etc.

Thank you to all who wrote with sympathy, empathy, and advice for my computer troubles. It looks like a hard drive reformat is inevitable, so now begins the difficult and tremulous process of back-ups and data gathering. Updates here as progress warrants.

In the meantime, stripes:

This is Leftovers from the current Knitty. I’m using a bunch of Mission Falls 1824 Wool from a variety of yarn store bargain bins. I always knew I’d enjoy knitting random stripes, I did not realize that I would enjoy it this much. In every round, a new adventure! It’s hard not to love a jaunty stripe.

I am fervently resisting buying a new computer and it is taking every ounce of self-control in my little being.

I’ve had it in mind that the troubles began last year, and I have been consistently blaming those troubles on spyware and the injurious ways of Internet Explorer. When I took to using Firefox full-time last Fall, it seemed, for a while, that all was well in the world again, but the truth of it is that my fearless little warrior is 4 and a half years old, and computer-years are a bit like dog-years, aren’t they? In which case, I am working with a 31-year-old laptop bloated with enough application scree to render it almost unusable.

I spent four infuriating hours on it last night, running Spybot, SpySubtract, Norton, ScanDisk, a defrag, uninstalling programs I don’t use anymore, and doing a general clean-up (pesky tmp files and deposits, be damned). I stopped just short of completely reformatting the hard drive (which I would very much like to do, but cannot, for various reasons) before throwing up my hands in despair. The truth of it is, I only really play at being a tech-type, I’m not so very good with hardware, and would very much like a micro-computer-specialist-angel to arrive at my doorstep, offering up his/her services with reckless abandon.

Failing that, I will continue to troubleshoot, since a new computer has not been budgeted for this fiscal year (nor the next, likely). If you have any experience with this sort of thing, or know of a magical fix-it that can be applied, or a priest or Wicca who might be able to help, let me know?

I’ve been a busy site-owning bee for the past 24 hours, ever since I found this WordPress plugin that creates static pages based on your template/layout. To wit: about, images, contact, book index, and site design archive. There will be others before long, oh you betcha.

Also, along with eating one’s leafy vegetables and cleaning out one’s eavestroughs, one would do well to read The Morning News on a regular basis. There, to-day, I read a lovely piece on a tantalizing project, whereby the author collects discarded photographs and compiles them in a charming, if somewhat haunting, gallery.

Do you leaf through discarded photographs at flea markets? I do. And postcards. Preferably ones with correspondence on the back. It makes me wonder at the people in the pictures, and about the lives of the travellers and the ones they leave behind (“The weather is here, wish you were beautiful”). And why didn’t someone save those pictures and postcards? It is, somehow, a strange indignity for a 5¢ tag to be affixed to someone’s memories.

Later that day (when the author recalls wanting to post this link days ago, and almost decides against posting it to-day due to waning outrage, but then has said outrage rekindled by re-reading the article): no doubt you are as shocked and horrified by this as I am.

You probably didn’t notice that the weighty “General” category (into which all my archived Blogger posts were imported) that used to sit, all bloated and self-important, over in the category area to the right is now gone. Well, inquiring readers, it’s gone because I’ve actually gone through all old posts and assigned each one a category or two that is actually meaningful, and I accomplished this onerous task with the help of Stephanie Booth’s invaluable WordPress plugin for batch category editing. I had been putting off this task until I had a few spare moments to locate such a handy time-saver, and there just aren’t enough plaudits I can shower upon Stephanie that would do justice to her remarkable efforts. (Thank you, Stephanie!)

Blogrolling has been down for a few hours, and I really shouldn’t begin to describe how disconnected I feel when all attempts to access my regular reads are thwarted. Lucky for me, I’m back on the RSS wagon these days, enjoying the convenience of desktop delivery via FeedReader, which is a rather low-tech, zero bells & whistles aggregator, but fine for someone who switches aggregators weekly. Which is to say that with Blogrolling’s downtime, I have been managing just fine in most areas except for the knitblogs I frequent. Not enough knitbloggers are doing the RSS thing yet, and so I’m considering putting out a plea to said non-rss-publishing-knitbloggers to take heart and select that rss option for the sake of the rest of us. In fact, that was it right there, my plea.

And so now, cut to confessional.

Most regular readers know that I don’t apologize for much around here, but to-day, I do have a wee something I need to get off my chest. You see, I started knitting Gatsby, as I mentioned in my last post, and I did quite well for about the first 16 rows, and then I started noticing some minor irritation on my right-index finger, the one the yarn feeds off of. At about the same time, I also became acutely aware of the latent irritability that was gnawing at me, an irritability that grew with every stitch I knitted (I, too, wish the past tense of knitting was knat), in fact I think I frowned through all 16 rows. You see, I really don’t like this yarn. I knew when I picked it out that I’d have to make something large and roomy out of it, something that would afford complete coverage beneath because it’s a fairly coarse wool and, you see, I’m a bit allergic to wool. What I didn’t realize, however, was that I wouldn’t even be able to put up with holding the knitting in my hands. Not only was the fabric irritating my fingers, but I also experienced a lack of enjoyment that I have not known while knitting before. It was dire. I still haven’t made the final decision to scrap this project and look for another home for the Briggs & Little (want it?), but I think it’s pretty obvious where I’m going with this.

