the girly who shall end all girls

we slept on an air mattress on the balcony last night, and it was quite successful - when we lay down the temperature was about the same as the inside of the house, but there was some point where i woke up cold and had to pull up the quilt i had beside me for that purpose. we'll do it again tonight and probably tomorrow night.
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i found a pattern for the yarn i mentioned yesterday, Thousand Tulips. the key here is that it starts at the narrow tip of a triangle, so the striping follows the bands of the pattern and so far is making the clear chevrons i hoped would happen. today i watched the entirety of Ted Lasso for the second time while i knit the first foot or so.
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hopefully i'll get around to writing more about Ted Lasso in detail later. there is SO MUCH, the important thing for anyone to know who has seen the commercials that created the character is that yes, he's still a fish out of water but the cringe factor has been dialed WAY down as to be practically nonexistent. don't let the soccer scare you away, it's just another workplace setting. (but if you like the soccer part they have Arlo White playing himself - since calling my local team was one of his career stepping stones, i get all kinds of warm fuzzies seeing him and hearing him calling the game sequences.)

i volunteered to do the last dog walk of the day and let C finish watching his soccer match, which means podcast time.

tonight it was Fiber Nation, on Gunnister Man (there's plenty of text and links on the landing page if you don't feel inclined to listen). basically a beautifully preserved set of wool clothes were found in an isolated peat bog in the Shetland Islands in the 50s; the person who had worn the clothes had rotted away, but the clothes remained. the podcast is the story of the painstaking effort to recreate the clothing for display in a local museum, and what the clothing and its composition can tell us about where this unknown person came from and why they might have been in the middle of nowhere in the first place.

at the beginning of this year i was trying to write an entry every day. i still try, but life is pretty boring. i write Dad a card several times a week and i'm getting to the point where it's today's weather, how busy i am at work, and how my homework is going.

i struggled with my programming homework last week. there are several lessons that i need to internalize: 1) it is safe to ask for help 2) asking for help is expected (it's why i chose the program, after all) 3) i can turn in imperfect work and make changes based on feedback. i think i've mostly learned these things now, but i had to lose a bunch of sleep and cry first.

probably due to the above, i got a stye and that sucked. i am reminded again that taking care of my eyes and hands has to be a priority, they're too important to everything i love to do.

that said, i took something i learned in class on Tuesday and was able to turn around and automate something at work that was important (and tedious and exacting). really pleased.

this week's homework went better, and the second assignment was genuinely fun. it was based on Tom Swift Under the Milkwood - essentially it's a generator for the kind of almost-plausible text you get in spam sometimes. i used A Princess of Mars as my input. if i get in trouble for the run-on sentences, well, that's Burroughs for you.

i've completed 3+ hexes on the blanket. i say 3+ because i'm using a striping gradient yarn instead of doing all the color changes, and the one hex chart is very clearly supposed to be a flower with a leafy stem at the center. so when i was ready to start a new ball of striped yarn and its first color was green, i started the flower chart, knit up to the end of the stem, and put it on a holder. i need two of the flower ones, so i'm working a different chart until i hit a long run of green again, then i'll switch and do the center of the second flower.

the yarn arrived and lo, i have started knitting a blanket because it's something i would only do while locked up in the house.

as is required, i had a false start where i knit only four repeats of the pattern instead of six. but now that ceremony is over and hopefully i can churn out colorful hexagons while watching comfort tv.

i know Discord is all the rage with fandom, but i hadn't been pulled in yet. but when i was looking for a free group video chat that would do a Brady Bunch view with no time/OS/hardware limits, Discord seemed like a good bet.

verdict: it was good overall.

pros:

• dead easy signup


• group video tiles beautifully and the quality is good


• chat groups are persistent and named


• you can create and share invite links easily


• the "server" is a persistent text and voice forum you can use to gather your friends


• Discord design is charming and attractive

cons:

• video is only as a direct message - so video chat is independent from the server where you have gathered your friends and is not discoverable per se


• when you bring in new people you may lose them into the audio channel before they find your video invite


• video chat invite links expire and you can't choose the duration


• echo. it didn't happen for everyone (i assume it was hardware-dependent) but i strongly advise wearing headphones if you don't have a headset or other clean separation of microphone and speaker.


the system i came up with (there might be a better way) was to create an empty video chat group, then post the invite link in the general channel of our server for folks to discover.

we had up to seven folks on at once tonight and it was pleasant, will try again next week.

i've been poking at New Pathways for Sock Knitters, which is all about the idea that you can put the gusset increases anywhere you like as long as the increases are proportioned in a specific way.

it includes multiple toe structures, and a bunch of wonky tables and formulas where you knit a gauge swatch and measure your foot and that produces a set of numbers that you plug into the pattern. the only thing that i don't really like is that there aren't heel options, just slipstitch top down or toe up.

i did a tiny practice sock, and then about half of another and figured out that i could probably just do a Fleegle heel and it would be fine. it was. i've gotten through the heel turn of a full-size "riverbed" sock (gusset increases start centered on the sole of the foot).

i'm using a Crazy Zauberball that came from philotera's stash purge. i had to edit a bit to get huge bands of black out of the sequence (funny how everything matching is a hazard of random plying). progress pic in the previous post.