Memories of Wool

Here is another pair of visits to the woolly community that we made last year (2008). Please excuse the gaping spaces in the blog text - the Google-Gremlins are attacking my HTML, possibly because I'm trying to do by hand what the Google-team want to do for you.

Firstly, with where some of the wool comes from.

Foxbriar Farm

Almost a year ago we went out to a small town called Tabernacle, near Mt. Holly in NJ, and visited a couple who were running an Alpaca farm. They're not the only ones here in the area with unusual animals, but I thought I'd feature them here.

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Next, here's some pictures of a really good shop. They have a large selection of yarns and a huge selection of buttons. They're in the Germantown part of Philadelphia, right on a bus route for convenience. As you can see, there's a plaque stating just how historic the building is.

The Knit With Yarns.

To the right, the shop's shingle makes it clear what's inside: below you see the tag on the building - it's been here for quite a while !
Just a few buttons in stock, for any cardigan you could dream of !	Yarn falling from the ceiling - there's really a lot of wool here.

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There'll be more pictures up in just a few days, but first I have to do some programming !

Knothing But Knitting for Ewe

Last year we did a kind of tour around all the yarn shops in the Philadelphia area that my wife could find in the phone book, etc. I came along (usually as driver), and took pictures. Here are some of them. What I will say, before all of these, is that the knitting community has some of the friendliest people around. Knitting To Know Ewe, Wrightstown, PA This may look totally disorganised, but really it seems that it's very easy to find things. Here's a selection of their wools - just a beautiful colour array. Loop, South Street, Philadelphia Loop is one of no less than three yarn shops on South Street. It's a very modern store, with beautiful new hardwood floors and a very Scandinavian feel to it. One of their favourite tricks is to arrange skeins of hand-dyed yarn of very similar colours in arrays on the walls. It took me a long time to persuade my digital camera to reproduce what my eyes were telling me were the colours. In these two you see a span of oranges and a span of blues. You have to believe me when I tell you that it took about 25 pictures to get the colours in the camera to match those on the wall! In the end I had to resort to holding my had in front of the light source to get the camera to register colour corectly. Then, of course, there was the smell of scorching flesh if I did that for too long !

The background image above is a close-up of an array of hand-dyed yarn from Loop's wall. I'm not too sure that the effect is working too well with the text, unfortunately, but it certainly is an interesting example of what you can achieve within the limits of the HTML you can include in a blog.

More woolly things next time.

End of the Year (again !)

Well hi there!
It's the end of the year again, and a lot's been happening in 2008. Here's a few of the moments in review:

• I brought my new wife to Pennsylvania.Well, that actually happened in 2007, but only just!
• In Ireland the Garda are the guys who wear blue uniforms and point you in the right direction when you're lost. Here in Ameria they seem to be doing a bit of "moonlighting" ! Not so much money laundering as money moving, but you never know that it might all be part of the same thing !
  
• We spent seven months in Bensalem, PA. It turns out that this is also the place with the cemetery for the police in Philadelphia. We saw about four funerals in those months, which was, I like to believe, an unusually high number. So far the police report "only" 325 murders this year, compared to 390 last year. Maybe people are running short of ammo!
• We saw The Yarn Harlot in Annapolis, and then again at the book fair in Philadelphia, where she "accused" us of "almost stalking" ! We're all great friends, though.
• We found lots of friendly people in lots of unlikely places, all working diligently for pleasure with sheep shavings. These are better known as knitters, of whom the Yarn Harlot is a prominent example. Our "local" is a very friendly shop called WoolBearers, in Mount Holly. I hope my next post will have lots of woolly pictures. Here you see the front of the shop graced by an icy sheep. Every year there's an ice sculpting competition in Mt. Holly - hence the sheep !
  
• Fuel rose to $4.50 per gallon and I changed jobs to one back in NJ, so my commute costs became astronomical. In addition, I had to take a hefty pay cut, so was rapidly going broke!
• We moved to Marlton, NJ. Still broke, but the hemorrhaging was stopped. Mostly.
• Visited the Jersey shore with the Offspring and our very good friend D. Unfortunately D upped and left a few months later, going home to California to resume studies. I guess some people just don't know when they're well-off (or maybe ...). Well, anyway, we all had a great time at the beach and around Barnegat Lighthouse (the picture). Long Beach Island is a fun place to go.
  
