Making some slight changes to the blog address… November 16, 2009

Please note that the new address is http://materialthoughts.wordpress.com If you subscribe via a blogroll or other service, please change the address now.

It just makes more sense to have the blog address reflect the blog title– all posts have been imported from this address to that one, but I won’t be adding any more posts here at this address, and eventually it will not be valid.

Back to the Vikings November 12, 2009

I am well past the beginning of the armhole steeks now, and into the shaping of the V-Neck for this cardigan. It’s no longer possible to knit without someone reading to me; I’ve become spoiled. So we searched our library shelves last night and decided to start the next Cornwell book in the Viking series, The Pale Horseman. History and battles still figure prominently in this series about a disenfranchised Elderman from the first century B.C. In the first book, Uhtred is a child, captured by the Danes after they kill his Northumbrian father in battle. He is treated, however, like another son of the Viking king who took him, and his adventures weave in and out of both English and Danish cultures, both Catholic and Pagan religions. It is a fascinating story.

We’re seriously considering getting a Kindle or a Nook. We don’t have time to go to the public library, yet we don’t have enough shelf space to hold all the books we read. I haven’t known anyone personally who has used the Nook but I did get my hands on a Kindle once and was properly impressed.

Fabric Freeze November 10, 2009

Once upon a time, I was an aspiring concert pianist. I can remember looking down at the keyboard, my fingers poised above it, ready to bring forth harmonious renderings of rhythm and melody from an array of ebony and ivory. Unless I was giving a recital, I knew that the penalty for mistakes was limited to my own chagrin. I could, and did, practice hour after hour on isolated measures, changing their rhythm at times so that my fingers became so accustomed to the sequence of keys and positions of the hand that they seemed to grow a brain of their own; then reverting to the specified rhythm; playing them backwards and forwards, one hand and then the other, then both together; using the metronome to slowly bring the whole up to speed. What a joy it was to hear the polished piece after so much effort, what exhilaration to play a concerto or nocturne I previously thought impossible!

But the thing is, it does not require significant effort to make a mistake while playing a piano composition, in terms of preparation. You miss a note, you’ve wasted a mere second. You might want to cause yourself bodily harm from frustration, but you can always get up from the piano and pretend it never happened. There’s no physical reminder of your failure.

Lately I find myself gazing down upon several cones of yarn, knowing that they comprise a good blend of color, texture and fiber; knowing they will look wonderful in my dining room, knowing that a beautiful piece of fabric can be woven from them. But now, the price of a mistake is much greater. Winding a warp, threading reed and heddles, tying up treadles, throwing shuttles. After all that, to realize that your vision was totally different from the reality– that is what petrifies me. It freezes me into inaction. I am afraid to fail.

The battle for Sharpsburg, Antietem Creek is finally over– 23,000 soldiers dead in a single day. 23,000 and more who refused to fail. My troubles are trivial.

My stage awaits.

Devil Loppers and Data Basil November 8, 2009

The conference is over now, and I can get back to regular life, endeavoring at the same time to apply all the new knowledge I acquired over the past week.

But first, I need to get the sound of foreign accents out of my mind. I constantly hear East Indians saying “devil lopper” instead of “developer”, and Italians saying, in a very seductive way, “data-basil”. Only they really don’t say “basil”, but it sounds so delicious I feel the word simply must be edible. Then there was the comedic speaker who asked an audience member if he was wearing a kilt today, because if so he was going to have to learn how to sit like a lady because he (the speaker) could not tolerate another “Sharon Stone” moment as when he (the kilt-wearer) sat in the front row the last time.

I don’t know how much you out there in fiber-land know about databases in general and SQL Server in particular. Many of you probably glaze over at the thought of anything technical; others of you recognize the pattern-lover inside you and its relationship to data and are curious to know more, still others are known practitioners of the art of data. On the other hand, the majority of conference-goers, I speculate, probably do not knit… I saw nary a needle at the event. The thing is, we knew that we all had something very much in common– databases. Right? So you would think there would be a lot of talk amongst us, just as there is among knitters who know themselves to be part of the fiber world. Sadly, database folks are not typically the most social people around. My own social tolerance level is pretty low, but I found myself feeling very alone in a sea of people. Now and then, I would strike up a conversation, usually at lunch, but it was simply polite chatter that would lead nowhere. Which is where I think this paragraph is leading…. nowhere. But it was on my mind, and there it is, spilt all over my screen. Messy.

