The Heathen Housewife

A couple years ago, back when Windows Vista came out, I had just bought a new laptop that was touted as “Windows Vista Ready”, and although it came loaded with Windows XP, pretty soon a shiny new DVD showed up in my mailbox just practically begging to be loaded. I’ve always been an early adopter when it comes to computers. It’s always seemed like a good idea to stay on top of the newest technology. Why not go ahead and see what this Windows Vista stuff was all about?

Why not indeed. Joe was a little more reserved. He doesn’t like to interfere in my computer stuff, even to the point of hesitating to even state his opinions when I’m about to do something he thinks might be less than smart. But he did quietly, gently mention that the reviews of Vista weren’t all that great. That Vista didn’t really offer anything new or improved to benefit me…and boy, now that XP has been around so long it’s finally somewhat stable.

But I’m bull-headed, and I went ahead and upgraded. Well, I give up. I give in. It was a huge mistake. From day one, I had to put up with all kinds of weird, eclectic behavior from my software packages – an error message that I had to click through every time I wanted to send an e-mail using Outlook 2003; a funny little error message that I had to click through every time I finished uploading pictures from my camera; Stitch Painter never shut down gracefully. Things like that.

Then, after a Vista update a few months ago – I’m not sure which one because things were always so erratic that I just didn’t pay much attention to the odd lock-up or shut-down. But suddenly I noticed bad things happening more often. I was getting error messages about my video drivers and repeated blue screens of death. Not good. I did all the troubleshooting stuff that a good little early-adopter does. I went out to the manufacturer’s websites and downloaded the newest drivers. I looked for information on Microsoft’s website, and finally I ended up calling Toshiba support (I have a Satellite laptop).

That conversation was really funny, in perspective. The agent was really smart and helpful – suggested checking the drivers and even had me go looking for a save point that I could revert to. But apparently the upgrade that fried my drivers also corrupted the old system backup points. When I mentioned to him that I was strongly considering going back to XP, he hesitated a moment before politely agreeing with me that XP is a great operating system and that he’s still running it on his home computer. Vista is still new technology, he said. XP has been around longer and is very stable. Yes. Indeed.

So over the last couple of weeks, I got my ducks data in order and backed everything up. And over the last couple of days I reset my computer to factory settings, reinstalled all the software I use regularly, and copied all my data back onto the hard drive. Guess what? Everything went smoothly. Everything installed the first time with no weird error messages. Everything is running, and there have been no lock-ups or shut-downs. So far so good. Long live Windows XP.

Maybe now that I hate my computer a little less, I can find time to update my blog on a regular basis again. I have a lot of knitting goodness to share.

I’ll start with another little shawl. A while back, I spun up a 4-oz. chunk of merino-tencel roving. I wanted to keep the colors seperate and make a kind of self-striping yarn, so I tried my hand at chain plying. The first batch sucked. Royally. Somewhere around the last third of the first bobbin’s worth I kind of figured out what I was doing and managed to make some useable yarn. That’s the blob you see on the bottom-left of the photo.

I set the mess aside, and when I came back to it several weeks later, spun up the second half of the fiber and chain-plyed it, things came together and I made some real yarn. It wasn’t a lot of fiber in the first place, and after screwing up a good chunk of it, it was really a pretty small amount of yarn. But I managed to knit up a little mini-shawl that is just big enough to go over my shoulders, cover a good portion of my back, and tie in front. This picture of it blocking doesn’t do it much justice…

But I wore it on Saturday, and loved the way it looked and felt. I only wish I’d gotten someone to take a picture. Note to self: I own a camera, I should use it! It hangs much better than it looks laying flat.

This is another variation on the shawl pattern I got when I attended Candace Eisner-Strick’s class at the retreat last month. I’m obsessed with this pattern right now, and feel like I could knit about five more of them while I’m on the streak. It’s super-fast knitting, and quite gratifying to see my handspun knit up into a pretty garment!

This entry was posted on Monday, November 17th, 2008 at 3:01 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.