First things first

Around the end of June, my tech life changed dramatically in two ways.

First, I became the owner of an iPhone 3G. Jan bought this two years ago and has used it pretty much nonstop every since. (We joke that it is his “auxiliary brain.”) When the iPhone 4 came out last month, he preordered one; it arrived (and was immediately activated) the day before it would have been available in stores.

Then the 3G became mine. I’m not using it as a phone, though. My cell phone use doesn’t justify this expensive; it currently amounts to about 400 minutes per year–so I use T-Mobile’s prepaid 1000 minutes good for one year for $100 deal. So the old iPhone is functioning as an iPod Touch*, which means I have Internet access whenever I have a WiFi connection.

So what am I doing with the 3G? Mostly gaming. It’s very handy for playing an asynchronous Scrabble-like game with friends, as well as Carcassonne. (If Settlers of Catan ever comes out for the iPhone, I will probably disappear for a while…) I’m also having loads of fun with Plants versus Zombies, which is exactly what it sounds like (and available for many platforms, for non-iPhone users out there).

The other big change is that I have pretty much stopped using Facebook in the past few weeks. I ranted here about Facebook several months ago, but ultimately still found it a useful place to keep in touch with people. But lately, I find that reading Facebook just annoys me: too much passive-aggression, too many “let me say something vague and negative so lots of people will ask me ‘what’s wrong?’” status updates, too much inanity. I started hiding people from my feed, and when I realized that I was hiding most people, I knew it was time to go. Oh, and there’s also that whole thing about how Facebook completely ignores any privacy concerns and aggressive markets users’ information to other vendors. Yeah, that.

(I haven’t nuked my Facebook account–still on the fence about that–but I’ve removed most of my personal information from there.)

So, aside from the blogosphere, where am I hanging out these days online? Believe it or not, Twitter, where I’m First Things; you can find me here. I’ve been active there only for a couple of weeks now, and so far it’s been…interesting. More on that later, though.

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*What a lame name. Seriously, Steve Jobs: Apple has excelled in the design and marketing department for some time now. This was the best you guys could come up with?

It’s funny that I originally started this blog to keep track of my knitting projects yet lately I’ve been lousy about posting knitting-related updates here. I’m still knitting these days–not so much with my knitting group (busy schedules and other interests and obligations have made it difficult for us all to get together as often as we used to), but mostly during times when I’m sitting around waiting somewhere or watching a DVD.Early last month I finished the hem on my Wallaby. I’d originally knit it with a rolled hem, but after test-wearing it for a couple of months I decided I didn’t like how the roll formed a “bump” that poked me in the lower back whenever I leaned back on it. So I picked up stitches all around the cast-on edge, knit a hem, and sewed it down. I’m pleased with the results.



I also finished my squirrel and oak mittens to match the ones I knit for Sylvia a year and a half ago. She really wanted us to have matching mittens, and it took me a while to get the yarn and gauge right.You may recall that I knit Sylvia’s left mitten three times before I got the size right. I did not rip the failures but plan to knit their mates at some point. The small ones can be a baby gift for someone, and the larger ones will probably fit Sylvia this year.



I had similar trials with my mittens. First I knit one in Knitpicks Palette, which turned out to be too small for me. Then I knit one in Knitpicks worsted Wool of the Andes on #4 needles. Too small again. Using #6 needles yielded success. Fortunately, I always start with the squirrel mitten, which has “20″ at the top. Since it’s highly unlikely that we’ll start a new century before I finish the oak mitten, I’ll be able to knit the mates for these and give them away. (The Palette ones are likely to fit Sylvia in a couple of years.)

Happily, I had no gauge problems whatsoever with this baby cardigan, sized for 6-12 months. Two years ago I took a class with Margaret Fisher and was so inspired that a couple of months later I got her book, Seven Things that can “Make or Break” a Sweater™: Techniques and Tips for Hand Knitters (even though the capitalization choices and use of quotes in the title annoy me).

