PJ Trader

Saturday I had to venture over to the big city of St. Louis to attend a local RWA chapter meeting.  After a nice gabby lunch with fellow writers, I took myself over to a LYS in Kirkwood, fittingly called the Kirkwood Knittery.

I went to buy a ticket to Stitch ‘N Pitch.  On May 28th, I will join hundreds (???) of other St. Louis needlework enthusiasts to root on the St. Louis Cardinals.  We’ll sit in some nosebleed section of the stadium and play with our yarn and needles.  I’ve heard there are tote bags full of goodies, a drawing to go down on the field and watch batting practice, and who knows what else.

When I was buying the ticket, the salesperson asked me to fill out a slip for a drawing.  Since free stuff is always good, I filled away while asking “what for?”  A trip down to the field to watch batting practice.  Apparently I actually am one of the few women in the shop who likes both baseball and needlework, as a I mentioned that I hoped we’d stop leaving runners stranded by the end of May.  (The saleswomen in the store didn’t have a clue what I was talking about.)  I wonder if we should knit up some baseballs to give to the guys if I win that drawing?

Since it would be rude (wouldn’t it?) to have gone into the store for the sole purpose of buying a baseball game ticket, I carefully explored each bin of the cramped store to see what they had.  A lot.  I didn’t recognize many of the brands, and the rather high prices were a shocker ($63 for one hank I petted).  Since, of course, I am queen of the cheap acrylic yarn.

But I found this Malabrigo laceweight towards the front of the store on my second circuit and I couldn’t put it down.   (And I was thrilled that 470 yds of this 100% baby merino was only $10.  THAT I can afford.  Although apparently the Addi Turbo needles I bought cost more than the yarn.  Hmmm.)

The pattern color is called “Loro Barranquero”, which means “Burrowing Parrot”.  Here’s what they look like: 

The store also sold me a pattern called “Restuarant Stole” because I liked the display model so much.  Very simple pattern, they said.  (Uh, picot cast on?)  A very interesting element is that you “kill” the stole during the finishing process by ironing it on high heat with lots of steam! 

Maybe I’ll make the stole at Stitch ‘N Pitch. 

No, better not.  I might spill mustard from my hot dog on the yarn!

I don’t suppose most of my friends who yawn when I start getting excited over new tech stuff will need to read this.  But if you want to hear some of my observations on the Mini Note, read on!  (You see, Mobileers have an obligation to report user experiences with their new toys.  It’s a law.)

I have been spending the week getting acquainted with Mini.  It’s been an interesting experience, learning to love a new computer.

When I first unboxed Mini, I loved it like you love a little baby, a new kitten, a cute little puppy.  The size is awesome – being able to throw it in my bag and go and not hardly know I’m carrying it!  It’s exactly what I wanted.

But after that first blush of love, Mini’s personality starting making itself known.  First, I had to learn Vista Business.  Now, I’m relatively computer literate – I can be trained.  But without a book, Vista is a bit odd to figure out.  It’s not what I’d call intuitive, but that’s probably because I’m an XP-trained killer.

But the worst thing about the Mini Note was the text size.  The native resolution on the Mini is 1280×786, which on a 8.9″ screen is kind of small.  Reading RWA Online’s boards was hell on my eyes, which are of the over-40 variety. I was disenchanted.

The funny thing was that I wasn’t disenchanted with the speed of the VIA CM-7 chip, which is widely dogged among Mobileers.  I wasn’t even too upset about Vista, figuring it just takes time.  I was completely annoyed at not being able to set up a proper wireless configuration between my phone and MIni, the way I did with my Tablet PC, but I will beat that one down sooner or later.  I am miffed that the hard drive I bought to do backups to must be reformatted from FAT32 to NTFS before Vista will do its thing.

But I was extremely concerned this screen and I would not find a comfortable place to meet.  If you can’t read your screen and/or it causes headaches, then what’s the use?

I tried making the text larger, but Interenet Explorer is a little funny about that.  Not every site I visited increased the text size and I came to the conclusion that the site’s CSS (cascading style sheet) probably overrode IE’s settings.

It then occurred to me today to load up Firefox on this machine.  I would have loaded it eventually, but I’ve been trying to keep it clean until I can do an initial backup and recovery image.  I didn’t know if FF could do anything for my old eyes, but I’m happy to say they have settings in their browser that forces fonts and sizes I can read instead of what the website’s settings are.  I really, really like that.  I’m soooooooooooooooooooooooooooo  much happier with Mini now.

Now, to get that Bluetooth PAN working…grrr.

Illinois sits on a major earthquake fault – the New Madrid fault line.

This morning at 4:37 am, I was awakened by some noise, which included the dogs jumping out of bed.  Bob and I woke up for a second, muttered “what was that noise” and promptly crashed back into slumberland.

“That” was a 5.2 magnitude earthquake.  I found out about it at 8 am when I went to work.

However, I felt the one at 10:15am – a 4.5 aftershock.  We watched our computer monitors shake for a moment just before the whole floor shifted back and forth.

My first earthquake.  Wow.

The FedEx man showed up just before 10:30 this morning with my new computer!  The Bob tried to hide it, but I threw my body in front of him and grabbed the box out of his hands and ran.

Note:  Do NOT try to operate the Mini Note and it’s tiny 8.9″ screen running at 1280×820 (or whatever) resolution when your eyes are still dilated from the eye doctor’s appointment.  I was very disappointed with the machine until an hour ago when everything came back into focus.

I’m using Mini now.  Wow!