SNOW!

For some reason I'm tired...

After I took the dog out this morning, it started to SNOW! Yay! It's tapered off now, but wow, I love snow. Cocoa and hot tea and warm cozy things.

It occurs to me that I may not have felt much like writing over the last week because I was doing a lot of writing for classes - didn't mean to leave the blog so...fallow. I've had some distraction projects going, too, of the knitting variety and a computer variety, plus getting *this close* to having all the bits I need to make a really cool LED thing. I unfortunately managed to salvage some 47 microfarad capacitors in almost every conceivable voltage EXCEPT the one I need, so that's been really annoying. I even rummaged in the attic and found an ancient Apple monitor and carefully disassembled it and found, amongst the beautifully laid-out electronics in there, only one of the bits I can use right now. I have reverently laid the rest of the stuff in a box for another day.

The computer wrestle is that I am still figuring out how to load and build and run the simulation program I want to play with. I had to re-learn everything I ever knew about working with Unix shells, which was not a whole lot but not zero, and I just about understand where I need to point things and from where I need to point. Very slow going and an odd mixture of utter, blind ignorance and actually knowing what I'm doing, which is alas not possible for an outside voice to help me sort out (who but me can figure out what sounds familiar to me?).

I remember way back when I used to work in an office, I was the resident geek, owing to my comprehension of how to a) switch on the computer, b) find the games in our LAN (which connected to NY), and c) get Lotus 1-2-3 to do almost anything (I created and ran a database for all our our client data, which was sortable by any field - no biggie, really, but mucho worship by boss). I recall getting in trouble because I was aghast that a new senior person created entire new directories for every single new document she saved - I actually spluttered. New person cheerfully hated me roughly from that point onward. I also did not win friends when the first big computer virus broke out (EDIT: this was around 1991 or so) and I insisted that our headquarters in NY was vulnerable, and the IT head insisted that he had it covered and there wasn't an issue. I'm sort of stubborn. And I was right. And headquarters' IT was shut down for a week trying to repair the damage that the dude said would not occur and that he didn't need to take precautions against.

Yes, I can be a real pain in the ass. Oh, you noticed that already?

I'm also wrestling with MS Word to make a downloadable pattern for this:


Anyone know how to create charts using any Microsoft Office software? I'm getting a bit frustrated. And the world really needs hats with obscure cartoon characters giving us the finger.

Cheerio, all.