This baby cardigan project features all of the elements she discussed in that book: as you read the book, you work through the project, thus getting some hands-on experience with each technique.I knit this in Rowan All-Season Cotton from my stash. What a fun project! I definitely want to knit this pattern again. This particular sweater went to a friend who is expecting her first child at the end of July. I can’t wait to see photos of the baby wearing it this winter!

For now, at least.

The last few weeks have been super busy around here. Between preparations for Sylvia’s birthday party tomorrow, shopping for a new car, working on the garden, and getting the house in order for both the party and my parents’ visit, I haven’t had time for blogging. I’m got plenty to blog about, though–and hope to get to it next week or so, once the party/visit bustle subsides.

I started this blog in early September 2005 (happy birthday, Blog!), originally intending it to be a place where I could keep track of my knitting by posting pictures and specs of various projects. Its scope quickly grew to encompass pretty much anything that interested me, but knitting still makes an appearance.

I haven’t written about knitting for a while, but I have been working on (and even finishing!) some interesting projects. I’ll write about those projects another time, but for now I want to write about an all-day knitting event I attended over the weekend.

Last year I attended Knitters’ Day Out (KDO) for the first time and had a wonderful experience, which I blogged about three months late. (D’oh!) I was able to go again this year and once again had a terrific time. All together, seven people from my local knitting group went; two went up the night before (they were teaching a class and had a free hotel room), and the five of us rode up together early in the morning.

Again, I took two classes.* My morning class was “Entrelac Basics” with Gwen Bortner. She is a professional knitting instructor–and boy, it really shows. She was very clear and very thorough, and she had the best knitting instruction handouts I’ve ever seen. I finally learned how to do entrelac, which isn’t as terrifying at it seems when you understand how it works.

And, even better, I learned how to knit backwards. OH MY DOG that is so cool. I can’t even begin to describe the coolness of it. Learning this technique alone was worth the price of admission. Basically, you do the purl part of stockinette from the back, so you never have to turn your work. This is handy for something like entrelac, where instructions might have something like “Row 1: K1. Row 2: P1.” All that flip-flopping your knitting back and forth can get annoying, but when you learn how to knit backwards, it’s all a distant memory.

(How is it that I never heard of backwards knitting before? It is so practical! And easy! Is there some Great Conspiracy to keep this hidden from the knitting community at large? Hmmmm!)

My afternoon class was “Double Knitting,” which was taught by one of the KDO organizers. (Each year at KDO they have three “celebrity” instructors, and you can take one class with one of them.) She was very nice, but the difference between her class and Bortner’s was pretty striking. When you teach knitting for a living and not just for fun, a certain level of professionalism and thoroughness isn’t optional. It also didn’t help that the afternoon class was full of people who just didn’t listen. I swear, in the ten minutes after the instructor told us to cast on twenty stitches (instructions that were replicated on the handouts she’d given us), at least half a dozen people asked how many stitches we were supposed to cast on. Argh!

Double knitting is pretty cool, too–and, like entrelac, not complicated at all once you understand how it works. It does move along pretty slowly, though, since you’re basically doing K1P1 across the length of each row–and across twice as many stitches as the row’s final length–so I’m not sure how often I’ll use this technique.

During breaks I visited the yarn market, which had maybe twenty or so vendors. Many of them sold yarn and notions that are available anywhere, but there were also quite a few purveyors of locally grown/spun/dyed yarn and fleece, and those were my favorite places to visit. When I stopped by the Bearlin Acres Farm booth, Linda, the owner, recognized me. “You’re the one who knit those mittens three times!” she exclaimed. She had enjoyed seeing the blog post and photos of those mittens–and was pleased to know that Sylvia loves them and wore them all winter long.