Last night I finished up the second ball of yarn for Colette, which put me in the middle of the seed-stitch belt on the back. I will put it away now until the time, which inevitably must come, when I need soothing stockinette once more. The puckeriness you see is a design element. The bottom portion is completely cast off, then smaller needles are used to pick up and knit only about 3/4 of the original number of stitches. I am curious as to why the stitches aren’t simply decreased. Another headscratcher. I could have defied the pattern and done it my way, but I was feeling more sheeplike, and so followed the pattern slavishly.

Meanwhile, the Rebels and the Yankees are on either side of Antietam Creek. General McClellan is foolishly waiting for reinforcements before he attacks, while Lee is hoping that additional Rebels make it to the scene before McClellan makes up his mind to strike. McClellan thinks there are 80,000 Rebels there already, while Lee knows there are fewer than 17,000. And I knit frantically away on Icy River, the tactile equivalent of putting my fingers in my ears and saying “lalalalalala” so that I avoid paying too close attention to all the bloody horrific parts that are coming.

WITless in Seattle: Access Denied November 5, 2009

“Bring anybody!” they said about the WIT luncheon held at the PASS conference yesterday.

“There’s a dearth of young women entering the field of technology,” they cried.

So I took the opportunity to invite my own daughter, who is soon, very soon, to graduate from college with a degree in computer science. I figured it would be a place for her to network, get to know other women in the field, gain some insight into what obstacles she might encounter, get advice on how to get her first job after college, etc.

We got to the door and she was denied access to the luncheon. I protested, and another person was consulted (neither one of these guards were actually members of the PASS organization, I am sure) and she was again rebuffed, rejected, turned away, denied entrance. And I? I was seething with anger and frustration. My co-worker the data architect had attended the morning spotlight session, where it was affirmed that “anyone” could attend the luncheon. The guards apparently concluded that only “anyone” who had paid a couple of thousand dollars to attend the conference qualified. I figured I would get nowhere arguing with them, so we turned around and left. We went out to a very nice lunch and talked amongst ourselves about why young women aren’t entering the field.

The conference continues to be a goldmine of information about, um, information. But I won’t bore you with the details.

Colette stockinette continues while my brain remains engaged in mulling over the insights of the week.

Intelligence: PASS it Along November 3, 2009

In a few minutes, I head out the door for more fun at my second day of the PASS conference. Yesterday I attended an all-day pre-conference session entitled “Delivering Intelligence to the Masses”. I’d always wanted to be able to do that. Unfortunately, it seems the masses are required to be adept at using Excel, Sharepoint, PerformancePoint, Business Intelligence Development Studio, SQL Server Reporting Services, Report Builder 1.0 and/or ReportBuilder 2.0 (inexplicably, these last two are not versions of the same product, but distinct products).

Masses, I don’t think you’re going to get a whole lot smarter anytime soon. But go ahead, try using a pivot table in Excel connected to a UDM in Analysis Services. I dare you.

By the time I got home last night, my brain was so overwrought that the simple act of knitting with two correct colors in a pattern designated by a chart was simply impossible. Instead, I chose simple ribbing and stockinette.

The story begins with Beadwork, which as I mentioned a few posts ago, did not show up well using the gray gansey yarn with which I commenced. A couple of weeks ago I bought some Louet Gems sportweight, thinking it would be perfect for that design. Not so much. I just cannot adore superwash yarn. It has no character, no fuzziness. It’s too much like cotton. Sunday I exchanged it for some Rowan silk tweed in a very deep green color; the tweed flecks are chartreuse.

I thought at the time I would try designing something myself– something simple. Maybe a cardigan with a seed or moss-stitch collar, even a couple of pockets and some waist shaping. I flipped through some of my knitting books, looking for ideas and mulling the possibilities over langorously when I was stopped short. Turns out, Jean Moss beat me to it with her Colette cardigan (in the book Sculptured Knits).

I knit one pocket on Sunday, cleverly combining swatching with actual usefulness. I wanted to see how bulky the pleat would make the pocket– it seemed to me that three layers of fabric in the pocket, combined with the front of the sweater itself might be bulky and heavy. It’s not. the yarn is very lightweight and will stand up to this extra thickness very well. So last night, brain-dead as I was, I started the back.

Is it just me, or does that conference logo look an awful lot like a Harley-Davidson emblem?

An interesting observation… the number of women at the conference is actually declining. This is disheartening, but I understand that it is definitely the trend. In fact, the Women in Technology (WIT) luncheon tomorrow is all about this topic. Out of over 100 people in my conference session yesterday, only 6 were women. Of those 6, three were not American-born. I have opinions about why (as usual) but I’ll save them until later.

