Recently in Blog Facts Category
MT4 is not bad, it's just a significant shift structurally and I did some dumb, blind things without thinking when I installed it. I have been kicking myself for deciding to upgrade when what I had was working fine. The lure of shiny new features is just too much to resist sometimes. Some days I am just my own worst enemy when it comes to wanting to play with new toys. In the end, I ended up "starting fresh" by creating a brand new blog and importing all of the stuff from the old blog into the new one. And there are still a ton of issues that I still have to resolve. Sigh. But at least you can read it and I can post to it, which is an improvement. The look and feel of my blog is now just one of Movable Types standard on board styles... I miss my old template already. But hopefully I'll be able to resurrect things as time goes on. In the meantime, it's nice just to have a blog that actually functions.
Right now I'm trying to look on the bright side and see this as an opportunity to learn something new and to clean up a bunch of old cruft that had accumulated in my template. I'm hoping that once I get to start playing with some of the new widgets and toys in MT4 that I will be happier about the whole situation. I do have to say that I like the image preview functions much better...
However, the moral of this story is most definitely the old engineer's adage: if it ain't broke, don't fix it!
Yes, I know I am having problems with the comments... they want you to be authorized to log comment... even I am not authorized at this point, so don't take it personally... more MT4 issues.
How very cool is this? Much thanks to Ann and Kay over at Mason Dixon and Rachael for pointing out this very cool Google-maps based tool. This is so much better than what I was trying to do before. If you come by and read, I'd just love it if you could add yourself to my map. And you don't have to be just in the US -- I zoomed it out so that you can see the whole world!
For a long time I've wanted to have a section of my blog/website in which I shared information about the books I have in my collection. If there's anything that is true about me, it's that I love to buy books. Any time it's time to learn something new, the first thing I do is go and see if there is a book I can add to my collection. This means that I've amassed a pretty large collection of knitting books and other fiber arts related books over the last several years.
This morning, while I was going through my list of "in progress" projects that I would like to have to wear this fall, I decided that Liberty needed to be my next thing to complete. I chose Liberty for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that I am concerned about having enough of one of the colors and if I need to get another ball of Mist, I want a halfway-decent chance of still being able to find the dyelot somewhere on the planet. So in order to get the right front cast on and on its way, I had to remember how to do a tubular cast on. And the first book I reached for was Nancie Wiseman's "The Knitter's Book of Finishing Techiques".
As I was paging through the book, I realized that I had used this book enough to give it a good evaluation. Relative to it's size, it's not a cheap book, but I find myself coming back it over and over because her explanations and illustrations are excellent. And that got me thinking about getting a little bit more serious about sharing my opinions on books. In many cases, it takes a long time of living with a book, especially a technique or pattern book, before it's really possible to talk about what makes it good or not so good. I've been blogging and knitting and buying books for quite some time now, and I've definitely got both a good library to talk about and a growing collection of books that I've had time to live with and really understand whether or not they are treasures, trash or fall somewhere in between. I hope that my growing expertise in knitting will be able to give me a good perspective from which to judge new and old entries into the field and that my writing skills are sufficient to provide anyone who reads my reviews with a good overview of the book in question.
So today is the day that the book reviews start. You can find them over at The Keyboard Biologist Collects Books. I've also added a link to the page to my side bar for easy access. I don't anticipate that I will have a regular schedule for updating this blog, nor will it be totally restricted to kntting books. Not surprisingly, given the subject of this post, my very first entry is Nancie Wiseman's book. I invite you to read, leave comments and add anything that you think would help me or someone else understand what the book I've reviewed is all about. My goal is to help others get a good picture of what's between the covers of my selections.
Because I can't resist helping a scientific cause...