Linda had four skeins of yarn that she’d spun from Stansborough Grey fleece, and though the geek in me really really wanted to get these, I couldn’t justify the expense. These fingering-weight skeins were $30 each, but since I’d probably need two skeins to knit the socks I had in mind (which, for this yarn, would definitely be the Rivendell pattern), $60 for a pair of socks was just too much for my budget. (I should point out that rest of Linda’s yarn was very affordably priced; the price of this stuff reflects the cost of getting fleece all the way from New Zealand.)

I actually managed to avoid buying anything–well, anything for myself, that is. Toward the end of the day, I picked up something for Sylvia: twenty-five little felt balls in a variety of colors (with a bit more purple than anything else). She loves them! We are going to get some elastic thread and string them together into a necklace for her.
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*When I told Sylvia what I was going to be doing that day, she said, “So it’s like you’re going to knitting school!”

So here’s a blog post about my blog. Specifically, about how comments are handled here.

I love when readers comment on posts here—partly because I think of this space as a conversation, not a monologue; and partly because it’s nice to know that someone else out there is reading this stuff. (If I wanted to write only for myself, I’d start a LiveJournal and set the privacy level on each post to “Just Me.”)

My own philosophy is that if someone goes to the trouble to read and comment on a post, I owe them a response. I’ve tried a couple of approaches to responding to comments, and until now haven’t been happy with either of them.

At first, I used to post my responses in the comment threads themselves. But unless the previous commenters come back to check the thread, they never see what I wrote. And because remembering to check back for follow-up comments can be a PITA, most people don’t do this.*

Next, I tried the approach of responding to comments directly by e-mail. This ensured that each commenter saw my response to what he or she wrote, but doesn’t do much to foster dialogue among readers. I’m not saying I expect commenters to write essays to each other. But it can be a lot of fun when one comment inspires another and the next thing you know there are interesting things going on that aren’t necessarily related to the original post.

So to make things easier for all of us—me, regular readers, people stopping by for the first time, anyone—to converse here, in early February I added a nifty plugin to this blog: Subscribe to Comments.

Subscribe to Comments lets you do just what its name promises. If you tick the box before posting your comment, you’ll automatically get e-mail updates about any comments that follow yours for this particular post.

Oh, and I’ve recently adjusted the feed for this blog so that all posts appear in their entirety in readers. I had it set to display just the first few lines before because I really wanted people to click over to here and see what other people (not just me) had to say, too, but with that new plugin in place I don’t think that’s necessary anymore.

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*It is possible to subscribe to the comment feed for this blog (just click on “Comments RSS” under “Meta” in the right-hand column on this page), but my hunch is that most people aren’t interested in reading every single comment that gets posted here—just the ones that follow their own comments.

I joined Facebook about two years ago but didn’t do much with it at first. Then, about nine months ago, it seemed that pretty much everyone who hadn’t yet joined Facebook started signing up. And posting there. A lot. Since then, I’ve been getting friend requests from people long removed from my social circle—elementary school classmates with whom I haven’t communicated since graduation, for example. And meeting someone new in person these days is nearly always followed by a Facebook friend request.

If I were in need of a dissertation topic*, I’d seriously consider an examination of online social networking. It is sociologically fascinating to me: a quasi-anonymous environment populated by physically isolated (from each other, that is) individuals who divulge their innermost—and often passive-aggressive—thoughts (via status updates and memes, for example), skeletons on the closet (e.g., digital scans of high-school photos from one’s “big hair” days), and random musings in a place that feels private but is actually quite public. Some of the things I see on Facebook leave me shouting, “TMI! TMI!” and wanting to wash my eyeballs afterward.**

But through Facebook I have learned some interesting things about some of my friends. It’s enabled me to maintain contact with some people who live far away from me and to renew contact with some people from my past. That second category is a tricky one, though, since whenever I get a friend request from someone I knew long ago but haven’t heard from in a long time, I remind myself that there’s a reason why we didn’t stay in touch***. Sometimes people drift apart; sometimes the only common ground they have is attendance at the same school.

