Autumn Zebra

A white moon shines in a red-rimmed well of light. A soft seashell of clouds cups the sky. Shell and pearl, so darkness draws back. Swept-up seashell? Something sings! ...sea song. NB. In the first poem, I don't like the last line, but I can't think of anything else yet. In the second, "swept-up" was intended to describe the shape, It's second meaning is the more obvious one.

It snowed. It snowed a fair amount considering how much snow we normally get. I measured up to 10cm at our house, and I tried not to measure in anything that was obviously a big unnatural pile. It was generally between 3cm and 7cm. People who live in places with lots of snow like to laugh at people who get excited about 5cm of snow, so I would like to say that the snow itself is not remarkable, but the fact that that much of it happened here, and that, in some places like our house, it lasted all day. The stuff on the trees melted, but not noticeably any of the stuff on the ground. Here's some snow on the ground. That's our street. It was pretty cool. It was all powdery and not good for making stuff out of - like snow balls or snow men - until later. Well, the snow balls were ok but the snow man wouldn't stay together. (Keep yourself together man!) Unfortunately G decided to go to training in the morning anyway so we didn't get to have a snow ball fight, very sad. Of co

I sincerely hope that we have now fixed our internet problem. It would have been fixed earlier, had there not been more than one problem. The original problem seems to have been that the router had stopped working. The second problem was that the password in the second router was wrong. The computer automatically entered the username and password into the router opeions, presumably from what I had entered in the internet settings in the DSL configuration in the network settings. Unfortunately this turned out to somehow be incorrect, as when we entered it again, the internet suddenly worked. Hopefully this is not a coincidence. Having the wrong password was presumably not the problem with the other router, as that had worked fine for a week before gradually slowing down and eventually stopping working altogether. When I swapped the routers and the second one didn't work either, I assumed the problem was with the connection further on somewhere, rather than that there was a second pr

I thought I'd post about what I am doing at the moment, sewing wise. Just Finished I recently finished a bunch of things for pattern making and design process classes, but I have to wait before I get them back from marking, and there are no pictures from before I handed them in because I finished them so late. I also made a simple beret, of which there will be pictures shortly. In Progress A very dark "midnight" blue skirt, Victorian inspired. I'm not sure yet whether it will look awful on me. A bustier type top for someone's formal. I am getting paid! It is a friend of mine from karate. I've done the mockup and it fits her so I will probably do most of it this weekend. There will also be a skirt. It is all from a pattern. Curtains A houndstooth skirt I just haven't sewn together yet. The timing just isn't right at the moment. Planned More berets of different designs, along with another amusing silly hat A Tudor dress (kirtle) in non-Tudor material A c

I am spending the afternoon watching videos on how to program using Windows Workflow Foundation , not ever known as WWF which seems to be an awfully popular acronym that no one can use except the World Wildlife Fund, or whatever it is called. Not wrestling, not Microsoft, ha ha the pandas win. But shall we iterate again - videos, on programming. They're actually pretty good videos about this new technology one can use for programming workflows, ie. sequences of actions, events and data transfer, without having to write the actual sequencing bit yourself. You specify the workflow (simply put: the flow of work) and the conditions for transitioning between events, and you specify what actually happens at various stages, ie. what work is actually done, but you don't have to handle the flow yourself; you specify the parts and when you would like them to happen, but you don't need to make them happen. It's hard to explain what I'm talking about if you don't already kn

You should probably go and play this game - Desktop Tower Defense . The link goes to the instructions, and then you can play by clicking on "Play Desktop TD" at the top left. It is a little online game, and you can pause it, so handy, I appreciate that. Sometimes you need to pause a game. Not all of them let you do that. If you wish to enter your scores against ours, use the group name "gumble" when it asks you, that's after it asks you for your name and if you wish to record your score. I'm not very good at it.

I installed Suse 10.1 on my computer yesterday evening, eventually, but it actually went pretty well. I now need to get the internet to work, and then I have internet and word processing and I am half way there. Then I need to make sure the peripherals like the digital camera can connect to it, and I am all good, except for games. But I don't play that many and we have another computer we have to use for the new stuff anyway. I mainly would want to get the old dos and win95 games going if possible, and there might be emulators for that for Linux - it might not actually be any harder than getting them to work under a new Windows version. The thing that immediately struck me about was that it was like walking out into a cold, crisp morning or evening, where things are quiet and clear and uncluttered, free and easy, there is a clarity. Things happen immediately. You click on something and there is an immediate crisp response. It - wait, that's it! Unlike in Vista, where everythin

My home computer has stopped working - we need to install another operating system of one kind or another. The computer itself seems to work, but Windows won't boot. So that sucks. In the weekend I was going to write lots of things for my report for Design Process, that's why I turned on the computer to find out it didn't work, but I couldn't. Not much point writing it out on paper to type it in later, that's just annoying. And I missed out on lots of web surfing - how sad. And no blog writing either. Or picture downloading from my camera. Or anything. And it was a long weekend too, perfect time to do some of those things. When I get time, hopefully this evening, we will hopefully find out that this Linux disk I have, unlike the other one, works, and then I shall install Suse. And then I need to get everything to work, which may be tricky, but at least it won't be stupid, like Windows (I assume).