Or at least that's what I'd recorded when I started to get this post ready. What a treat it was going through all the comments and tallying up where everyone was from. It's funny how the world seems to get both smaller and larger when I look through the results. When I was growing up, I'd often thought it would be neat to have pen pals -- people in far away places (for a kid without a car, that could be as little as 20 miles away) who would tell you about all the strange and wonderful things going on in their lives, let you know what the world was like outside your own protective bubble. At the time, I had no idea how one went about finding such people though. But I did collect a lot of stationery in the hopes that I might figure it out.
Now, a quarter century later, I think I may have figured it out. Granted "far away" has a different definition for me now, and the mechanism of communication is different. But the fact that it my horizons are broader and I'm using mostly electronic media instead of pen and paper doesn't make it any less wonderful.
I'm also pretty amazed by the number of you who identified yourselves as biologists or scientists or people connected with science in some way -- just over 13% of those leaving comments.
The place that has the mapping service has 4 maps to play with: an entire world map, and maps for the US, Canada and Europe. I decided to use them all so I could share all the stats with everyone.
create your own visited country map
During my short time sampling, I heard from people 323 people from over 16 different countries (17 if you count Hong Kong separately, as I am inclined to since it is a very unique component of China). 43 of you identified yourselves as having some connection to a scientific profession. Although last month I got hits to my blog from many of the places that aren't colored in, they are a relatively small number of hits, so I wasn't expecting to see too many of those in a couple of day window. However, I'm going to keep the comments open on the original post so that anyone new dropping by who feels so inclined, can share their location. You can get to it by clicking here or in the link I've added to my side bar.
4% of those of you who responded were in Australia, China, Hong Kong, Japan or New Zealand. Approximately 15% of you have some connection to science or biology. Given how far they are from Chicago, I consider myself fortunate that I've visited even one of these places -- I traveled to Australia for my honeymoon(we had a stop over in Auckland, but I'm not sure that counts as visiting New Zealand). We spent most of our time in Sydney and near the Barrier Reef. I'm hoping my next trip will take me farther inland.
create your own personalized map of Canada
8% of you hail from Canada. Only 4% of the Canadians who left me a comment were willing to admit to having a connection to biology or any kind of bench science. Perhaps, not surprisingly given population density, the largest number of waves came from Ontario. British Columbia was next.
Embarassingly, I've travelled very little in Canada. I've been in Ontario (Stratford Festival, anyone?) but haven't yet visited beyond that, in spite of having a cousin in Manitoba. Someday I want to take the Royal Canadian Pacific train across Canada. If only I could convince my husband to take a vacation that doesn't involve a beach!
create your personalized map of europe
11% of the responses came from Europe, with the most from England, followed by Germany and Finland. 16% (the highest percentage overall) of the responses were from scientists or biologists of various stripes.
I've been very fortunate that, since getting married and getting a real job, I've visited a few European countries. Most I haven't seen anywhere near enough of, and I've enjoyed every place I've visited: England, Germany, France, Spain, the Netherlands and Switzerland. I've spent the most time, so far, in France, but am hoping to get a few weeks in the UK this summer with my family. Watch out, Colinette factory!
create your own personalized map of the USA
Finally, the US. 77% of the responses were from my home country, and 14% of you identify yourselves as having biological connections. California, Massachusetts, New York, Texas and Virginia were the top 5.
I won't list all the states I've visited -- my parents did a pretty good job of making sure that I've at least driven through most of them. I've only lived in a few of them, however... New York (first 4 years), Michigan (14 years), Texas (4 years) and Illinois (14 years). Just seeing it that way gives me a bit of a surprise. I've been in Illinois for much longer than I thought, sometimes it seems like I just got here...
Blog of the Day
This mapping adventure has also brought a whole new collection of blogs to my attention. I've decided that every day I'm going to take the time to explore a new blog from this group and share the link here. I'll pick them more or less at random from the list. Today I took a little trip by Nadia's Crafting Adventures. Nadia hails from British Columbia, Canada and has an idea for a store that could completely clean out my bank account... a combination book store and yarn store! Good thing Vancouver is a long ways away from Chicago.
And for anyone who wanted to see the whole tally of responses, just open up the extended entry.