• Went to NYC to visit bro-in-law Luke, along with wife and her daughter. We all had a fun day out being tourists in the big apple.
  
• Fuel came back down in price again - to about $1.65 - so things are getting somewhat better. However, I have no doubt that SUV sales are on the up again, to rescue Ford and G.M.
• The main project that I'd been working on almost the whole year finally crawled towards an end. The client announced that they were happy and would send a final set of test data. A week later and it hasn't arrived ...
• Christmas was quiet, but enjoyable. My son (the Offspring) came to stay for Christmas Eve, and we all ate well, and then went to Mass. At the end of Mass the priest beckoned a rather shy girl up to the altar, and then announced that her name was Noëlle (or Nowell, as in the hymn book ?), and that she had been born just eight years before, so we all sang Happy Birthday to her ... yes ! the whole congregation (about 800 people !). The Offspring nudged me and asked, of course, if I was next. I'll confess to rather hoping that the priest would ask if there were any other people with birthdays that day !
• Then back to work until New Year. This was definitely the quietest New Year on record: we were so tired for lots of other things that we lay down at about 9.30 in the evening and didn't wake up for 12 hours straight! No fireworks, no bubbly, nothing ! No hangover either, which was kind of nice :)

So that was the year, that was ! Looking back, I think we came out ahead in most ways, which is good. Hopefully 2009 will let us improve in the areas we didn't do too well in in 2008. More frequent blogging included !

Lest We Forget

(94 years since 1914)

Be careful what you type !
Where I work we deal with a lot of companies and use quite a lot of fax transfers. Not many of the companies we deal with have even gone to electronic faxes (like using an electronic fax system like OneBox.Com), and just a very small few use emails ! It's probably because it's all to do with medical matters and that faxes are legal documents.

Anyhow, yesterday a local hospital sent us some information, including a fax number for themselves. Over the next couple of hours our system duly sent out the proper faxes to this fax number, as it should ... however, the fax number was for someone completely different ! Not surprisingly, this gentleman was seriously upset with us, so our call centre received a less-than-polite call from a less-than-happy person.

We blocked our fax output to him within about 15 minutes of being told of the problem, found the cause of the problem about 30 mins later, and rang him back about an hour after he first rang in. Although still not too happy, he was, at least, gracious about the matter. He explained that the same thing had happened a few months before with one of the large companies that do blood testing, and it took him 3 months of yelling to get it fixed ! He was getting psyched up to have to do the same thing with us, but didn't have to.

The moral of the story is to treat incoming information with care and to be responsive to other people's complaints and problems (one day it may be you on the receiving end !).

PS Thanks very much to Sarah (St Bloggie de Riviere) for the poppy.
--------------------------------------------------------------
Programming Part
Here's a little fragment of code for those trying to trap errors in T-SQL before moving to SQL Server 2005:

declare @intError int
-- put the code that could break in here.
SET @Error = @@ERROR
IF(@Error != 0)
BEGIN
-- do what your reaction should be
END

and here's how to get just the date in T-SQL:

SELECT DATEADD(dd, 0, DATEDIFF(dd, 0, GETDATE()))


That's all for now, folks.

Just a few comments today

The Election

• The Unfortunate Editing Award goes to the paper (on-line) that published the unfortunaet story of a young man from Liberia now living in Staten Island who was apparently beaten up by a "gang of four whites in hoodies" (his words) at 10 pm on election night. The editor chose to accompany this with a picture of him quite obviously pre-incident, in what had to be one of the weirdest self-designed hooded coats that one could imagine. An "after" picture would have been a far better choice, as many of the comments to the story suggested. Unfortunately the link - from Google's News page - has apparently been superceded.
• Now the Good News ! It seems that, in general, people are honestly looking towards making this a step forward for their country. Not just the people whose ancestors come from Africa, either, but those of European and Asian descent also. It would be nice to see a fair proportion - maybe more than 60% - of Americans all pulling in the same direction. It happened in the wars and Korea, but the conflicts since Korea just don't seem to have the ability to draw the people together. Neither circumstances not leaders since Kennedy have really had the appeal. Reagan had some, but not really enough to draw in a goodly number of those who had voted against him. This time we just might be in for a change.
  

