Variety is the Spice of Life

I was rather taken by Rita Tseng's drawing of such fun-loving sheep¹. You'll find them cavorting on GoEnglish.Com's site (I've forgotten what word I was looking for - sorry !), a good place to find word meanings, etc.

They conveniently lead to another subject - knitting. I've been learning rather a lot more than I ever expected to about knitting recently ! Totally aside from seeing the finished product in shops, as we all do every day, I've been introduced to raw wool, washed and dyed wools, roving, and hanks.

I've been re-introduced to the delights of turning a hank into a ball to knot from (much easier with a swift that when I had to stand in front of the fire on a winter's afternoon with my hands upraised like a priest and with a hank stretched between my wrists), and have discovered the tactile differences between wool blends with and without additions such as silk and nylon, etc. Some wools are specifically for making socks (and hand-knitted socks are lovely and soft to wear !), whereas others are for jerseys or sweaters or scarves or almost any other piece of apparel that you could imagine !

There's a huge community of knitters out there that also has a large intrusion into NetSpace and BlogSpace, amd many of them have a terrific sense of humour — good even for the "muggle" amongst them. Go here for a most unexpected link between knitting and rock !

^{1 -} The cartoon is copyright Rita Tseng and GoEnglish.com and used with their kind permission. Please respect their copyright.

Wilfs of the Post

Well, I was wandering aimlessly around various sites, clicking links as the whim took me, and I came across a shop in Hovingham in Yorkshire. It's a very nice, well-designed, and informative site, and worth a read. It also has some good links, especially if you're anywhere in the area.

Finally, on a more serious note, if you're a VB programmer by chance, Beth Massi does a neat blog of VB stuff. She writes clearly and explains things well (I need that !). Well worth a read.

Have fun until the next time everybody.

The Last Day of 2006

It's been a long time, so probably nobody'll read this but me, so that explains why this is a bit monologish. I've just ripped three Michael Chapman CDs that I received as a birthday present. Michael's been a pro guitar player for almost forty years now, and familiarity just seems to breed respect. The problem with being a fan of someone like Michael is that, as nobody'll ever admit to having heard of him, you tend to have to do unusual things - like buy all your CDs from the man himself, as no shop or web site ever carries them, and entering the track names on GraceNote and CDDB yourself, as very often you're the first to be ripping the disc !

With 26 albums of his (I just went and counted !) I suppose you could call me a fan. If anyone has a copy of Americana, though, I'd dearly love to buy it. I have Americana II, and have heard some of Americana's tracks, buy want that CD ! Anyhow, I just got "27 06 05", which is a recording of a concert he did on that data at The Greys in Brighton, which is where I grew up.

For Christmas I got something seriously more modern - Smoke and Mirrors from Marillion, the two albums from the Holiday Weekend in 2005 at Butlins, Minehead. I haven't listened to the double CD Mirrors yet, but Smoke (the single CD) is great.

Recently I've been listening to internet radio instead of CDs, and getting a good strong dose of Prog Rock. Groups such as Sylvan, Frost, and Ayreon especially. I think that these three will certainly feature in my CD buying list in the next few months. Remember that Frost is officially no more, so try to get Milliontown before it's sold out. Sylvan's is a German site: there's also a Dutch band Silvan. Finally in this musical adverts spot, take a look at Heather Nova.

So, I've spent a very large quantity of my spare time since August getting my teeth into VB.NET 2005 together with SQL Server 2005. All I can say is that I'm very thankful that I didn't try in January ! The six months have provided a huge amount of information onto the web for people to find. Even so, I've easily spent $500 on books, as it's impossible to predict what you'll need to know in advance. Finally, however, the effort is beginning to pay off. However, it's been painful at times !

After over a year with an AMD-based machine running Windows XP/64 I suppose that I was getting blasé. I had got to the point of believing that MS tools worked ! After all, I had installed the Express editions of VB and SQL Server with no problems. This feeling of security vanished abruptly when I installed Visual Studio 8. I did all the things that the release notes commanded me to do, and didn't do all the things they commanded me not to do, and then looked at what I had. The install had added a new copy of SQL Server Express, which was not what I wanted . In addition, it wasn't running. In fact, I couldn't find any services connected with VS8 at all !

OK I though - time for a reboot (akthough the install hadn't asked for one). The PC never came back !

Not good !

Eventually, through Safe Mode and the rebuilder, I found that the video drivers had been trashed, but somehow in a way that prevented me from re-installing them. Every time I touched the video software either the screen went blank or else the complete PC just stopped dead.

So, I added a small - 40GB IDE - drive to the machine and unplugged the two 200 GB SATA drives. Fine ! I can recreate a new system. Well, for a week or so, and then it crashed again - "cannot find NTOSKRNL.EXE". Well, I could find it, but I couldn't blow it away and replace it, so that drive was moved down a notch and yet another drive introduced and XP/64 installed.

Now things went better - except that it refuses to boot without the distribution disc in the CD drive ! So my original C: is now D: and my original D: is E:. So none of the original installs work and I've spent countless hours in reinstalling software onto a system that, before Visual Studio, was working extremely well.

The moral of the story appears to be to do development on your second-best machine ! Right now this PC has become a second-best machine !

My other birthday/Christmas/New Year present was a shiny new Acer 9300 laptop with a gleaming expanse of 17" of LCD screen. Seriously neat, and I hope to review it here for you in the next little while.

Meantime, however, my better half is calling ... New Year's Eve festivities are calling. Best wishes and a prosperous New Year to you all.