Message Ends.

My sister-in-law is having a new child soon, and I've made a couple of small things for her, like a hat and a sweater. I thought it would be nice if I made something for Sarah, the older niece. I asked, and she told me a pair of socks would be nice.

So I picked up a new book ("Sensational Knitted Socks" by Charlene Schurch), which looks to have a lot of great sock guidelines rather than a handful of one-size-fits-all-but-whoever-you-made-it-for patterns. I'll be using a basic purple machine-washable cotton/acrylic blend, and the Double Moss stitch pattern to give it a little texture. Hopefully I can knit this up pretty quick. I've only got about a month before Brooke heads down to visit her sister, and socks have taken me a couple of months to knit in the past. I am getting faster, though. Fingers crossed.

Further reports as warranted.

Wait a minute, this ain't twitter. Oh well. Thanks to general stress, I'm really having trouble getting tired at a reasonable time. Thanks to dermatographia (the world's most annoying minor ailment), I have lovely red itchy blotches in random patches of my skin.

What else? Job hunting. I'm pretty sure the insomnia and the frequent job hunting are related in some way. I don't know if there's a specific causation going on here, but there is definitely some correlation going on. Now I just need to figure out why the heck my best hours are from 10pm to 6 am and either fix it or get a job that embraces it. This has been an issue since I was about 10, incidentally. Definitely not what you'd call a new thing.

I wonder if my hours had any bearing on the fact that a lot of my best friends were the goth and punk kids when I was younger, despite the fact that I'm about as punk / goth as Fred Rogers. Okay, a clinically depressed Fred Rogers that smoked and drank coffee, but work with me here.

Actually, Fred Rogers was kind of a freak, now that I think of it.

And now I'm getting punchy, the precursor to tired. That's actually a good thing. I'll see about applying to a couple more jobs and go to bed.

So I'm poking around at the few gaming books I still have, and enjoy a few nostalgic giggles over Hol, the cheekily inappropriate and endearingly handmade role playing game of adventure and slaughter and stuff in a dark far future. It was mostly just silly, but I did manage to play it a few times. Man, that was fun. What I remember was fun, anyways. There may have been alcohol involved. Or just really good coffee.

After looking at the books (yes, I own the full line - both books), I did what I always do these days. I went to Google to see if I could learn more. Turns out there was more. A second edition was released in 2002, with four extra pages! I must have that. There were also rumblings of a plush wastem. I want that, too. And if I cannot buy one (because you know maybe they never gathered enough money to produce them), I will make it myself.

Originally posted on brianwisti.vox.com

I tend to eat more and heavier foods. I'll get strong cravings for burritos, chips & salsa, mashed potatoes, sweets, and on and on. This is also nearly the only time of year I still drink mochas. Of course, I'm consuming a lot less of all these things since I don't want to be 235 pounds.

Video for the song I'm so much cooler online - it's cute, although it took a certain amount of willpower to sit all the way through a country pop song. It features Jason Alexander, Will Shatner, a blip of Patrick Warburton, and a couple of other people that looked familiar.

[via the second_lifers group, naturally]

One of my smarter friends has moved to work at a company in Emeryville California, and now he's pushing me to follow. I would just discard the idea quickly, but this sounds like it could be an interesting job and Seattle is living up to its cold and damp reputation right now. Now I'm just trying to find out where the cheap neighborhoods are, how good public transit is, what people are like, stuff like that. The job may never happen, of course, but it is still interesting to ponder.

I already know that eating a random handful of Jelly Bellies is a bad idea, yet I do it all the time. When oh when will I ever learn?

I say Never!

I was working on a knit skirt for Brooke, but I decided to abandon it today. I'll have to frog a few rows if I decide to pick it up later, and frankly I'm not sure if the end pattern is worth it. It was pretty much a straight skirt, which isn't so great for women with hips. Or legs. There is a better simple skirt pattern out there, I'm sure.

Instead I'm taking a break from patterns with grand vision and making a hat. Winter is approaching, after all. It's the "Garter Stitch Hat" from Melissa Leapman's Knitting Beyond Scarves. I like a lot of the patterns in this book, but I've had it less than 2 hours and I'm already scratching notes into the margin with my pen. There is a striped shirt that I'd like to tackle later on. I'll make it a little longer since Brooke is not generally the sort of girl who likes to share her navel with the world.

