Knit Geek Life

Finally, my new computer parts are on the way. We'd actually tried to order these twice a month ago, but I'm not sure what happened... I think Matt had his address wrong or something in his NewEgg account or something. Thus, order got canceled twice. Maybe it ended up to not be such a bad thing...

Shortly thereafter, my dad's computer shit the bed. Not that this was totally unexpected or anything, when he decided he wanted a computer we gave him Matt's old computer which includes parts that are over 10 years old. We'd warned them it was probably going to die soon, we were just dragging our feet at buying something new because we weren't sure what to get him. Then it died, so we were forced into action.

So, we devised a nice plan to upgrade everyone. My computer's getting a new motherboard, chip, and RAM (like we'd planned to do anyway). My dad's getting my old motherboard, chip and RAM. He's getting a new case, new hard drive and a new monitor.

According to my mother, my dad's feeling a little lost without his computer though. I'm sure everyone can totally relate to that, I know I'd feel that way too... but I can't help but laugh at the same time.

My dad's in his 60s, and regardless of the fact that his household has had a "modern PC with a connection to the Internet" in it since 1993, he had virtually no interest in having his own box until 15 years later. (Cripes... have I really been online for 15 years?!) I find it funny that he's managed to get so attached to his box in the past six months that he's throwing the same sort of fit over it's absence that most of the rest of us addicts who've been doing this forever have. Even better, his snobbery about using my mother's computer...

When we gave my father his computer, we set it up with Ubuntu Linux. One of the nice things about giving a computer to someone who's totally computer illiterate is they don't have any expectations, so my father was probably the most ideal candidate you can get for Linux. Of course, the end result is that now he has expectations about the way things should be and is less than thrilled to be suddenly thrown into using my mother's laptop that runs Windows and lamenting how much better using Evolution (mail client) is than using Thunderbird.

Fortunately, he shall have his computer soon... and I'm extremely relieved to see that the parts are coming from New Jersey.

Matters of religion, faith, and spirituality seem to be things I tend to mull around in my head a lot but never actually say all that much about anymore. I suppose there are reasons for that...

One being that I've always found these matters to be terribly sensitive and personal, and since it tends to be human nature to seek out validation and acceptance, sometimes speaking transparently about the thoughts floating around in your head about how you see the world that you're living in and how you believe you ought to be living your life, and when it seems like people in your life have much stronger convictions than you do, convictions about things that you can't seem to bring yourself to agree with them on... It's frightening to make that leap. No one wants to be judged harshly.

To talk briefly about the labels I've held in my life... I spent my early teenage years identifying as atheist/agnostic, I wasn't quite sure which term fit, so I used both haphazardly. My later teen years and the first two years of my twenties, I was identifying as Christian, a path I ventured down primarily for selfish reasons, I wanted to fit in with my peers. After four years of trying, ultimately there were things about the Christian faith that I could not reconcile with how I perceived reality, and I parted ways with the church. I have a bad habit of tending to dwell on my negative feelings in regard to the church, but in reality... a great deal of what I hold dear to me now philosophically are things I learned while practicing Christianity.

These days, the label I use to identify myself when I need to is the Reluctant Agnostic.

Ultimately, agnostic was the term I most closely identified with. I feel that there's always some degree of doubt that exists in regards to whatever the force or deity or whatever you want to call it that guides the universe. Yet, I use the term reluctant because I find defining myself as agnostic to be limiting and not fully descriptive. All the term agnostic tells you is my position on a higher power, and to be quite truthful whether there is or isn't a higher power doesn't really have any bearing on how I live my life.

I think one of the biggest things I brought out of Christianity was the need for being a part of a community, a part in a larger whole. Like the Old Crow song says, "We're all in this thing together." I was disenfranchised when I left because I felt I was being given conflicting messages... On the one hand, I was getting the sense that one of the most important things that people needed to be was to be open and honest with each other in order to grow into better people over time from what I was reading in the Bible, and it was being reaffirmed at every turn in what I read online, in other books, etc. On the other, when I tried to live up to that ideal, the Christians I had surrounded myself with didn't appreciate it. They did everything to shut me up. In the end, I left because to me... being open, being transparent, and being accepted regardless of my flaws rather than being chaistised was more important.

