July 2004 Archives

The whole reason the computer thing was bugging me was that I want to fill up my iPod and every time I got half-way through a disk the computer would re-boot and what a pain it is to figure out where the rip left off?!! I use MusicMatch to rip because it's faster, then link to iTunes for the import. But ooh, I am happy now, between last night and today, I have ripped all my cds from Paul Weller, the Jam, Tears for Fears, Michael Penn, and Kraftwerk. Before tonight I had only 7.1 days worth of music (2446 songs). I have room for 30 more GB of music, and I am not even close to ripping my entire CD collection. And I am not being picky, I am ripping whole cds, not just the good tracks.

And did you know this is back? I had no idea it was back in print (the last song on this otherwise NEW!!! album) and I just bought it off iTunes because I know I will like it. And I am listening right now and I do love it. It's one of those concept albums, like Autobahn. And for the record... I loved this song long before I met my Huz... I had it on a mix tape I had taped off the radio in what.. 1986 maybe? Of WJUL which I could get on good days up in my New Hampster bedroom, all the way from ULowell. Good times... :sniff:

Shapely Tank using Gedifra Aragona. It's a strange yarn, two variegated plies. One is cotton-ish, the other, some nylon/acrylic stuff. The cotton is very pale and pastel-ly, while the nylon is jewel toned colors. The cotton has only 4 colors, and the plastic has maybe 10 colors, and they repeat at different intervals, making a really nice confetti look to the fabric. My swatch didn't shrink at all, which I guess makes sense if they are plying two materials together it would really suck if one shrank and the other didn't, leaving a loopy crappy sweater. I am halfway up the front, having just finished the increases, and on my way to the short-row shaping. I am amazed at the simplicity of this pattern. No hand-holding here! She just says increase here, decrease here... no mention of what type of increase to use. In other words, think for yourself! I know, I know, a novel concept for most Americans. ahem.

because I am reading this on my palm via Palm Reader, and am finally getting into it. I loved the other "Ender" books, so if you did, you will dive right into these, I imagine. I must say that reading on the Palm is odd, and even though it's with me all the time, I don't think to pick it up like I do a paper book.

Plus a Marion Zimmer Bradley/ Diana Paxon book, one of the Avalon ones but I don't remember what it was.

Most of the next few were bought in the Hurt Books sale, so they were half price. This one came with a bunch of errata which was nice of them to include, instead of me hunting it down off the Interweave web site.
I don't really even like vests, but I do like some of the patterns, especially the cover one.
There's a few cute ones, but I probably won't make many of these.
Now this was just silly. I want to make some xmas stockings but needed some inspiration on the scale of them, so I bought this one thinking it might help. It might.
This one is nice, I like a lot of the patterns, and can see using this as inspiration.

I keep waiting for good stuff to show up in Crafter's Choice, the crafty book club. Most months I just toss the flyer, but once in a while something good comes along:
It's likely that I will get more inspiration for xmas stockings from this book instead! There's lots of cool stuff that I can see for edging a plain sweater that will make it really nice. Maybe my first design?

I got this one while trying to figure out what to do with a Barnes & Noble Gift Card. I was always curious about the concept, and can see some uses for this technique.

I just started reading this: I loved his other books, so I have been waiting and waiting for this one to come in paperback, but I couldn't pass up a slightly crinkled used copy for only $10 at a local used book shop!
I started reading this last week, but Quicksilver took precedence.

If anyone has any suggestions for a good (and paperback) sci-fi type tome that would make good plane-trip material, drop me a line, eh? I used to have a roomate that read books/week and so I would read what he was done with. Our tastes mostly aligned, but without my sci-fi buddy, I haven't been very adventurous.
Why is it ok to spend so much on knitting books that might suck, but not sci-fi? I guess it's more work to figure out that the sci-fi book sucks, but not really, if you knit something and then discover the pattern sucks. Hmm, I guess I need to re-think this one.
I think I need to make a list of the books I have read -- recently, at least.

A few weeks ago, my computer started having all kinds of problems, and rebooting randomly after only a few minutes of use. This was very unusual for me, since I don't download (steal) music, or have any of that spy/adware stuff that hitches a ride with a lot of the free software out there. My firewall has never been down, my Norton AV updates daily (or it did till all hell broke loose) so I couldn't figure out what's going on. My huz installed one of those spyware finders on his machine and found hundreds of trojans and other crap, so he tried it on mine also. It found only two, but they both use the same port that mail software uses to talk. One of them may have been used for those spammer p2p networks that make me sick. Needless to say, I have cleaned up, and things are much more stable as of today, so I can actually have the machine up long enough to compose a post!

What have I been doing? Shopping, mostly.