Anyhow - today's project. It's small enough that it won't take me a ridiculous amount of time to finish it and I'll get the sweet sweet sensation of work done before too much time has passed. I'll bust out the camera later today to get a shot of the yarn in its natural woolly skein before I wind it up into a ball and start knitting and cussing.

In completely unrelated news, I have my precious laptop running Ubuntu Linux 7.04. I'm using the 32 bit version despite the fact that the CPU is AMD64, since important stuff like Flash doesn't work as well on 64bit Linux. The computer seems to be very content, though, and I'm able to get a lot of coding work done now compared to Vista. Maybe it's just my imagination, but Vista seems to be possessed by the ghost of Clippy. There's no paper clip, but there is the near constant barrage of "You appear to be trying to get work done. Are you sure that's what you want to do?" messages that I associate with that damn paper clip.

I got my Ravelry account the other day. I've been waiting for a while, and at first glance it looks the site was worth the wait. We'll see how I feel after more poking around, but so far so good.

We bought season 3 of Forever Knight this morning. Watching it right now. It's fun stuff. I miss the partner from the first two seasons, but it's still enjoyable.

There isn't a lot going on at the moment. I haven't updated any of my blogs for weeks because I have been silly busy with work and home stuff. Most of it has cooled off, though, with little net effect on my life. There is one interesting thing to mention, though. Sunday is the first anniversary of our wedding. We were supposed to go on a vacation, but work demands made that impossible. Okay, so I'll take it out in multiple little vacations over the near future.

Something I need to remind folks. It's our first anniversary, *not* our first year together. People forget that, like Brooke and I went through some strange transformation on September 16 2006 and were taken over by pod people who didn't exist the day before that. No, we've been together since October 1998, and living together since 1999. We're still the same strange cute twisted creatures we've always been, but there is some shiny metal on our fingers and I no longer have to introduce her as "Brooke, my girlfriend ... partner ... ummm ... may as well be my wife really."

So that's it, really. Oh, I'm a little cranky about my Vista installing insisting that the registration number from the box is not valid for my current install. I didn't know that Microsoft had started contributing to Apple's Switch campaign, but the constant nagging is reminding me that life is a lot easier under OS X. Hell, it's a lot easier under Linux, other than driver annoyances for my Broadcom wifi card.

Happy birthday to Melinika!

I have spent most of the last two days sleeping. That's unfortunate, because I had quite a bit of work to do. I hope I still have a job.

Must be over the hump on this cold, though. I felt nearly healthy for a whole two hours, but now I'm back to blah. Apparently this cold is going around, because a lot of folks have similar symptoms.

Maybe I'll occupy myself with some knitting, since there's not much more I can do with my code assignment.

Taking a break from a too-long work stretch to bring my account back up to paid. I'd post something clever, but I have a deadline *and* a cold. This is pretty much my primary journal again, though. Vox is niftier, but it's not compatible with all of my favorite browsers, I don't like the ads during composition, and I want more control.

In all the fuss and bother of my daily life, I forgot that I'd let my premium LJ account expire back in April. I think I'll renew it on payday - the 20th. I haven't been using LJ as much, but they do several things right that the other blog sites don't seem to manage. I like their handling of communities and interests, and for some reason LJ seems to be the only one that gets threading right.

Originally posted on brianwisti.vox.com

My friends keep asking me what I think about the iPhone. I don't know why they never like my answer.

The iPhone is pretty, but I already have a phone. I know, I know. It does all these other things, too. Browse the Web, check your mail, watch YouTube. That's great, but I already have a computer. What's better is that I can program for my computer without resorting to Web app shenanigans. But it's got a revolutionary interface and will completely change the way you look at expensive shiny things that will be marked by your greasy food-stained fingers and face in seconds! Lovely. I don't want a revolutionary interface, I want a machine I can hack at with an assortment of my favorite programming languages and tools. Except when I'm making phone calls. Then I want a phone. The phone that I already have.

Don't get me wrong. It's pretty, and I'm sure Apple will do quite well with it. I like shiny, and I like Apple. We have three iPods (although one of them is running iPodLinux at the moment) and one of those pretty older iMacs with the swivel neck. Heck, I will probably try to buy an iPhone for my wife for Christmas (it's okay, she never reads my blog posts and I'll probably change my mind by the time Christmas shopping happens). I just don't want one for myself.

The Nokia N800 is the shiny device that I want. It even runs on Linux. Not that I care about Linux specifically - I just like the idea of being able to install and use a UNIX-like command prompt.

Originally posted on brianwisti.vox.com