The Economy

• ``We expect retail demand will remain weak for an extended period of time as our affluent customer reacts to the continuing volatility of the financial markets,'' Neiman Marcus Chief Executive Officer Burton Tansky said in a statement.
• Saks Inc. said its sales dropped 17 percent and that profitability would erode in the last two quarters of the year because of its ``permanent markdown cadence cycle.''
• Wal-Mart Stores Inc. remained a bright spot. Sales at stores open at least a year climbed 2.4 percent

The translation of those three snippets seems to be that even the owners of McMansions are going to Wal-Mart these days !

The rest of the USA - big and small

• California votes to ban "gay marriages". . But not retroactively. - . You know, there's something fundamentally weird about a country where you're not allowed to have any trace of religion in (state-funded and federally-funded) schools, etc., but the money has "In God We Trust" printed on it. I think the governent out to get out of the marriage business altogether: if you want to get "married" (which is a status conferred upon you, traditionally, by an official of your religious establishment), then deal with that religious establishment. If you want all the monetary goodies that the government offers, go there and sign a "contract of co-habitation" (or whatever you might want to call it) for however many years you want.
• I just moved again, as I may or may not have said. I'm now back in the land of PSEG-brand electricity (where the electrons are all painted white with little orange stripes !). Now PSEG are pretty good as a whole, don't get me wrong. However, where I live now we get a power cut in the middle of the night about 3-4 times a week. Needless to say things are on UPSs and I'm talking earnestly to PSEG !

So, there are a few things from here in the USA. Now I'll try to go back to splitting things between tech and not.

Well, you finally got what you asked for ...

There's a saying much used, especially in science fiction, that you should be wary of wishing for things, in case your wishes come true. Well, a lot of people here in the USA have been hoping and wishing that the People would get the guts to vote for a "minority" for President.

Well, it happened last night. I rather think that most of Obama's supporters would really have preferred him to have been elected 4 years ago, when the economy was in much better shape. Better late than never, maybe, so now we wait to see how a President of a very different background will handle things.

Hopefully, for all of our sakes, he'll get things right. If not, it won't matter what kind of a person he is, we'll all be having bigger problems of our own.

A few weeks ago a good friend of my wife's and mine left the east coast for studies in California. LA to be particular. She's blogging recipes now, sone of which look really yummy, and I'll add the address here when I get home and find it again!

Not Gone Yet !

Back again - twice in two days. This must be a record or something - certainly for this year !

Voting!

There's the normal shambles of indecision. Who's running ? Ask 95% of all citizens of the US and they'll say "McCain & Obama" ( or "Obama & McCain" ! ). However, in this "land of the free" there are other choices:

Republican Party has nominated John McCain
Democratic Party has nominated Barack Obama
Libertarian Party has nominated Bob Barr
Constitution Party has nominatedChuck Baldwin
Green Party has nominated Cynthia McKinney
Ralph Nader is running as an independent, whatever that might mean here.

For all know there may be more, but hardly anyone knows that they exist. I'll ask my wife when she gets out of the polling booth area if she noticed anyone else.

For those used to getting given a piece of paper and a scruffy bit of pencil and being ushered into a cloth cubicle like those used for privacy around your hospital bed (but much smaller), American Elections are Modern and use Voting Machines ! These used to be mechanical gadgets that punched holes in some of Hermann Hollerith's Cards (the ones we used to program on !) but there were too many mistakes along with too much corruption in Florida and Ohio (?) two elections ago and since then there's been a big drive to go all-digital !

That's great, but now the authorities are realising that with digital machines come viruses, worms, trojan horses, and problems with power cuts, power spikes, power sags, peaks, and other nasties, along with lightning strikes and the problem that one professor exposed just last week: given 18 minutes alone in a booth any self-respecting teen studying comp. sci. should be able to hack into the voting machine and change all the votes cast so far that day !

Good one, that. Let's all go back to the way of the Athenians ..... black or white stones into an old amphora.