Too many words, not enough notes

11:53 am - [public]

I'm having a spring (?) clean of my journal and have pruned my friends list substantially. I think I've mostly removed people who either never update (or filter me out of all their updates), or people who I friended via common communities or mutual friends but we don't seem to have ended up with anything beyond an aquaintanceship (i.e. we pretty much don't comment on each others posts).

I have been reading everything and I am still more than happy to re-friend anyone who was sufficiently riveted by what I wrote; just shout and it will be done.

Similarly if anyone feels the need to de-friend me, no hard feelings either way!

09:31 pm - Pogies pattern

My friend Will was complaining about how cold his hands get when rowing in the winter. He mentioned that some people had special mittens that fit over the handles of the oars and allow you still to grip the oar properly... and I offered to knit him some.

I was going to adapt a standard mitten pattern, then I found out with some judicious googling that these types of mitts are called pogies and there are three patterns on Ravelry for them. I picked the pattern I liked best, but of course I am incapable of making a pattern without altering it in some way: the original pattern used a relatively thin yarn, whereas what I had to hand was thicker; I wanted to knit two-at-a-time magic loop instead of one-at-a-time on DPNs; and I wanted to do "fingertips up" rather than "cuff down" because I wasn't 100% certain I had enough yarn.

The original pattern is here (requires Ravelry login) and is copyright Fervid Designs.

I thought I'd write up my alterations to it in case anyone else ever wanted to do something similar.

( Read more... )

If you have any questions on this pattern feel free to leave a comment and I'll do my best to answer!

12:59 pm

Discussing some Subversion "feature", earlier...

Me: Does it really do that? That's totally bizarre.
Co-worker 1: No, it's not bazaar, it's svn!
[collective groans]
Co-worker 2: Ooh, you git!
[more groans]
[short silence]
Co-worker 3: OK, we're all trying to work out how to get an RCS joke in now, aren't we?

07:29 pm

I decided to take part in caddyman's Halloween Ghost Story challenge. Briefly, the challenge is to write a Halloween story of exactly 500 words, based around a song lyric.

My entry is below. If you'd like to guess at the song lyric, feel free; I think it's glaringly obvious :-) This is also my first attempt ever at anything like this, so please if you can't say anything nice about it don't say anything at all :-)

I'm leaving it public so it can be linked from caddyman's post.

( Read more... )

09:22 pm

Grr argh. I'm trying to remember a carol we used to sing at school. It wasn't in our normal hymn books, it was hand-typed and purple roneo'd (OK, dating myself here). I've never heard it anywhere else but as far as I know it wasn't written by our music teacher or anything.

All I can remmber about it is that as written each verse had four lines, but the third line I think was sung multiple times? And something about kings, and joy. And it had a bit that went too high for me to sing (not difficult) but it was still my favourite. I'm also getting a strong feeling of a key word beginning with mau..., or maybe just ma....

Funnily enough that's not enough information for me to track it down even with my l33t g00gl3 sKillz0r. Grr.

08:49 pm

My back is doing much better now. It appears that when under doctor's orders to potter around, I turn to baking; I've made a meatloaf from my Mum's recipe (yum), a double batch of chocolate and cherry brownies from my Green and Black's chocolate recipe book, and Gloria's 5-minute chocolate-cake-in-a-mug recipe which is EXTREMELY tasty and astonishingly easy and quick. Dangerous indeed.

Also this weekend: sorted out various stuff around the house, garden, and car; Jif taught Matthew how to ride without his stabilisers; caught up on a bunch of SG-1 and Atlantis; did an enormous grocery shop; and only logged into work to check my email twice (and not found anything too scary therein, either).

( [ETA: chocolate mug cake recipe below the cut] )

( [ETA2: chocolate and cherry brownie recipe now below the cut!] )

03:25 pm - [public post]

Since Jif is going on sabbatical for at least a year, his company are looking to find someone to fill his shoes on a permanent basis.

More details below the cut if anyone's interested, or feel free to pass it on if you know someone else who might be.

( Embedded software job - details )

09:45 am

PSA for UK people:

The ISA limits have changed for this tax year (2008-2009). You can invest a total of £7200 in ISAs overall and a maximum of £3600 in a cash ISA (last year the numbers were £7000 and £3000).

