Does anyone remember the 1970’s show Emergency! It starred Randolph Mantooth and Kevin Tighe as two paramedics?
I happened to stumble across an episode playing via the Slingbox. Oh, the memories.
Dixie McCall in her white pantsuit and nurses’ cap. Johnny and Roy and all the boys of the Engine 51 Fire company. Many a Saturday night was spent with those guys
Did you ever watch it?
The Fussy Knitter posted a link to a beautifully cabled coat last week. I know I wouldn’t ever finish it, but whoever does manage to will end up with a gorgeous piece of art. I think this sweater/sweater dress is more my cup of tea. It’s from my favorite source – Lion Brand yarns. This pattern isn’t free, but the $3.95 price is perfectly reasonable.
In the comments on the order page (click the picture to get there), one person mentioned seeing this same sweater in a fashion magazine for $1500. Knit in Lion Brand Wool-Ease (a mostly acrylic wool blend, about 80/20), the cost comes out to about $30. Priceless!
I’m thinking a deep eggplant purple? Or a blush pink? Or in oatmeal. So many choices.
I’ve got my finger on the “buy now” button. What do you guys think?
Here’s pics from the trip to Virigina and what I got at the yarn stores:
This purple tweed one is the 67% cotton/25% wool/8% silk blend DK weight thta I purchased in Hampton Roads, Virigina at Coordinated Colors.
This one is made by Cestari, Ltd with wool they raise themselves. The Fussy Knitter asked how soft it was in a previous post. After playing with it a bit, I’d say the drape is going to be soft, but not limp. It’s not scratchy like some cotton blends can be, but looks like it will really showcase some nice stitch definition.
The picture for this one doesn’t do the colors justice. In the pic it looks much more blue when it’s really a rich blend of blues and purples blending to black. This is a 100% merino fingeringweight that has been handpainted. Based on the label info, either the raw wool comes out of Italy and the company - Claudia & Co, from Harrisburg, VA. dyes it or some variation of that theme. Either way, the colors are gorgeous and I bought enough for a someday-I’ll-make-it shawl.
But neither is enough for the Cable Luxe Tunic. So you know what that means, don’t you?
Since I bought the HP 2133 Mini Note in April, the market has been flooded with manufacturers of these small, low-cost computers. Dubbed “netbooks”, they’re designed to provide minimal computing experiences – web surfing, email, a little office productivity, some music and video entertainment value. HP used the oft-maligned VIA C-7 CPU chip, as the Intel Atom wasn’t ready for prime time when they released the Mini Note.
Last night I produced a spreadsheet of the US available netbooks for The Lish to earn brownie points with her teacher, who was interested in them. I compared the Asus Eee PC, MSI Wind, Dell’s Mini Inspiron, and the HP’s Mini Note’s features against each other and proved what the tech community already knows – these products have exactly the same innards. I even added upcoming netbooks being released by Lenovo, Toshiba, and Samsung. Still no differentiators in the bunch.
Interestingly, other than HP’s choice to use a higher screen resolution (1268×760 –ish) and the VIA chipset combo, every one of the others was exactly the same with only the display size changing from the smallest 7″ original Eee to my favorite 10.2″. Oh sure, you can dither between buying a big hard drive versus a solid state drive or which one has the best battery life, and whether to Linux or Windows it, but that’s just details.
At first glance, you might dismiss these small computers as gadgets for geeks. (OK, you might be right about that.) But as computers invade our every waking moment, you may change your mind. I’m more inclined to go Google for a recipe I want to make rather than dig through my stacks of magazines and cookbooks these days. Need a phone number? That’s what www.whitepages.com and www.yellowpages.com are for. These can be ideal for a lot of road warriors who lug 8 pound behemoths through the airport. During a last minute shuffle of baggage items (when my bag was overweight), I even shoved the Mini into my 
totebag/purse and used the carry-on space in my computer bag for my teaching materials. Try doing that with a 15″ notebook computer!
One untapped market I see is for the writer. Unlike the Alphasmart, an author uses a familiar computer product, compatible word processing software, and their traditional files for creating a manuscript. A netbook is easy to toss into a bag for writing in the car during soccer practice or for escaping to the local coffee shop for those “writer-on-display” moments. They’re only slightly more expensive then the Alphasmart, giving more features for the money IMHO. For those that must have music when they write, the computer can solve that problem. (The speakers on my Mini are so awesome, I’m spoiled and won’t accept lesser quality on my next purchase.)
What a netbook does bring to the table is the bane of the writer’s existence – the internet. Even the cheapest netbook is designed to access the ‘Net in one way or another for those hours of blog-reading, Amazon-trolling, online-suduko-solving (may I suggest the game at USA Today online?) procrastination. Now they’re including not only wi-fi, but also Bluetooth and 3G WWAN options for closing off the escape routes. It comes down to willpower now to stay off the internet.
Do these little notebooks appeal to you? As a writer or as a geek (or both?) Why?
I happened to stumble across mention of Leslie Langtry’s recent release somewhere and got excited to go get it. Stand By Your Hitman is the third release of her wildly funny series of stories about a family of assasians. These guys are nothing like Tony Soprano.
The first book ‘Scuse Me While I Kill This Guy introduces us to the Bombay family with Virginia (Gin) – your everyday soccer mom who has to fit in an assassination between dentist appointments. Guns Will Keep Us Together is Leslie’s sophmore book in the series with sexy Dakota Bombay leading us astray, and now we get more of Missy (Mississippi), this family’s version of Bond’s Q.
Missi Bombay invents things–fatal flowers, Jell-O bullets, stroke-inducing panty hose and other ways to kill a target without leaving any kind of evidence. She’s a great asset to her family of assassins. The one thing she can’t invent, though, is a love life. Unfortunately, her mom has decided to handle that for her. Next thing Missi knows, she’s packed off to Costa Rica for a wild reality show where she’s paired with Lex, the hottest contestant on TV. Too bad she also has to scope out a potential victim. But the job becomes tougher when someone starts sabotaging the show…and love-of-her-life Lex thinks she’s the culprit!
If you’re looking for a fun read, pick up one of Leslie’s books.