Facebook is a huge time suck. Updates to status blurbs, posted items, comments on other peoples’ stuff—all of that fills me with a sense of urgency. For a while I felt like I had to check Facebook a gazillion times a day just to keep up. I didn’t want to miss out on any of the inside jokes or shared moments, especially since so many of these online interactions become part of a pool of shared knowledge that is referenced during in-person encounters and shapes them.

For me, Facebook became oppressive. Not only did I feel like I was on an information treadmill, but I was putting so much energy there that I didn’t have much left for blogging or correspondence. It’s too easy for me to dash off a quick comment there rather than put the effort and thought into the more substantial writing that I want to give some topics. (So yeah, I am staying far, far away from Twitter. No tweets for me!)

N.B.: I am not dissing Facebook or the people who use it. Rather, I’ve been thinking about what I want from social interactions and find that Facebook is not my primary outlet for these things. It has its uses for me, though. I’ll still keep up with Facebook, just not nearly as frequently or intensively as before. This slowing down feels right to me.****

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*Which I’m not. One is enough, thankyouverymuch.

**For an interesting discussion of this, take a look at this recent Time article, “25 Things I Didn’t Want to Know About You,” about a Facebook meme that’s been making the rounds for the past few weeks. My favorite is this one: “23. My friends say that when they shave my back, I purr like a walrus.”

***So far I’ve accepted all friend requests I’ve received from people from my way-back past, mostly because I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings. But every time I do this, I feel like I am contributing to the redefining of the word friend—and not in a good way. I believe I have many acquaintances but not a huge number of true friends. On Facebook, though, everyone is a friend. This bothers me somehow.

****Wow, look at all the footnotes here. I have read way too much academic writing. At least the footnotes here haven’t rebelled, as they did in Robert Grudin’s very excellent Book (which was published, incidentally, many years before Whoopi Goldberg’s famous memoir of the same title), in which the footnotes actually take over a chapter.

My blogging has been derailed for the past month a half—first by our trip up to Vermont, then by the Nigerian State Security Services arresting my brother-in-law. Andy is back in New York now (Jan, Sylvia, and I took a day trip up to Brooklyn to see him today), so things can start to return to normal around here.

First up, two weeks of CSA boxes. We’ve been getting a lot of potatoes, nectarines, green beans (we ate the last batch smothered in mayonnaise and garlic—yum!), and tomatoes lately. We’re in the end-of-summer phase now; two weeks ago we got what is likely the last watermelon of the year, and last week we got what is probably the last of the season’s sweet corn.

So what else has happened in the month since we returned from Vermont? Sylvia started preschool (for the first time ever) nearly two weeks ago. That’s a biggie that warrants its own post—not one of mimsy musings about how my little girl is growing up so quickly (even though she is), but one about our commute to school.

I’ve been doing quite a bit of knitting.

And pickle-making. (What else am I going to do with all of those CSA cucumbers?).

And game playing. (The cake is a lie! Bonus points to the person who knows that reference.)

And just enjoying the end of the summer. (I hope you are, too.)

More on all of that later…

A new Joss Whedon project? Check.

Nathan Fillion, Felicia Day, and Neil Patrick Harris? Check.

And they’re all singing? Double-check.

Teaser from Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog on Vimeo.

I love reading blogs. I love how blogs can offer intellectual and creative stimulation. And I love how blogs can point me in directions I hadn’t seen before.

A lot of this pointing takes the form of links. I don’t click through every link I see, but when one grabs my interest I hover the cursor over it and look at the URL in the status bar at the bottom of my browser to see if the link looks clickworthy.

On some sites, though, my placid cursor-hovering is interrupted by a little window that pops up in the middle of my screen: a Snap Shot.

I hate these things. Loathe them.

First, they obscure a good chunk of the surrounding text. Here I am, merrily reading along, when suddenly one of those little windows appears and completely derails my train of thought.

Second, the Snap Shot windows are so small that they’re actually useless. (Note that I am not advocating any embiggening.) Whatever text and images appear in them are barely discernible from the noise in the window. If there’s a link to, say, Matthew Fox in a Speedo*, that little window isn’t going to show much. If I really want to see Matthew Fox in a Speedo, I’m going to have to follow that link.