Overall, my current personal philosophy (I guess you could call it, for a lack of a better term) is this:

1. Sharing is sacred. The stories, experience, and knowledge that others share with us and we share with others is valuable. It's to be treasured, respected and learned from.
2. Be honest with yourself and with others.
3. Question everything. Realize and accept that not every question will have an awswer, and that answers to life's persisant questions may change over time.
4. Love others the way you would like to be loved.
5. Forgive others for the things they have done wrong.
6. Accept and welcome the unexpected, it's probably better than what you planned anyway.

Josh often uses a tag on his posts that has seemed to resonate with me... Authentic Experience... Honesty and authenticity are something I've always put a high value on. There is nothing that can rivet my attention more than someone sharing of themselves honestly, openly with others.

I've done a few more layouts lately other than the RAKed ones, and I figure it's about time to show off.

Midnight Scrapping - Template
Claudi Designs - Hearts
Colie's Corner - All That Glitters

Elemental Scraps - Zazzle
Sir Scrapsalot - Antique Polaroids

This one was for the Color Challenge at The DigiChick Forums. The color was yellow.

Anja J - Summer

This one was for the Sketch Challenge on at The DigiChick Forums.

Lucky Smith & Jennifer Howland - Spring Spunk
Julia Oehme - Sketch Challenge

This was for the Template Challenge at Color Line Design.

Kellie Puddy - July Template #1
Mandy Mystiques - Peachy Keen

This was for the Bits and Pieces Challenge at Elemental Scraps.

Marianne Wahlberg - Twist

This was for the It's Elementary My Dear Scrapper challenge at Elemental Scraps.

Faith True - Eye Candy
Sugarplum - Glittery Fireworks
Valorie Brown - It's Elementary QP July 1-15

This was for the Flip It Good challenge at Elemental Scraps.

Elemental Scraps - Requiem

We did end up seeing the fireworks last night. Our friend Kyle's family has a cottage up on the lake, so we went up there yesterday evening to hang out and have a cookout and then went down and watched the Wolfeboro fireworks and got ice cream, then came back to the cottage and sat out by the lake and had some beers.

Kyle putting on the top of the grill.

Matt putting on the burgers.

The kitty.

Kyle mid-conversation.

Sunset on Lake Winnipesaukee

Sunset on Lake Winnipesaukee

Kyle taking a photo.

I must be having a streak of good luck this week! I was RAKed again, this time by Boyerville Scraps with her new kit, Affirmation which is currently available at the Benevolent Boutique.

Here's what I made with the kit:

Boyerville Scraps - Affirmation

We kicked off the holiday weekend in style going out to dinner at Z with our friend Kyle.... and promptly missed the fireworks that we had intended to go see. Not that I'm surprised. For the past two years, we've spent several holidays that traditionally have fireworks with Kyle and every single time, we have missed the fireworks. We tentatively made plans to try again tomorrow. We'll see if that happens.

That said, I have no regrets for skipping fireworks to eat at Z. I'm miserable at describing dining experiences, but I guess you could sum it up as upscale American with a atmosphere which makes you feel like you've momentarily walked into a restaurant somewhere in NYC rather than Elm St. in Manchester, New Hampshire. Mondays through Thursdays they have a three course for two special for $50, which is what Matt and I ended up getting.

The starter was Asian Nachos, which was crisp won tons with grilled chicken, jack cheese, sesame peanut sauce, wasabi sour cream, and daikon sprouts. For the entree, I got Free Bird Chicken and Matt got the New England Family Farms Roast Tri Tip Beef, and then for desert was White Chocoloate Bread Pudding. All definately good eats.

My only complaint was the service was a little slower than I like to see.. The courses felt awkwardly gapped.

In other fun news, I was RAKed by Mandy Mystiques at Elemental Scraps today. For the non-digiscrappers... a RAK is a random act of kindness. Sometimes designers will randomly give away a kit for free to someone. I was able to choose whichever kit I wanted from her shop and I ended up choosing:

I promptly turned around and whipped up this cute little layout featuring my cousin's little girl Ella:

Credits: Mandy Mystiques - Don't Feed the Daisies

Thanks for the kit, Mandy!

