to his best calf from last year came out dead even after watching his mother like a hawk for two weeks.

I’m going to (hopefully) miss standing over Brahman bull calves while worn out holding a beer saying “yep, that’s one big son of a *****.”

New Bull

We bought a new bull over at V8 Ranch a few weeks ago and while I have a nice little blog post ‘in the tank’ about the full day of Brahman viewing, I haven’t finished it yet.

Cloud Hosting

Our two-year hosting contract is up this month and I spent a good portion of time this week looking into hosting alternatives.  I’m not the slightest bit dissatisfied with Rackspace but if I can get newer hardware for $1,000/month less with a different web host, you gotta do what you gotta do.

Anyway, I’ve never really recommended web hosts, but if you’re in the market for web hosting for just one site, look into cloud hosting with Rackspace.  If I didn’t have multiple databases running 20gb+ I’d jump on it in a second.

Duke Senior Thesis

I’ve started writing mine, is there a minimum length for these things?

South Texas Prospect Shows

At least down here, the unsanctioned prospect shows with some sort of tradition are getting more entries than the TCCA shows.  The weekend that Hondo had 285 head show up, the two sanctioned shows had fewer than 30 head each.

Facebook Like Buttons

Yay or nay?

The American Angus Association has announced the availability of a test for CA... 

Authorized Labs for Contractural Arachnodactyly (CA) Testing

CA is the one that, wait, which one is it?  I stopped trying to keep track when the geneticists decided everyone needs to call curly calf something other than what every single person in the breed called it.

Perhaps the Angus Credit Card has a table on back to help you keep track.

Matt got the sale catalog for their upcomming sale posted this afternoon.  I bet there's one or two Monpoloy's in the set....

Matt Lautner Steer Sale

Bids close at 6pm on October 17th and the cattle can be viewed in Jefferson, IA.  For directions or more information contact Matt Lautner 515-450-2800 or Charlie Wilson 563-219-0318.

Kevin Mears beat me to it but Christi Collins announced that they're putting an end to The Exposure sales.

It's disappointing if just for the fact that there won't be the catalog to ooh and ahh over any more.

I'm trying to put a directory page together that details all of the online auction services currently out there.  To make things easier on me, would anybody who DOES NOT manage an online auction service that sells cattle please raise their hand?  Nobody?

But seriously, what am I missing from this list?

• Breeders World Online Sales
• CIM Auctions
• CW Cattle Sales
• DLMS.ca
• DVAuction
• EDJECast
• Liveauctions.tv
• New Age Cattle
• Sale Day USA
• Superior Livestock

For the time period 8/31/10 to the morning of 10/1/2010.

1. Ranchers.net 36.97% (3)
2. Steerplanet 27.67%
3. Cattle-Today 22.37% (1)
4. 5BarX 7.32%
5. Advantage Cattle Services 4.11%
6. Clubcalves 1.52%
7. Breedersworld 0.04%
8. EDJE 0.00%

The EDJE forum will be dropped next month as it has become irrelevant.

Compared to the previous time period, activity is up 8.1% to 530.71 posts per day.  Compared to last year during the same time period, activity is down 12.6%.  Welcome to the world of Facebook.