Silly Rule, silly sign

This is a garbage can. It is at a bus stop.

It is a garbage can of high standards, rigid principles, only the users of mass transit can use it, no walkers, no cyclists, no users of privately owned motor vehicles.

Can I use it all the time, I am a regular transit user or can I only use it when I am there waiting for a bus?

And exactly how is this going to be enforced?

How much of my tax and ticket money went to pay for this?

Dyeing for Entrelac

I don't like writing posts from Blogger, could be this layout, could be me.  Now I can't even get the pictures in the right spot

 

This is yarn natural dyed with cochineal expecially for an entrelac sweater.

I did a wonderful post using My Journal software and the pictures didn't come though.

Used 100 gms of finely ground cochineal from Maiwa 7 skeins of wool Soho Bulky Tweed 2 skeins of different handspun, and roving. The trick to getting the skeins different shades is putting them in one at a time about 20 minuties apart.
Used Jenny Dean's method but forgot the lemon juice.

Library Thing

Library Thing might be my favorite site on the Internet. 

I record everything I read as I read it, and rate it, even if it's so bad I don't finish it, hopefully this helps me not to be attracted to the same book again.  I review only occasionally mostly books that don't have any or not a lot of reviews and try to balance good and bad comments. Collections are part of the entry, some basic and some member created, I track books I own, books from CPL, books I want (mostly paperbacks in a series) and books I read years ago and don't own.  Tags most users use for subjects, I tag things I will want again for programs, this replaces the wish list that one could keep on the CPL site. 

LT has lists of series and charactors which is handy. There is a forum for asking help finding books from whatever details one remembers,  one for knitters, and one for librarians.

Office and others

Today Microsoft is releasing Office 2010, right on time to consider productivity suites, free or expensive, computer based or in the cloud.  My favorite technology writer has an interesting article on the free parts of 2010.

I own Office 07 and dislike it mildly, I own it because the Library does and because some of my other software, Inuit's Quickbooks  will only export to Excel and only email though Outlook.  Ah, Outlook, I loathe Outlook.  Without these constraints, I'd probably use Google docs more.  I will certainly not pay for Office 10 but I will probably download the free part, not today though.

Google Doc's are free, Google Doc's are accessible anywhere there is internet, reasonably private, and quite safe.  I think the Library is doing it's patrons a disservice teaching Office instead of Google, and a harm teaching Office 03.

But I use a small word processing and calendar program called My Journal,  the writing part is easy to use, the calendar kind of clunky, I might switch to Google, it started as a very secure program for journals and is designed to be installed on a Flash drive.   Private and portable but vulnerable to loss.  It actually is easier to blog on and then export to Blogger than using Blogger.

Facebook or not

To Facebook or not to Facebook, I dithered.  When one person joins an organization, becomes one of the statistics an organization can point to to say how successful they are,  it is a sign of ethically approving of an organization, agreeing with their policies and actions.  I don't approve of Facebook.  They only do as much as they are forced to do about protecting privacy, they do nothing about controlling on line bullying whcih has lead to several deaths.  And there are alternatives, and hopefully there will be more,  wired has a wonderful article about the whole issue.

But using Facebook is part of this whole CPL 2.0 experience, Sorry, I can't bring myself to be one more stat that Mark Zuckermann can point to with pride.

 CPL has chosen to make Facebook a major part of it's 2.0 outreach, has chosen not to use some of the other sites that might be a better fit like Librarything, and I am ashamed of CPL.

Edited to add more nformation from my favorite techie about Facebook and it's great respect for the privacy of it's users.

RSS

Well worth using to follow blogs, makes reading them easier, good tutorial here. 

flickr, youtube and me

Flickr is nothing great, I prefer Piscassa Web Albums. 

YouTube though, YouTube is great.  The instructional video's about knitting are mostly wonderful, with the usual consider the source problems,  if you ever want to knit with Ramen noodles this is it.  And then there is the glass spinning wheel, utter lovely.  I don't search for videos using YouTube though, I use Google.