I am thoroughly convinced that I have got to have some of the strangest issues when it comes to the overall concept of routines and having a routine.

I had a mild short lived obsession with routines when I had first started reading the FlyLady Sink Reflections book. Assuming that people aren't familiar with FlyLady at all, here's a short recap... It's more or less this system of home organization that at it's heart more or less boils down to making small changes in the way you're doing things or as she calls them "baby steps" and the establishment of routines that you stick to. You start out with morning and bedtime routines, then if you have more that you want to add, you can.

Part of this process was writing the routines out and putting them in what in the FlyLady program is called a "control journal"... and this is where I started screwing up.

I really like the concept of the Control Journal. More or less, it's a centralized space for things like routines, todo lists, grocery lists, meal plans, bills, schedules, address books, etc. Something like a three ring binder for this sort of thing...

The problem for me was, I don't do well with data organization on paper.

One of the reasons I absolutely love the computer is because data can be manipulated, moved, reordered in a way that's not going look terrible, or be confusing, or potentially clutter my kitchen counter.

Printing things makes them physical and permanent. This is well embodied for me when it came to my routine lists. They drove me nuts. One of the suggested things to do was to order things on the routine in the order they should be done.

I tried to do that when I made them, but the reality of the matter is, I may do X, Y and Z when I get up in the morning, but I'm just as likely to do Z, Y, and X or X, Z and Y, or Y, X and Z... you get the picture. I'll get the tasks done, but I almost never do things in the same order every single morning. Not that there's anything wrong with that, because who cares as long as it gets done... but since it was on a piece of paper in the form of a checklist, I wanted to do it in order. I wanted to see it in order. But it wasn't in order and checking things off not in order drive me nuts.

Likewise, there were things on the list that I wanted to incorporate into my morning routine... Things like going over to the gym and running on the treadmill for 15 minutes, but since I don't consider that vaguely fun I'd only do it once in awhile, and it would remain unchecked and I'd feel guilty because there was something unchecked on my list.

The physical embodiment of the list just sorta made me mental in a way that probably makes me sound off my rocker.

I'm still searching for my way of doing things... I still can't remember to do normal things that most people can remember to do on a regular basis.... Like to go to the grocery store and actually plan to buy more than ingredients for one meal.

I get the heebies by not totally flying by the seat of my pants at all times. Planning ahead gets me upset because I usually plan for one thing and change my mind when I get there.

But that aside, I got to thinking this evening about how easily I feel like I get thrown off balance. How frustrated I get when my so-called "routine" gets messed with. And why sometimes I'm totally fine with the spontaneity of life, and other times I'm not.

For example, right now I feel like I was thrown for a loop today because I had to take some time out of my day to go take the car to be inspected. It isn't my usual lack of sleep excuse either... I knew a bit an advance and made sure I was in bed and able to sleep at a reasonable hour last night. But I just couldn't get in the swing of doing anything today... I was awake to take Matt to work, but I came home and slept even though I didn't need to really. When I got up, I didn't want to start doing anything because I knew I'd have to leave in an hour or to to go to the car dealership, and then when I came home with my husband I just felt mad that I didn't get anything done that I'd planned on doing. The day's not over so I'm sure I'll accomplish something this evening once he goes to bed... but I just feel unbalanced, I usually have accomplished SOMETHING during the day.

The fact that the 4th of July is Friday isn't helping either. My week is short. Most people appreciate that extra day off, but me? Not so much. I feel like someone short changed me on time. It's not that I don't like holidays.... I do. It just messes with the old routine of knowing how much time I have to accomplish things.

I guess I've totally been on a roll with this scrapbooking thing this weekend... I think I need to take a time out to knit!

For the Font Jaunt Challenge at Elemental Scraps which was to used a dingbat font in the layout. I used WC Sold Out B BTA.

Credits:
Kaciia - Babycafe Summer Megakit Collab 2008
Lencula - Babycafe Summer Megakit Collab 2008

For the Template Challenge at Color Line Design.

Kelly Puddy - June Template #2
Designs by Vicki - Berrylicious

Armina - Template 3
Amy Leighs - Modern Man

Since my life is still infinitesimally boring, I bring you more scrapbooking!