Today? What a treat… the first thing on my agenda is Leveraging PSSDiag/SQLDiag for Efficient Troubleshooting, followed by Disk Partition Alignment: Increase Disk I/O Throughput By 10%, 30%, or More – The Best Kept Secret in SQL Server Disk I/O Performance!!!

Aren’t you jealous?!

The Tricky Part about Treats November 1, 2009

Wherein we survive another Halloween…

Sherlock lies beside me every evening as I knit. My left-hand ball of yarn is usually near his rear feet; his head rests upon my leg and we sit contentedly. Sometimes Claire occupies the sofa on the other side of Sherlock, but for small spaces of time only. Last night proceeded thusly:

{Sherlock lies beside me, I am knitting} The doorbell rings. Sherlock shoots off the couch, under the coffee table and to the front door, yapping wildly while Claire woofs her deeper barks. They race each other like the hounds of Hell. With Sherlock goes my ball of Hyacinth. The Others open the door and treat the costumed visitors. Sherlock returns and settles in again.

This scenario repeats itself a dozen times. Each time, it seems that the ball of yarn is taken further away from me until finally, it happens. The yarn is caught around Sherlock’s hind leg and he drags it all the way to the door. The path he takes– under the coffee table, around the ottoman, around a chair, through the kitchen, over the sectional– reminds me of one of those Family Circle cartoons that show the path of the little kids. I have to calm myself and coach Sherlock back along the same path in order for my yarn to be returned to me in a meaningful condition. This I do; Sherlock is an apt performer and quickly catches on. The yarn remains intact but I’m not sure I can say the same about my sanity.

I was really glad when the young ghouls stopped coming.

And so last night after having warded off all tricks by giving out treats, we began the last of the Civil War series: The Bloody Ground. Antietam (the South calls it Sharpsburg), the bloodiest battle of the entire war. I’m not sure I’m looking forward to being in the midst of it, but that is where Mr. Cornwell will undoubtedly put me.

And now I have a little exercise for you. Please observe Exhibit A, the collection of yarns involved in my Icy River design. Let me remind you that I put these colors together three or four years ago, with no thought whatsoever about other peoples’ designs.

Next, observe Exhibit B, the yarns I recently purchased with which to knit Anne Feitelson’s Hillswick Lumber cardigan.

Get my point?

Oh my God, Just Lay Me Down October 31, 2009

I am sitting at my desk in my office on a Saturday. Why? Because it’s “Maintenance Weekend”, something that occurs once a month and means that we kick all the users out of all the systems so that we can patch them up (the systems, not the users). It also means that the things I do often take a while and I simply wait for them to complete, check to see if they completed successfully, and figure out why they failed if they fail. And today, everything is failing the first or second time around. I am slowly pulling my hair out by the roots. The causes aren’t catastrophic… a dba failed to create a directory here or there; license files needed to be moved from there to here, that sort of thing. But each cause takes time to find and then to fix and then to begin again. Grrrr. Arghh.

We finished the third Nathanial Starbuck book, Battle Flag, last night. Bernard Cornwell will never win prizes for beautiful prose, but he is an engaging historian and brings to life the characters who existed during the War of Northern Aggression, whom we have come to admire as great heros– namely, Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson and Robert E. (“Granny”) Lee. Further, I’ve learned much more than I ever knew about the pre-Grant generals of the North: McClellan, MacDowell, Pope. They (not their soldiers) were afraid (or at least overly cautious) to fight even though they had the best-equipped forces ever to exist. My forebears wore rags and used up all their ammunition, but they fought like bears to protect their land, their families, and their rights. The majority of the southerners didn’t own slaves and weren’t fighting to keep slavery, and the majority of northerners weren’t fighting to free slaves, but to preserve the Union.

Anyway, I awoke in the middle of the night with a dull stomachache that wouldn’t go away, so I crept downstairs to make myself some ginger tea, and as I sipped I looked up Stonewall Jackson on the internet, where he is alive and well. I was curious about the phrase that caught on among Jackson’s brigade just before the second battle for Manasses in August of 1862. Apparently a Yankee soldier wanted a look at this man Jackson, who was reknowned for his skill in strategy and his success in battle. Upon seeing that Jackson was an ordinary-looking man with light blue eyes and huge feet who sat ramrod-stright upon his horse, holding his left hand in the air for extended lengths of time, the Yankee declared: “Oh my God, just lay me down!” From that time forward, the phrase was used to provoke roils of laughter among the troops.

It’s still sort of a headscratcher, but I guess the phrase is supposed to mean, in a semi-sarcastic sort of way, that you realize you might as well just give up, because this foe is so formidable. Thoughts?

