Monthly Archives: November 2008

A Question of Popularity

It happens that there are 2 baby blanket projects I have done that have
each achieved a level of fame.  This was not an intended outcome
— it just seems to have… happened.   In both cases, the
receiving baby seems to have enjoyed the blanket, which is all that
matters.

The first blanket to achieve some level of fame (or notoriety) is the Dragon
Hide
baby blanket (previously
blogged
).  I’ve seen it appear on completely random other
pages, and if I look at the stats for my blog/web pages, I see that it
gets a fair bit of traffic — probably a hit every couple of days
(which counts as high traffic, for this blog πŸ˜‰ ).

The second is the Tie-Dye
baby blanket
, which I have not previously blogged about, but which
I did log in Ravelry, here
From Ravelry’s stats, I can see that it’s been viewed over a thousand
times (which is, approximately, a thousand times more than any of my
other projects πŸ˜‰ ) and over 200 people have fav’ed it.

I have no idea whether how to compare those worlds — the un-Ravelry’ed
Dragon Hide or the un-blogged Tie-Dye baby blanket have each gone off
and struck peoples’ imagination in ways I could not anticipate,
measure, or reproduce.  I suppose, now that I have done a drive-by
blogging of the Tie-Dye
blanket, I should quickly post the Dragon Hide blanket to Ravelry, to
see if it captivates anyone there.

Or, not — see point above about what matters.   This is just
idle curiosity, and a matter of checking the heartbeat on the blog πŸ˜‰

Good thing I’m not in the knitting/design business, I guess!

A Glimpse into the Yarn Industry

I thought this
article
, about Schaefer
Yarn’s
“Sock the Vote” effort, was interesting for the peep into
the yarn industry it gives.

(“Sock the Vote” is a set of 4 colourways of sock yarn Schaefer did to
represent the colours apparently favoured by Michelle Obama, Hilary
Clinton, Sarah Palin and Cindy McCain).

In particular, the article notes,

“Schaefer said her company […] did
some $850,000 in business last year, the best ever for the 16-year-old
company.

But the growth of those in the yarn business is exceeding demand. In
addition, the ailing economy is creating a slowdown.

She expects sales this year to dip into the $800,000 range.

Thus, she said, the popular “Sock the Vote” effort comes at a time when
it is indeed welcome.

Schaefer told of being able to weather the downturn, but predicted
others in the business aren’t going to make it because of growing
competition and the tight money market.

In her business alone, she said, her 16-person work force now is down
to nine because of the weak economy.”

The overall business number is good, though not huge.  Interesting
to see some kind of numbers — assuming an average of $20 per skein,
that suggests they move 40,000 skeins a year.  That’s more than
modest!

It is also interesting to note the pure business terms above — while
it’s good  to be in a business that deals with something you
really love, you never can lose sight of the fact that it is a
business, and you have to tune to the market realities or suffer the
consequences.

‘d like to know how the specialized colourway did — I didn’t have enough resonance with the campaigns to feel I had to buy a particular yarn (as a memento? to make a memento?), but I don’t know if others would have.  And, looking at the colours, I did think the ones that appealed to me most were not aligned with camps I would care to support.  So — did politicizing the yarn help or hinder sales, I wonder?

Getting Things Done: It’s All in the Overview

Every now and again, I fall down the rabbit hole and find myself
exploring “to do” software again.  This dates back to when I first
had an Apple Newton and worked with basic list applications (oooh, the
thrill of having a “done” item disappear from view! so much more
satisfying than a simple strikeout on a piece of paper).

Some of the traditional “To Do” support programs aim to give you
guidance on what you should be doing next — calculated by priorities
and due dates, and whatever else.   Llamagraphi’cs LifeBalance
(which I did try even as long ago as on those Newton platforms)
aims to provide you with the insight of what you should be doing in
order to meet your stated goals of balance between different aspects of
your life.  

For myself, I find that I don’t want software that will tell me what to
do next.  Instead, I just want to capture the salient features of
the things I need to keep track of, and then have software that is
flexible enough to give me different views on that — what is due now,
what did I say I wanted to revisit now, what is the collection of
things I’m supposed to look at or do over the work week, the whole
week, the next 4 weeks, or the next 4 months (in
aggregate).    Then, I’ll use those perspectives to lay
out my gameplan for the day, week, etc. 

Or — I would like a tool that collects and manages the data about the
items to be done, is flexible in presenting the collected information,
and supports (not supplants) my own planning
process.  A tool that organizes my “To Do” data, and I’ll take
care of organizing myself.

My current “To Do” management tool is an Excel spreadsheet.  Over
the
years, I have refined my techniques so that I don’t bother with things
like “priority” (which varies by context and is largely equated to
guilt) and the types of things I track have evolved to look
suspiciously like those for David
Allen’s “Getting Things Done” (GTD)

So, I looked at the various software applications available that tout
GTD
capabilities, and compare their functionality to my Excel spreadsheets.