I finally figured out this week why The GIMP kept crashing. I knew all along that it had something to do with memory, but I couldn't quite put my figure on what... All I knew was that when I was running out of available memory, 90% of the time The GIMP would not handle it gracefully. My computer would lock up or The GIMP would just randomly quit.

Ironically, my first stop on my journey to the solution had absolutely nothing to with GIMP troubleshooting... It had to do with Photoshop troubleshooting. Someone on a message board I belong to was trying to edit some large files but kept getting a message about her "scratch disk" being full. For giggles, I decided to do a little google research and learned that a scratch disk was just more or less yet another term for what I'd always known as being virtual memory or a swap partition.

From what I read, I figured out (and this is likely over simplified for clarity) that when you're dealing with editing images, all the layers and changes are saved in the computer's memory while you're working on it until you save everything permanently and close the program. When there's too much for your memory to handle, it uses the special place on the hard drive set aside for holding stuff that needs to be in memory but doesn't necessarily need to be accessed right away, and when you run out of space there... That's when Photoshop would be throwing an error.

I knew somewhere in the back of my head that The GIMP worked on the same principle, but didn't think too much of it that night.

A few days later, I tripped over a post on Scrapbooks Gone Digital about performance boosting with The GIMP, where it was shared that the Tile Cache Size in the preferences should be set to 256MB, the original GIMP documentation was cited, but other than that no other specific reason why stated... so, when I went to go change my tile cache size, that's when it hit me.

The tile cache is the max amount of MB you want allowed in your RAM at any given point, anything over that will get sent to the virtual memory. My tile cache, by default, was set to 1024MB which is equal to 1GB, which is the amount of RAM that's in my machine. Duh! Of course, it's crashing! You can't ever use 100% of your RAM on one process! Things like, say, the operating system need RAM too! If my tile cache was set to 100%, it would never reach the threshold to send anything virtual memory. So, I changed my tile cache to 256MB, and it's been smooth sailing ever since.

That said, the documentation for changing the tile cache makes me want to choke somebody. Umm... Excuse me, never in a piece of documentation should I EVER see a line that says "Forget about this and hope the default works." or "Ask someone to do it for you." Such drivel is patronizing and clutters up documentation. If I was bothered to look at the documentation in the first place, you better be damn certain that A. the default isn't working and B. I want to do it my damn self. When I first started noticing problems I read this very piece of documentation and virtually no useful information from it other than the writer must think that I'm a moron. Thanks, man. Thanks.

Moral of the story open source documentation writers? Your job is to DOCUMENT. Not tell the user to go ask someone else to do it for them.

Rant over. On to the layouts.

LouCee Creations - Freddie

Claudi Designs - Jenna

Sweet Digi Scraps - Uncertain
Chrissy W - Sample Pack 1

Sweet Digi Scraps - Round the Track

Template by Trish Heffner
Sweet Digi Scraps - It's Primary, My Dear

mlg scraps - Neon Tantrum

Scraplifted from littlehands - Steal the Flag
Elemental Scraps - Fling

Designs by Krista - Picnic

I accomplished quite a bit scrap wise this week... Probably more than I should have.

I made this one for the Fresh Meat challenge at Elemental Scraps. This month's challenge was to do some photo editing and touch ups. I removed some blemishes, whitened my teeth and did some color adjustments.

Chrissy W - Angielicious II
Elemental Scraps - Requiem

This was the original photo:

This was for the Bits and Pieces Challenge at Elemental Scraps.

Blue Bayou by Angie Kovacs

This was for the Apple Cart Challenge at Scrap Orchard.

Apple Cart #1 Challenge by Ziggle Designs

This was for the Template Challenge at Scrap Orchard.

Sine - Title Goes Here!
Miss Vivi - Electric Boy

One of my forum friends, Beth, posted her first kit for her forum, but I don't know if she's posed it publicly yet... I immediately made a layout for her though!

Beth Brenneke - Mis Mash Modern

No challenge for this one... Just me playing!

Amy Sumrall - A Walk in the Park

This one was for the Scrap Jack challenge at Elemental Scraps.

Chriscrap - Paper