December 2006 Archives

It hasn't been a knit free month, but I've been blessed with the good kind of busy. I wish you a Happy Holiday Season!

Pictures of knitted items will be here before you know it. Maybe even a gadget or two. Or perhaps even vacation photos.

Many Thanks to James, the wonder boyfriend, for a successful operation. The computer now zips along with a hard drive transplant. Just how hard is it to get to my hard drive? Well, assuming your new hard drive is ready to go in (mine had to be re-cloned and that took over five hours), here's a hint.

The keyboard comes off. The upper portion also needs to be lifted. If I'd done this myself, I probably would have broken two little plastic tabs alongside the right and bottom (1/3 in from the bottom right corner) of my laptop. These little tabs help hold the top in. Here's the inside of my Sony notebook.

He also cleaned the fan area while he was there. And my keyboard was also lavished with some canned air. Hey, maybe the hair in there was wool... it didn't look like mine.

So many screws came out of my little notebook. I think they look like hampster droppings.

Sidenote: I generally maintain and fix my own systems. In this case, the old notebook drive had several bad sectors, has a recovery partition that is difficult to clone, and the hard drive is under the keyboard. It was definitely time to take it to a computer technician for an operation. Luckily, my boyfriend happens to be a technician and kindly did a replacement he'd have charged megabucks for at work. And he came to me :) THANK YOU!

In an attempt to distract you from noticing the dust on my blog, I'll tell you about some other stuff you probably don't care about.

1. My notebook suffers from an undiagnosed illness. Symptom? Unusually long start-up times.

2. Said notebook now has more special memory. It is specially small and therefore specially expensive. Memory size and quality has some parallel with women's underwear that I don't quite understand - the tinier it is and more high-end the brand, the more it costs.

3. Said notebook also now sports a hard-drive backup, necessitating a drive to the local indie computer parts store in the rain. Then my techie boyfriend gave me a heart attack by telling me it was a special 1.x" hard drive instead of the normal 2.5" notebook hard drive. My eyebrows went way up. Thankfully, it uses the more readily available 2.5" notebook hard drive. If you care, it is a Hitachi 7200 RPM hard drive.

4. I bought some new windshield wipers for my car while I was out in the rain. That's not very interesting but a whole lot safer if you live near me. By the way California Drivers, turn on your headlights when you use your wipers.

5. The heating knob on my car's dashboard, the one that turns the heat on, is now broken. Thankfully, it is in the off position. It now occurs to me that that is also the button for the defroster. "Buy new heater knob for car" now moves up my todo list.

6. If you show me pictures of seafood, I will go to bed thinking about it. Last night I really wanted lox and wondered how tobiko would taste spread on a bagel. I had a bagel for breakfast today. The lox and tobiko mix is something I'll save for when I hit the right markets. Dang, I'm hungry again! I'd settle for some onigiri, too (rice balls filled with salty filling). Mmmm. Salt.

In knitter-ese, I finished a EZ Baby Surprise for a family member's baby (who doesn't knit and therefore has no idea what an EZ Baby Surprise is). Just gotta sew the buttons on and I can photograph the completed work, blog the completion, and wrap it up.

Two skeins of Handmaiden Sea Silk in colorway Paris. Alas, it is not in my stash (but some will be soon enough, soon enough, my pretty). The feel of this yarn is so smooth and luxurious, it was slightly painful letting it go to the rightful sample knitter.

Click the images to enlarge. I took a good whiff and couldn't smell the seaweed others claim to pick up. I've got a good sniffer, too, and definitely know the smell of seaweed.

To console myself, I bought a skein of All Things Heather Merino Tencel sock yarn from The Loopy Ewe. I like to take the skein out now and then, pet it, and try to part with it as gift knitting. What was I thinking, envisioning this as a pair of gift socks. Pictures coming soon if I decide to keep it. If? If!

I feel like everyone blogged but me this week. Even Eilen of Ei Knit who only posts ever so rarely (but fantastic knitting!).

Well, the Movable Type blog was exhibiting some odd keep on logging in behavior where I'd log in, click a link, have to log in, click another link, and repeat. The particular details were correct, the cookie was being set. I contacted the wonderful tech support and Sarah responded.¹ We poked at a few things for about a week and she was able to figure it out for me, where the error was in a place where I should have guessed had I been troubleshooting this myself (du-uh!) and now the blog is all happy again! She ran a database repair because one of my movable type tables was marked in use (mt_session, double duh) and here's what she did to fix it:

> If you continue to see a login issue with your own
> username, I'd suggest you do try clearing cookies, and then
> login again - if it still occurs, do try running a CHECK
> and/or REPAIR command on the mt_session table of your
> database to see if this again corrects the problem.

Blog All Happy Again!

Thanks Sarah and Movable Type Support.

¹ I have a license which includes support. My time was spent on other higher priority things than fixing the blog. Admit it, all 20 of you, that you didn't even notice my lack of posting. Bwahaha.