The big difference seems to be — the GTD software tools are much
better at supporting groupings of activities (e.g., projects, areas,
contexts) than Excel.  However, they mostly have a few pre-set
ways to look at the collected tasks — much less flexibility than you
can achieve in a more general purpose tool (like Excel).  I
wouldn’t dare suggest which is better than the other — it’s all a
question of tradeoffs and priorities.

Tools like Cultured Code’s
“Things”
, and Omni’s
“OmniFocus”
seem to focus on facilitating the process of capturing
activities (e.g., drag and drop from e-mail) and organizing them into
projects.  Then you can look at all the things that are to be done
“as soon as possible” in a given project or context.  But, as many
of us live in a world where everything has to be done “as soon as
possible”, the fine art of personal planning seems to be in building
nuance into how one handles “possible.”

Ideally, I’d like have the ability to map out the next weeks or
weekends based on what focus I intend to give them.  For
example,   there’s no point in expecting I’ll get a lot of
creative thinking done if I’m out of the office and on the road for 2
weeks.   It’s not okay to just say “I’ll get to those when
I’m back in my office context”, because deadlines will have
passed:  I need to prioritize which bits of creative thinking are
going to have to be tackled in the bleary eyed state of jet lag, even
as I am pushing off certain other thinking/writing
activities.   On the personal side, I can set any number of
goals or targets for getting machine knitted projects done, but there’s
not a lot of point in doing that without looking at the number of
weekends I’m going to be in the same building as the knitting machines
between now and the end of the year.  Or, when I have a weekend at
home,  will I swap in the knitting machine project or focus on all
the household chores that have backed up over weeks away?  (It
should be clear which I would prefer πŸ˜‰ ).

Of the tools I looked at today, “Thinking
Rock”
seems to be the most promising, from my perspective. 
It’s a little less glitzy than some, as it is a cross-platform
Java-based application.  On the other hand — it is cross
platform, and knows how to save out an individual data
file!   The big thing it seems to have going for it is that
it includes a number of “report” perspectives — all open actions, all
actions for a project, all deferred actions, etc.  I haven’t quite
figured out how I would include the perspective of the kind of “focus”
times (or distracting events) as described above — but   I would
really like to let go of this hacked up Excel spreadsheet
approach.  There doesn’t seem to be a lot of glory to be claimed
from having figured out how to make Excel produce GANTTs. 

Seven Years Ago Today…

Crochet baby blanket

Seven years ago today, the project above was called to
action.   Happily, in the seven years since, I have learned a
thing or 2 about taking pictures of knitting and crochet
projects…!   And the recipient has been busy learning all
about more fundamental things!

Knitting Design Perils

Here’s an old project, still underway:

WIP

That picture was taken over a year ago (September 2007).  There
has since been progress — but only a couple of inches or
so.   And this is the first piece of the sweater — there’s a
front and 2 sleeves to go after this piece is done.

It’s from my own design, and there are 2 reasons it’s particularly slow
going.

  1. the patterning is inobvious — it’s painstaking to memorize a
    chunk of the pattern so that I can knit a row without having to look at
    the chart for every single stitch
  2. there isn’t anything like enough contrast in value between the
    different yarns to give this the punch it should have

So, I’m picking at it from time to time, between projects, pressing on
to finish but not with enough energy to actually make significant
progress.

The first issue is a matter of lack of experience in pattern designing
— I have gained a new appreciation for the value of building
interesting things from simple building blocks (e.g., easily repeating
motifs that build up in clear progression from one row to the next).

The second could easily have been handled by, say, doing a SWATCH, with
the real yarn, instead of relying on the colours I had chosen to
represent the yarns in the knitting design software:

Design

Sigh.  Lesson learned.

Here are a couple of closeups to admire the yarn, which is Green
Mountain Spinnery Mountain
Mohair
.  I do think it is a wonderful yarn, and this is not
the first time I’ve used it.

Contrast fail Contrast glow
Failed
contrast
Glowing
mohair

 
     

Of course, I could, and perhaps should, pull it all out and do
something more successful with the yarn.  I dunno.  The
overall project is over 2 years old.  Do I want to restart the
whole design process?  Or plug away until I have a finished object
to declare victory?  I guess I’m stubborn, and want to finish the
original design:  I think it will be perfectly wearable, just not
spectacular.  But at this rate, I could pull it out, redesign and
reknit it before I ever finish this original plan…

Looking back to get the picture

I feel I’m not making a lot of knitting progress this year.  
Maybe that’s really a “latter half of the year” problem.  Looking
at my completed
project gallery
,  it’s not like it’s empty for 2008.

Sometimes, I guess you have to look back at a progression of things
(trees) to get the picture (forest).  I know I can look back on
certain years and see almost no knitting output — and further
reflection reveals that they were very busy and distracting years
(usually not in a good way).

What is notable about the gallery for this year is the prevalence of
small projects:  travel
projects.  That would be because of the wild travel schedule this
year.  This is borne out by the almost complete absence of
progress on knitting machine projects — you have to be on the same
continent as the machines in order to use them!

So — how do you look back and measure progress/distraction?

KM Lace — at last!