Third. if I want to know where a link goes, I find it far more useful to just look at the URL. The URL of a blog post can reveal a ton of information, including the website, post title, and post date.

Fortunately, there are ways for site visitors to avoid seeing those annoying windows: by disabling Snap Shots. Apparently, the company has had enough complaints about this product that they’ve included this info in their FAQ; just follow the link in #3 on the list. Unfortunately, this solution requires cookie placement and has to be reactivated whenever your cookies are deleted.

If you’re using Firefox and running the AdBlock Plus extension (which is awesome), you’re in luck: you can get rid of those Snap Shots forever. (Well, for as long as you’re running AdBlock Plus. Which is so awesome that you’ll never want to get rid of it. So yeah, I guess that does mean forever.) Check here for the details. (Opera users will find their solution in the comments to that post.)

*That one’s just for you, Gina!

Three weeks ago, the renowned knitblogger Franklin came to the Philadelphia area to take pictures for his 1000 Knitters photography project. His shooting location: Wool Gathering, in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania. Kennett Square is the Mushroom Capitol of the World, just down the road from the Brandywine River Museum (more Wyeths than you can shake a stick at), home to a Revolutionary War sites, and only about half an hour from my house. So of course I had to go.

Five people from my local knitting group (plus the mother of one of them) arranged to meet at the shop at 11:30. I got there first and found a very interesting performance in progress. The tiny store was packed with people (Franklin and his setup, though not huge, did take up a good chunk of the inside space next to the storefront window), and the sidewalk outside was covered with knitters, chatting away and knitting on various projects.

After I put my name down on the list, I looked around inside the store for a bit, hoping to find something that would work well for Sylvia’s sweater (I didn’t). Fortunately, just next door was a terrific cafe where my friends and I (and Jan and Sylvia, who’d tagged along for the outing) grabbed lunch while we waiting for our numbers to be called. Good thing the cafe was there, too, because we had to wait about an hour and a half. Franklin was snapping away as quickly as he could, but there were a lot of people there (several of whom, as I overheard, had traveled from a few states away, even!).

When number 78 was called, I handed Franklin the model-release form, shook his hand, picked up the scarf, and took my place on the stool in front of the white backdrop. When I looked at the scarf, I was surprised to find that the stitches were all “backward” (i.e., the right “legs” were behind the needle rather than in front of it). My far-more-knowledgeable-than-me knitting friends explained to me later that the previous knitter had used a different knitting style; me, all I know is plain ol’ vanilla knitting and purling, so I didn’t really know what to do with those stitches. So I just knit into the left legs—and found out later that I should have knit into the right legs. (Fortunately, my friend Debbie, who was number 79, said she had no trouble working with the stitches I’d left for her.)

So what was it like to sit in front of Franklin’s camera for three or four minutes? I’m fairly self-conscious in front of a lens and don’t feel particularly photogenic. But he did a great job of putting me at ease, and what impressed me the most was his ability to conduct a coherent, engaging conversation with me while I sat there. He posted in his blog later that he’d photographed 131 people that day (wow), and although I certainly didn’t see all of them I did get to see him interact with several people. And in all of those interactions, he was grateful (we are, after all, providing him with free material for this project, which he hopes to turn into a book), gracious, and actually interested in what knitters had to say and the stories they told him.

It was a very warm day (one of those too-warm days that hit before the air conditioning is turned on), and he was working at a pretty steady clip. But I was really impressed with his interest in the knitters as people, not just as photographic subjects. And the fact that he was able to talk with each one of them is pretty amazing.

So if Franklin and his photography project make a stop in or near your hometown, I very much recommend spending a few minutes in front of his camera. Aside from the opportunity to meets lots of knitters and participate in an interesting project, you also get a chance to meet a nice person. And you know, that sort of opportunity doesn’t come around every day.