SpinnySpinny

It took about six weeks, but the comment spammers have finally found me. I already had compulsory moderation for first-time posters, but basically I’m getting nothing but spam comments.

If you are a real person and want to leave a comment, here are the things to know:

• You must enter a name and email.
• If Akismet thinks you are a spammer, you lose.
• If this is your first comment, it will go to moderation.
• If there are any links in it, it will go to moderation.
• If you comment again with the same name and email (and I approved your previous comment) then comments without links are automatically approved.

Comments are encouraged (I know you are out there, I can see you in my website logs.) But spam is evil and moderation is unfortunately one of the few defenses I have.

I’ve gone and done it, I installed WordPress. I have an actual modern blog! All the same old content is here, and I’ll be adding the old posts.

Yes, yes, I’ve been seriously lax. It has a lot to do with that Real Job I got a while back. But things have settled in and I’ve started thinking about the website again. I’ve lately been only sewing regular clothes (now four sizes smaller, yay!) which I find mostly boring to talk about. I realize that it’s still a fairly unusual activity these days, but as far as I’m concerned it’s at about the level of blogging what I made for dinner. Yawn.

Stage One of the Great Website Re-Do is complete:

The new server arrived, and while there are a few details to straighten out with my order from the Apple Store (like they sent me the wrong damn operating system version?!) it’s happily running on the internal network while I get it configured to my liking. (Thank you, Developer Seeding.) When this is done I’ll have an actual normal blog. I’m sure re-implementing RSS would be an interesting intellectual exercise, but I’m over it. WordPress, here we come.

I’ve been thinking about textiles, how about that? I started to re-sley the acrylic baby yarn on the loom because I wasn’t happy with the fabric I was getting at 12 ends per inch. That’s what I measured from the relaxed yarn, but as weft it insists on packing in way more than I want (like almost twice the number of weft picks as warp ends.) I’m going to change it to 16 and see if I like it any better then. If it’s going to come out like cardboard then at least cardboard in both warp and weft directions is a more useful fabric. It’s annoying to do however, one of those things that makes housework suddenly very interesting.

In the spinning department, I’ve been re-organizing the studio so I can bring the bicycle over finally. Yes, bicycle. A friend has an exercise bike with disembodied Ashford parts bolted to it that she would really, really like gone from her basement. It’s rumored to work, and if I can get it going well enough I’ll use it. Finally I could combine fiber and exercise at the same time. (A Woolee Winder is going to be high on the list for next equipment purchase. Spin for hours, never having to stop to change hooks!)

Note: I’ll be doing an OS upgrade and some filesystem housekeeping for the webserver soon, so you may find the site off-line for a few hours sometime in the next week or so.

Back online, on a new server. New operating system even, as the most reasonably available machine was an old PowerMac G4. There is still some tweaking to do (SpinnySpinny is the only site up at the moment) but things are moving along.

In case some people need reminding, let me help: Do your backups, kids. They’re good for you.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled textile content.