etc.

These are good socks. They’re warm, comfortable, the pattern is far simpler than I thought it would be (although I ran a quick three-needle bind-off rather than the recommended grafting), and sock-knitting is intensely gratifying. Yarn: 2 skeins Fortissima Colori in #9070 Sombrero.

I’ve spent inordinate amounts of time categorizing old posts over the past couple of days. You see, I ran the Blogger import script on all posts from the former etches-johnson.com (books, film, links, knitpics), so it’s all here now, and it’s certainly nice to have it all in one place. But it means categorizing will take a lot longer than I anticipated, I’m working my way back from October 2004 (I’m up to April 2004) and until it’s all done, there will be a whole bunch of posts under “General“. In case you’re wondering.

A book whose contents I cannot vouch for, but whose basic premise is giving shape to my life these days.

WordPress has a wonderful Blogger-to-WP import script included in the download that walks you through the import process, but I also found this tutorial to be pretty handy. All posts since August 2002 should now be here, and eventually I’ll get through all 382 of them assigning categories. Fun work ahead.

Old posts will be accessible from the old archives page. I have located a little Blogger import tool on the WordPress support page, but I can’t promise that I’ll get to the importing right away.

update: That old archives page won’t work. Archives have now been imported from Blogger and are linked, by month, from the right menu.

This template is all thanks to ViewFinder Design, with a couple of CSS tweaks in a few places. In time I’ll rip apart the CSS and put it back together again, but for now, out-of-the-box is just what I need. Standard disclaimer applies: let me know if things look funky in your browser (amanda AT etches-johnson DOT com). Thanks.

Well, I certainly didn’t expect it to be that easy.

Here’s where I’m going with the whole WordPress thing. As you may or may not know, etches-johnson.com used to be composed of a bunch of different blogs – there was etc. (the main blog), books, film, the linklog, and KnitPics. I’ll happily admit now that I was never fond of that arrangement, it felt awfully artifical to me — a clunky workaround to deal with Blogger’s lack of categories. What I really wanted was a way to display all these “blogs” as categories in linear-chrono format (not that nightmare 3-column incarnation I had going on last year) on one page. What I really wanted was categories, and I was getting pretty tired of making excuses for Blogger for not having them (and having to resort to clunky workarounds).

So I started investigating a couple of options. I looked closely at Movable Type, Greymatter, Textpattern, and this one, WordPress. I eliminated Greymatter pretty early on since there didn’t seem to be a lot of support for the product (I could be wrong — that was simply the impression I got from reviewing the website). I passed on MT mostly because the documentation just plain scared me, and their new license structure did nothing to endear their product to me. (In most other situations, when a product has 100s of pages of support/help/faq documentation, I take that to be a good thing. And I’m sure it’s a very good thing with MT too, I just knew that I probably wasn’t ready for something that needed that much know-how to deal with, considering that my working knowledge of MySQL and PHP is nonexistent.)

It came down to Textpattern and WordPress for me and let me be the first to admit — as excited as I am to dip my toes into the enticing world of programming, I was ultimately wooed by the WordPress “5 minute Installation” promise, which was a far cry from Textpattern’s admission that: “there is nothing plug-and-play about Textpattern, yet”. It just sort of felt like WordPress presented a natural course of progression from the total-dependence-solution that Blogger provided (that I have been mosly happy with for 2.5 years).

First & foremost: my friends Meredith & Xavier have a brand new family-member, and her name is Ella-Matisse, and she’s just about the sweetest little thing I’ve seen in a long time. Mazel tov!

And next: if my recent and on-going delinquence around here hasn’t been enough for you, I’m here to tell you that it’s going to get a little worse. The course starts next week and I have a feeling that the first week might bring madness, while the participants AND I overcome the learning curve that is inherent in online learning/teaching. I’m also off to New York in a bit and planning for that quite madly (bookstores/yarnstores to recommend? Recommend away!), AND I picked this week to switch content management systems. Yes, that’s right, this week I make the switch from Blogger to WordPress because it’s something I’ve been contemplating for a very long time and it seems that I’m only happy when I’ve got projects enough to pull me in 5 different directions. 3 projects simply stretch me thin, and that’s just not good enough.

And so it occurs to me only now: this might be my last post in Blogger. Hello, I’m filled with the excitement of living in a world full of possibilities.

Dude, Where’s my Country?, Michael Moore
Unabridged audiobook 2003

I don’t think I’d do a Michael Moore on audio again. It might have been OK if Michael was doing the reading, because this narrator botched some of the irony, which ruined things for me a fair bit.

Anyway. In Dude, Where’s my Country?, Moore picks up where he left off in Stupid White Men — more about George, more about the Saudi ruling family, more about Iraq, and a bit more about The Big Corporations. I’m glad there’s someone writing these sorts of books, someone with as much vitriol as Moore anyway. I think it’s a good thing that “political humour” stays at the top of the bestseller lists for so long because that means mass amounts of people are reading it. And that can only be a good thing.

Hello. There is a new favourite yarn in town, and her name is Silk Garden. I started a lovely little sweater called Klaralund (for which there is a knitalong), and I’m absolutely smitten with this yarn, its silky-drapey goodness has me swooning a great deal, and I’m positively ravished by the colours (I’m using #86).

Which brings me to the issue of Knitpics.

You’ve been patient with me lately, gentle readers. I’ve been talking about the knitting (i.e. Fancy Work) I’ve been doing, but I’ve provided nary a scrap of photographic evidence, and for that I am remorseful. I’m happy to lay complete blame on the extant Buffy and Angel enslavement I have fallen victim to, the mister and I are up to season 4 of Buffy and season 1 of Angel (an episode each, in sequence), so there isn’t much of anything else that’s getting done while we imbibe ridiculous doses of The Best Television Ever Written, Ever.

So bear with me while I pick up the scraps of normalcy this week. I have not one, but two of these to show you, and the in-progress Klaralund of course, and also some older projects that are finally seamed and ready for wear. There are a couple of pictures in it for you, promise.

I feel like I should tell you that in my library’s catalogue (that is, the library where I work, not my local public library), one of the related subject headings for knitting is “Fancy Work“. I’m a big fan of charmingly quaint (& outdated) subject headings, so here are a couple of phrases from these very pages, appropriately rewritten with the related heading substituted for that other boring word:

• You’d think that with all the downtime I’ve had that I would have been undertaking fancy work maniacally, but I haven’t been at all. [2004-09-30]
• I have not done any fancy work in 4 days! [2004-09-10]
• Ever since I started doing the fancy work, I’ve become this person who cares for her garments. [2004-08-17]
• Fancy work has also made me appreciate colour as never before. [2004-08-17]
• I’ve also been alternating between steady fancy work and online euchre-playing and while my euchre score has not seen much improvement for the time I’ve been investing in it, my fancy work has. [2004-08-02]

While you’re recovering from this raucous display of subject heading fun, have a look at the package that landed on my doorstep yesterday. I have to say, this Secret Pal 2 deal has been very good to me. Not only does my secret pal rock all sorts of worlds and have impeccable taste, she is also kind and thoughtful and clearly reads these pages (and the archives! the boring archives!), which makes her some sort of angel soul.