The upshot of this (other than the predictable lesson-learned thing) is that as soon as I cast aside the ill-fated sweater, I picked up a pair of 2.5 mm bamboo double-pointeds and some Fortissimo sock yarn and cast on for my first pair of socks (for the 4th time, all other attempts were done with aluminum needles). Wish you had seen it, it was like I’d been knitting socks my whole life. I’d always sort of had a feeling that, for me, sock-success was merely a set of bamboo needles away, and I experienced heady rushes of enjoyment and fortification at how right I was. I may never knit anything but socks again!

So now I’m putting together a plea for instant beatification for the wondrous soul who thought up self-patterning sock yarn.

I’ve reverted to bad habits lately, and paid the price for it in spades, I’d say. Yes, spades. I went back to using IE a few weeks ago and have therefore spent the past three days rescuing my computer from spyware purgatory. There is still some sort of slithy registry key that has attached itself to IE that I can’t seem to get rid of (which changes my homepage everytime I launch the browser) and several days of diagnostics hasn’t helped at all. So back to Firefox while I work it out and lick my wounds.

I’m almost done on the sweater I started last week (just the 3-needle bind-off to go, happy thoughts my way, please) and I have to say that I’m positively head-over-ears for this pattern. I can’t say enough good things about a pattern that produces an almost-complete sweater right at bind-off, with only 20 stitches to seam and 3 ends to weave in. Genius!

Pictures soon (although nothing near Melanie’s superlative cliff shot), but in the meantime, here’s a picture of a cat who sleeps cute.

I realized yesterday that I am a single-project knitter. This might have something to do with the fact that I am new enough to the craft to NOT own more than one pair of needles in any particular size, in fact I have a languishing 10 pairs of needles (total) in my arsenal and will likely remain at the procure-needles-per-project stage for a very long time.

In addition to the needle limitation, I am also very goal-oriented and like to see a fairly quick conclusion to whatever project I have on the go at any particular time. For example, I believe I can safely reveal that the Mystery Yarn I picked up for the Mystery Project a few weeks ago is to be a Big Bad Baby Blanket from Stitch n’ Bitch (safely because the expectant mother for whom it is intended is safely on vacation in the wilds of northern Ontario, hopefully safely and without any sort of Internet access). Said mum-to-be is on her way to visit with me & the mister next weekend so the blanket needs to be ready for her arrival (and departure back to the UK the next day). If I was a comfortable multiple-project knitter, I would have started on the blanket some weeks ago, but instead, I proceeded with the existing schedule and rushed to complete the vest last night so I could start swatching for the blanket today, which I have done and which was successful, praise jesu!, I’ve had such bad luck with gauge and blankets.

And, apropos of nothing, have you used the Blogger user interface lately?  Out of nowhere, it’s practically a word processor, all toolbar-ish and icon-y.

For whatever reason, CSS has suddenly clicked for me. 10:05 AM, Saturday, July 10, 2004. Mark the date.

Do me a favour and leave a comment if the right column is still pooling at the bottom of your screen and not floating to the right of the main text. And if the font looks wonky. And if there’s anything else you don’t like or get.

Unrelatedly, yesterday, after a near-meltdown at the hands of malicious pop-ups, self-installs, home page slithyness, and deleterious spyware, I downloaded and installed Firefox. Andrea has been extolling the virtues of this responsible browser for a while and I’ve been doing a guilty duck & cover routine whenever I stumble across anyone who talks about how you’ve-got-no-one-but-yourself-to-blame-if-you-use-IE-and-it-ruins-your-life. So do yourself a favour and download it yourself before, you know, IE ruins your life.

And how’s this for an updated about page with much fewer than 100 things?

Hello. I’ve been neglecting the camera lately, haven’t I? And there’s a lot to photograph too. Well, I’m on the threshold of 9 days of rest so image catch up is on the menu.

If you are of the library persuasion and have been wondering about the lack of direction and all-around disappointment that has been bibliolatry.net lately, wonder no more.

I’m still saying good things about the new blogger, for the most part, but I realized after much deliberation that what I don’t like about it is the “out-of-the-box-blogging-for-dummies” feeling it gives me. I learnt practically everything I know about html and css by monkeying with my blog templates, and those new templates, pretty as they are, are too intimidating even for me, nevermind the nascent blogger. I think what this will mean, in the long run, is less customization and more blogs that look the same as new bloggers take one look at the css and coding and back down in fear.

The more careful readers amongst you might recall me mentioning a pair of blankets that I started knitting for the cats last Fall. Well, I unraveled them this morning. Here’s a lesson from a new knitter: never cast on hundreds of stitches on to too short needles because stitches that are bunched so close together that you can’t tell one from the next are not happy stitches, and unhappy stitches inevitably means unhappy knitter. As an alternative to the big, boring, stockinette blanket, I’ve decided to try wee kitty afghans comprised of wee little squares instead. This will give me a chance to practice different stitches and patterns, and the kitties will be able to boast afghans as opposed to predictable blankets. How many cats do you know with afghans?

And quick word about the new design: if the text seems to cut off in the middle of the page, or blanks out for chunks at a time (giving you white space in the middle of a post or a line of text that’s literally chopped in half at the end of the page), refresh the page. It’s something I had to deal with with my last design (the 3-column one with all the css borders) which makes me think that maybe it’s a css border thing. If you have any insight, I’d love to hear it.