I believe I finally cracked the mystery of getting my Brother KH930 to
knit lace properly.  I’d struggled with this before, to no avail.

Brother knitting machines have a separate lace carriage that is used to
transfer stitches.  That is, you use the regular carriage to knit
some fabric, switch to the lace carriage to transfer stitches from one
needle to another.  This is what creates the equivalent of “knit
together” and (on the next knit row) yarn over.  It can take
several passes, depending on which way the stitches are meant to lean.
  The electronic program you’ve selected controls which stitches
get slipped where.   And, once they are all set up, you go back to
the regular carriage and knit a row, two or more.

Simple, yes?  And — fraught with peril.  Lifting stitches
off a needle is rarely a challenge for the lace carriage. 
Depositing them on the appropriate other needle is sometimes less
successful.  My experience was that I’d get along mostly okay and
then the machine would drop one stitch in 10.  Well, that’s A
LOT!    More than you can reasonably keep an eye on to
fix if you notice a stitch that looks like it’s about to take a suicide
dive on the next pass.  And it just made a nasty tangle instead of
lace.

I looked at any number of things — more weight on the bar pulling the
fabric; less tension; more tension; bent needles… no use.

The following swatch was worked bottom to top.  You can see things
started out poorly (though this is hardly the worst example).  And
then I Figured It Out, and things worked almost perfectly.

KM Lace learning

I suppose I should work a few more efforts before declaring absolute
victory, but here’s the key thing that seemed to make a (logical)
difference:  I ran the fabric being knit down over the ribber
needles (i.e., I covered the ribber needles with a piece of cardboard,
and kept the knitting in the front of the machine instead of having it
drop down between the ribber and the main bed.  Put another
way:  remove the angle of the backwards tilt of the main bed
introduced when you attached the ribber.

Or, perhaps most succinct:  use the ribber OR the lace carriage,
but never the 2 at the same time.

An Election Eve State of Mind

One has the sense that 80% of the US population is on edge tonight —
deeply concerned that the Wrong One is going to win tomorrow. 
What isn’t clear — what percentage of the population believes which
candidate is the wrong choice. 

It seems likely, given the expected record turnout and other
indications of people taking this election very seriously,  that
there will be a very large amount of disappointment, fear and probably
anger, no matter which way things work out.

I hope I’m only seeing the empty half of the cup — I sincerely hope
that there will be a lot of infectious positive, constructive,
inclusive, optimistic response from the election winner’s supporters.

Because, above all else, we need to feel an end to the grinding
downward spiral from war weariness, economic pincer grips and so on —
let our feet touch bottom and push up towards the light. 

What’s that?  Sorry — could you speak up?  Knitting? 
Oh, yes! Knitting.  Always plenty of that going on — more on
that, later.

Computer Programming

Last night, I attended the Gala celebrating DC ACM‘s 50th Anniversary.  It
was a well-run affair, seemingly effective in its aim to pull together
visibility, awareness and support for the re-emerging ACM chapter.

The keynote speaker was Bjarne
Stroustrup
, best known as the designer of the C++ programming
language.  He gave a very interesting talk, unveiling the history
of C++ and some of the thinking behind its evolution, as well as
pointing to the key updates in the now-finalized C++0x (likely
to be C++09).    I think some of the power of his
presentation came from the fact that he was articulate in sharing the
backing story, instead of just pummelling the audience with sample
code, feature lists, or other gee whiz factoids  about C++ or
other programming languages.  The slides (and a video of the
presentation) will be available on the DC ACM website, shortly.

Of course, this tickled a few neurons in my own brain, and left me
thinking wistfully of programming days.  While I always liked it,
it’s been a long, long time since I did any programming of note in any
language.  Long enough ago that object oriented programming was
just becoming mainstream, and I never got seriously into
it.   The world of programming, and the tools to support it,
have changed entirely.  It’s hard to tell which new practices are
actually de rigueur, and
which ones are simply stylistic.  

However, I have no particular need for programming in my current line
of work, and certainly don’t have so much spare time that I want to
fill  it by climbing up the learning curve again.  There
aren’t any simple things that need programming in my life — and
writing a full-on knitting design program, say,  using KnitML,  is hardly a
simple thing πŸ™‚ 

NaNoWriMo

Today marks the start of National Novel Writing Month — check it out
at the NaNoWriMo site.

Although I don’t aspire to write a novel this particular month, I have
long admired the approach to breaking down self-imposed impediments to
writing:

“Valuing enthusiasm and perseverance
over painstaking craft, NaNoWriMo is a novel-writing program for
everyone who has thought fleetingly about writing a novel but has been
scared away by the time and effort involved.

Because of the limited writing window, the ONLY thing that matters in
NaNoWriMo is output. It’s all about quantity, not quality. The kamikaze
approach forces you to lower your expectations, take risks, and write
on the fly.”

This November, I intend to borrow a page from NaNoWriMo for this
blog.  If it works — expect to see a lot more content this month,
all over the map.  If the “writer’s block breaking” effect works,
perhaps there will be more content going forward.  Or —
not.  πŸ™‚