Miscellaneous: August 2004 Archives

Pink Swatches Abound

What a wonderful weekend I had! We just got back from Ann Arbor about 15 minutes ago. I have so much to "show and tell," but since it's late and I'm a little tired, I'll kick off the week by introducing some swatches that came to life this weekend. Believe it or not, they are the better part of the knitting that I have to show for the weekend. I just wasn't inspired enough to work on either of the top projects I've got started.

The swatch on the top is Phil'Eponge in Camelia. It is the setup for this project. As with all other Phildar swatches that I've set out to make, this one took not one, not two, but three -- yes, three - swatching attempts. The pattern calls for 3.0 mm, which I started with. I ended up with mostly acceptable row gauge on 3.5 mm, but not until after testing out 3.25 mm needles as well. In truth, even with the 3.5 mm needles I am probably a hair short of perfect row gauge, but I think the jump to a 4.0 mm needle would overshoot in the other direction.

What have I learned from this and my other two Phildar experiences? I should just automatically swatch for all my Phildar projects on two needle sizes higher than recommended in the pattern rather than hoping against hope that I am suddenly going to knit loosely enough on the recommended needles. On the positive side, at least Phildar and I are consistent in our tensioning differences.

Phil'Eponge is an interesting yarn to work with. It's an elastic-y yarn with a little stretch to go with the cotton boucle texture. It's not the gentlist yarn on the fingers, but it's not dreadful either. The fabric will certainlly be nice against the skin, and the cotton acrylic blend of the yarn ensures that it can be warn that way since it is machine washable.

That other pink swatch (in very exotic Lion Brand Woolease) is my first attempt at a "domino" a la Vivian Hoxbro. Why the sudden interest in Domino Knitting? I'm not going to share that secret yet, but more will be revealed as the week progresses.

While I was flying around on airplanes last week, one of the legs of my journey was on a commuter jet. After boarding the airplane and getting settled in, the steward announced that they were having a problem with the computer and they were going to have to reboot the aircraft. So they got some technician on board, powered down the plane (I'd never seen the emergency floor lights on before) and re-started everything. And then we were ready to go.

Late last week I was feeling kind of down and unmotivated and unconnected. It was like something just wasn't working correctly. Or to use a more computer-related term: my software seemed to have gotten into a bad state.

But how do you reboot a person?

Apparently with an overload of sleep. I went do bed around midnight Friday night and got up at almost 1 pm on Saturday. When I woke up I felt like the whole world had changed. Suddenly I was motivated to knit and I felt connected again.

Armed with too much energy I decided that it was time to do a little blog renovation. I was pleased to find out that SixApart had changed their licensing costs and terms for the newest version of Movable Type. So I bought myself a real, live license, backed up all my goodies on website and installed the new stuff.

It's still got a few rough edges, but I haven't run into any major bugs, in spite of the fact that it is version 3.01D (for developer's release). I was pleased and excited that it installed easily and had no problems with my templates and styles. But then I started playing with the commenting system. And for some reason, no matter how I changed the configurations, I couldn't get it to accept comments without going through the moderation process.

This was a major bummer. So I flipped off an email to tech support and received almost instantaneous help (as an aside, this happened on Saturday night. The helpful tech support person finished her email dialog with me at 2 am on Sunday morning. How cool is that?) Apparently the MT Blacklist version that I was running was not compatable with MT 3.01D. Disabling Blacklist completely solved the problem. But left me without the ability to control comment spam. Which is bad, because lately I've been getting quite a bit of comment spam almost every day.

Ugh. Ugh. And Ugh again.

So I had two choices: revert back to the older version of MT (which I could do, since I had backed everything up, including my databases) or persevere with the new version, but turn on comment moderation and wait for the new version of MT-Blacklist that is going to be available for MT 3.01D. (For those of you running MT 2.6 and having problems with spam, I cannot say enough about Blacklist. Go get it. Install it. Donate money to help keep the developer able to improve and grow this excellent plugin!)

For right now, I've decided that I am going to live on the edge and play with the new software. I'm a geek girl, after all, and I like trying out new toys, even if they are not quite perfect. This means that when you leave a comment, you won't see it show up on the blog immediately. I will get an email and then I will have to approve the comment. I hope this won't deter anyone from leaving comments. Please understand that the only comments I will block are SPAM comments. As soon as the new version of Blacklist is ready and installed, I will turn off all comment moderation again.

After getting all my new software toys installed, I turned my attention to the front side of my Phil Ruban top. I would post another picture, but it looks almost exactly like the one in this post. I haven't gotten to the neck shaping yet, so it doesn't make for very entralling blogging.

John and I also got to take in Venetian Night, an annual Chicago tradition sponsored by the Columbia Yacht club. There weren't as many boats as we expected, but the fireworks were awesome. I had hoped to have pictures. I even brought the camera. But digital cameras work a lot better when you remember to bring a compact flash card to store your pictures on.