Sock Muumuus? October 30, 2009

I’ve been practicing psychoanalysis without a license. My patient is me, and though my hourly rates are exhorbitant I’m not certain I’m deriving benefit from the treatment. Lately our sessions have dealt mainly with the subject of handknitted socks.

I ask myself: How do you feel about handknitted socks?
- I do like the idea of handknitted socks. I admire the intricacy of some I’ve seen. I like knitting heels.

That’s it?
- I like tiny needles.

What is it that you don’t like about them? (I continue my probe, trying to ascertain the truth.)

The truth, I decide, is twofold. The first fold: I do not like being subjected to the sight of handknitted socks in magazines, on patterns, at Ravelry or on blogs. Why? Because: these views usually consist of a “sturdy” calf, ankle and foot encased in a sock. The sock might be beautiful but if the flesh beneath it is not, I am turned off completely. I feel that if I wore that sock, my own lower appendages would look the same as the sockwearing model. Feet and legs– especially unattractive ones– should remain hidden inside shoes and underneath pants legs, just as unsightly rolls of fat are better off hidden beneath voluminous folds of fabric, like muumuus. Show me a sock that exhibits the same effect on feet as a muumuu does on the body and I might be impressed.

(By the way: why is it that a pedicure involves the feet, but a pediatrician treats children and a pedophile is a pervert? As a result of having your feet pampered and cared for, are you cured of children? This is something the fertility clinics might like to know.)

Secondly, I can’t see taking so much time to knit an item that costs so little at a store and fits just fine off the shelf. Other garments– sweaters, shawls, coats– are much more visible, much more individualistic and much harder to find in off-the-shelf versions that fit and flatter. They may not be inexpensive to knit if you use good yarn, but they will not be forced to fit inside a shoe and be walked on all day.

So, I’m glad other folks like to knit socks. Wonderful. It will keep the sock yarn on the shelves, and sock yarn is great for other things, too. Like shawls. But perhaps my therapist will hypnotize me one day and from thenceforth I will knit only socks. Or maybe I’ll just cluck like a chicken.

Meanwhile I am at the same point in my Icy River cardigan that I get to in my workout frequently: the bargaining point.

The bargaining point is where you really don’t want to go on, but you need justification for not continuing. The pattern is getting old, the colors are repetitious. Wouldn’t it be fine if it were ten inches shorter? Do I really need a 28″ long cardigan? Couldn’t this be for my ten-year-old niece? No, it wouldn’t; yes, I do; no, it can’t. I will persevere.

My Fetcher thought she might get a treat if she posed for a picture:

Are your feet cosy now, Ma?

Fetching October 27, 2009

So I’ve had a little time to reconsider ripping the blue warp off the loom in the blur I promised. After all, there’s still a few feet of it left, and it is rolled nicely onto that back beam. I’m not really as sick of the color as the pattern, so all I have to do is rethread the heddles in a different pattern and tie up the treadles again. Then I will have a whole new perspective on the blue. I’m thinking huck lace or Swedish lace or Bronson lace. Cogitation must occur; research is required.

Some readers may wonder why, suddenly, I am blogging again. I’ve been wondering the very same thing. If you have any answers, I’d love to hear them. I come home every day for lunch, since I work close to home, and it seems natural that I should eat and then blog. Eat, blog. See?

Claire, the black lab who is not generally the smartest dog in the world, has developed an endearing habit. Several months ago I taught her to fetch my slippers from upstairs. This involved pointing up the stairs, gesticulating wildly and commanding in a voice of heightened excitement “go get Mommy’s slippers! Go get them! Go on!” several times until Sherlock would get disgusted with her and lead her up the stairs, where she would (or would not, depending on her mood) find ONE slipper and bring it down. I then had to hide that slipper behind my back and go through the same process for the other slipper. Because of the work involved in getting her to fetch the footwear (even though she got a treat when both had been delivered) I eventually decided it was easier to get my own blessed slippers.

A couple of nights ago I was sitting on the sofa knitting away. Claire raised her head off her paws, looked at me, and suddenly ran up the stairs. She brought down a slipper and dropped it at my feet. I was astounded. It was still only one slipper, but she eagerly went for the other one when I told her to. She has decided, apparently, that whenever I am still for more than a few moments, slippers are required. Therefore, when I am home at lunch, eating, then blogging, she brings me my slippers. Go figure. The only wrinkle in this scenario is when she decides to fetch my slippers– only I’m already wearing them. She solves that little problem by fetching me someone else‘s slipper!

I seem to have misplaced my Spindrift color card, and had been thinking about ordering one from somewhere, when I came across Karen‘s post about where one can find them. Fortuitous! I placed my order right away.