Why knitting is good for those with OCD

I’m at home sick today. (stupid cold, stupid sinuses) The only bright spot is that it’s given me time to re-oganise my stash.  I was in the middle of taking the photos of the yarn, that are linked to the spreadsheet showing what I have, how much of it there is, and where it’s kept when I realised why I love my stash so much.

It’s the perfect play-thing for my OCD.

I can catalogue it in spreadsheets, I can reorganise it based on

• prospective project (all the jumper yarn over there, all the hat yarn here)
• colour (spectrum order, obviously,)
• weight, (cobweb through to Aran) and
• quantity.

And the whole time I’m doing that, I can think about what I’m going to make with it all, and therefore which organisation schema makes the most sense.

Of course, because I’m more of a visual person, no matter which schema makes sense, I always end up with it organised by colour. It just looks better that way.

But that explains why all my recent flickr photos are of yarn.

God I hate Microsoft…

I’m working on a client website.

They’ve agreed to give me direct access to their CMS <Good>

Their CMS is Microsoft Content Management Server <Bad>

Microsoft stopped supporting CMS years ago <Worse>

They no longer provide any documentation on how the damn thing works <Worser>

Oh yeah, and although it “works over the internet so you only need a web browser to use it” it relies entirely on ActiveX controls that only function in Internet Explorer. Which means I (a Mac) have to run a virtual machine to run IE just to deal with this ancient crap product.

I freakin hate Microsoft.

Dealing with the stash

I have recently acquired the first of Yarn Harlot’s books.

I thought it would make me laugh – I was right

I didn’t think it would teach me useful tricks – I was wrong….

See the problem that faces every knitter who lives with a non-knitter is how to deal with the stash. Stash is the yarn you keep at home. Non-knitters assume that the point of stash is to turn it into knitted garments, so they get very, very confused by the fact that knitters continue to acquire stash far faster than it can reasonably be knit.

That’s because they’re wrong. The point of stash is not to be turned into garments – the point of stash is just to be; just to sit their being soft, and warm and prettily coloured, gently inspiring the knitter into dreams of things that *could* be made out of the stash, but won’t, because then the stash could no longer create those dreams…

I love my stash

Anyway, as a relatively new knitter my stash is still comparatively small, but I am already encountering the raised eyebrow when I bring home yet another skien of sock-yarn. So eventually I will have to start to conceal it in places other than the designated yarn-storage bucket.

And this is where the Yarn Harlot was so useful – thanks to her book I now have a long list if hidey-holes where yarn can be stored.

No, I’m not going to share them. My husband reads this blog and I don’t want him to find out…

Perhaps a trip to my LYS this lunch might be on the cards – they’ve got some lovely silk/wool sock yarn I’ve been eyeing off and now I’ve got places I can hide it…

Job Vacancy – Financial Services

Sadly it’s been taken down now – but I do hope they found someone…

Sony Reader information

Over at Mobileread we’ve been talking about how often we get asked about our Sony Readers. I’ve raved about mine here before, so as you’ll know, I love it, and I’m more than happy to talk about it at length.

But after a while it can get a little tedious repeating the same information, and worse, if the person I’m talking to is seriously interested they have to remember it if they want to get one themselves.

So, I printed up some of those Avery perforated business cards with the most important details to be able to give to people who ask about the reader. My cards say…

Sony Reader PRS 505 (www.sonystyle.com for specs and details)
Can purchase online through ebay or B&H photo video NY (www.bhphotovideo.com) or in person in the US and Europe
Best software Calibre (calibre.kovidgoyal.net)
Best source of ebooks www.fictionwise.com and www.gutenberg.org (and tons of others)
Best source of additional information about this and other ebook readers www.mobileread.com
And it is the best gadget I have ever owned.

I mentioned this on Mobileread and some bright spark suggested turning them into a shareable Google doc so anyone else who wanted to print them out could.

So I did – and it’s here.

Update:

Well as I predicted the hard drive did not make it through the back-up process (persistent I/O errors for those of you who care)

However it turned out to be pretty easy to get my entire music collection back from my iPod (I love Terminal – is there nothing you can’t do) So in the end I lost some back-ups, which were easy enough to re-back-up, and movies which meant having the re-rip the DVD’s but again, no big deal.

The new hard drive is a whisper quiet Fujitsu 250GB, in the same kind of brushed aluminium as my MacBook (co-ordination is important).

The BCC was cut out of my leg yesterday evening, it was less painful than I expected, but my leg is feeling a little tender and throbby today.

So, on the whole, noting was as bad as I thought

Bummer

Things that can ruin your day….

Portable hard drive crashing taking with it your 80GB of Music and 40GB of movies.(1)

Getting diagnosed with Basal Cell Carcinoma.(2)

If both happen in the same 24 hour period you are officially having quite a bad day.

(1) I am currently nursing the drive and attempting to make a back-up before it actually collapses on me. I don’t fancy my chances.

(2) It’s on my leg and I’m having it cut out next week. BCC is generally non-maglinant and not a big deal. But they’re still going to cut a chuck out of me which will require stiches and will scar. I’m not concerned about the BCC, I just don’t like pain much…

I couldn’t have said it better myself

As, thanks to GFC, climate change and general crapness, it increasingly seems the world is going to hell in an handbasket, I refer you to the wisdom of the British Ministry of Information circa 1939

Ukulele love

As some of my regular readers will know I play (for some definition of play) the ukulele. It’s fair to say at this stage the ukulele wins more often that I do.

Anyway, while killing time on the intertubes waiting for a conference call to finish I came across this fabulous free e-book So you just got your first ukulele.

It’s from the fabulously named Uke Hunt website which I also recommend to ukulele players just starting out.

Why oh why…

As I’ve mentioned earlier we’re going through a re-branding exercise here. In fact we’re nearly done, The designers sent us the CD with the finished artwork on Monday

Now, when I briefed them I explained that things like our proposal template had to be useable in Word, and that the website design had to be easy to to install and use in our CMS.

I, however, was not responsible for signing off on quotes and those requirements weren’t reflected.

So on Monday I got a CD containing templates in InDesign… This is a mjor pain in the neck, but not impossible – I can, and have, converted them the word. (Although changing elegant simple InDesign into crappy Word hurts me in my heart)

We also got the the Website design

In Photoshop.

I could rant about why this drives me insane  – But the ‘vark guys have already said it better – go and read their comments on Photoshop as a web design tool.

And if you are a designer. Please learn – there is a difference between screen and paper.