What this means in practice (and I only realised last night) is that if you have used the full cash ISA allowance and have an equity (stocks and shares) ISA for the remainder, the amount you can put in the equity ISA has actually gone down from £4000 last year to £3600 this year.

So if, for example, you have been paying £333 / month by Direct Debit or standing order into an equity ISA, you need to reduce that payment to £300 / month effective immediately.

[x-posted]

09:12 pm

I waver on how much I enjoy Joel Spolsky's opinion pieces, but this one is fantastic:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/03/17.html

Anyone with even a passing interest in web standards should read it.

12:39 pm

I'm a member of the Yougov panel and recently got sent a link to their latest survey. One of the questions asked me what I could remember hearing about from the Labour party in the last couple of weeks, and what had I thought about it, and the next question ditto for the Conservative party.

I wrote "political funding scandals" for both. I honestly could not think of a single other thing from the parties specifically; I'm aware of various other things that the leaders or MPs of those parties have talked about in the last couple of weeks, but does that count as coming from the party itself? I don't think it does, but perhaps I was too pernickety in interpreting the question.

11:19 am

Wow, this is fascinating. Students who show stronger gender bias are more likely to under- or over-estimate their own past performance, in accordance with the gender bias.

http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/2008/01/gender-stereotypes-can-distort-our.html

12:04 am

Happy New Year!

08:08 pm - Anonymous goodness!

A few weeks ago, an edition of The New Yorker dropped through my letterbox. I initially thought it might be one of these free trial lure-you-in type things, although I was a bit surprised by the lack of advertising if so, but I read it anyway and thoroughly enjoyed it.

Since then a new issue has duly arrived every week, and they have all been extremely interesting. After two or three had arrived I posted on GANBABB in case it was related to my secret snowflake gift, but nobody there owned up to having anything to do with it, and I'm not participating in any other secret gift exchange things this year....

Then today a copy of the International edition of Vanity Fair arrived, too!

So. Whoever the kind person is, if you're reading this, thank you! These are both really fantastic magazines with a wide range of topics of interest to me. I've actually never read either of them before now, although I've heard of them both obviously. So thank you! It's really interesting getting the US perspective on some of the issues at hand, as well.

I'll leave this public so if anyone who knows who I should be thanking would like to comment, you can do so anonymously if you prefer :-)

12:14 pm

I'm having a bit of a friendslist cull - mostly communities that have lost their relevant for me, a few people I've rarely/never exchanged comments with, some who I had friended but had never friended me back, etc.

Nothing personal intended in any of it - if I unfriended you and you want back, just shout. I'm just aiming to get to a point where I can read my entire FL every day without having to use a default filter (at the moment I only read the full list once a week or so, if that).

It's also possible I've made mistakes because this new friends management page format makes it very hard to see what I'm doing!

01:49 pm

PSA, from a community:

Be warned; if you did the LJ Mojo meme that was floating around recently, you might have a nasty surprise. It seems the creators of the meme are having a nasty little joke at your expense; they seemed to have created this meme to obtain "dirty little secrets" - plus they have substituted a picture of Goatse for the Mojo results on your LJ. If you posted the result on your LJ, you might want to go back to that entry and delete it....

05:31 pm - It's Friday afternoon...

Leave me an anonymous comment and/or fill in the poll which only I can see....

Poll #759474
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: None, participants: 10

Tell me something!

Ask me something?

03:14 pm - Livejournal strike

In case any of you haven't heard, there's an LJ Strike planned for 06/06/06.

Read more about why. I won't be deleting my journal but I will be refraining from posting or commenting from midday UTC on Monday 5th June until midday UTC on Wednesday 7th June.

Since my paid time doesn't expire until August I can't really hit LJ where it hurts (by not renewing) until then!

09:41 pm

I'm now cmdr_ivanova over at GreatestJournal (I'll be staying here too, at least for the time being).

03:57 pm

Mmmm, toffee choc dips. Two hours ago I didn't even know they existed; now, I may never eat anything else.

12:04 pm - PSA

That IQ test meme that's going round at the moment - just in case anyone hasn't seen it yet, it's a hoax. It displays a high IQ reading for you but when you post it in your journal everyone else sees it reporting a low number.

See explanation here:
http://marnanel.livejournal.com/840471.html