I must be getting old. It doesn’t seem like 40 should feel that old, and in fact it didn’t bother me when I turned 40 in March this year. Of course, to my children, I’m ancient, and to my husband, I’m young. I’m nine years younger than ITMan, which is not so much, until you remember that he grew up in the 70’s and I was an 80’s child, and there are some vast differences in attitude based on that. I guess it’s all a matter of perspective when you’re talking about age. To me, 65 seems old, but now some of my readers may be sending “Who’re you calling old?” comments my way.

Forgetting things almost always bites you in the butt, one way or another…

Whatever your perspective on the age issue, I’m starting to feel old sometimes, like when I can’t remember things. Part of the problem is just having too much creative stuff bouncing off the walls in my head, and the non-creative stuff just can’t compete so it just gets out of the way and then goes into hiding. (As an aside, I don’t have nearly as much trouble in the memory department as ITMan, who seems like he’s battling early-onset Alzheimer’s sometimes!) I write more notes these days, which is a good thing because I absolutely HATE to forget things. Forgetting things almost always bites you in the butt, one way or another, by inconveniencing yourself or worse, someone else.

It’s finally gotten to the point where I write notes about sewing machine settings or other quilting-related tidbits about certain techniques, so that I can remember them when I go to do something again. Only problem is, I tend to lose little bits of paper quite easily. Ok, they’re not exactly lost, just buried under other bits of paper, and sometimes fabric and such. Read the rest of this entry »

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I discovered LibraryThing a couple of weeks ago, and I’m in book lover’s heaven! I could instantly see major potential here, and I’ve already started to get a couple of long-term goals accomplished. Ever since I started writing at Quilt Epiphany, I’ve wanted to make a Library page, showing all the quilt books in my collection, and either linking to my review of the book (if there was one) or to the book at Amazon.com, or both.

I do have a Worpress plugin called Amazon Media Manager (AMM) which makes it possible to insert a pretty picture of a book or product into my posts and have it linked directly to Amazon where readers can buy it. Oh, and the veritable river of cash that flows from the Amazon Associates account into my wallet is staggering, as well. However, while AMM works great for one at a time inserts, or lists of two or three books or CD’s in the sidebar, I just couldn’t see spending the amount of time it would take to input 140 quilt books into my AMM list, and then program the thing to display them on a separate page. Never mind.

Here’s why LibraryThing is such a killer app. I made a free account at LibraryThing (a one step, two word process, believe it or not), and added a couple of books to my Library. It’s a simple process, since you can either enter the ISBN of the book, or search by title or author, and then select from a list to add the book to your Library. You can see the contents of your library, add tags, write reviews, share your profile with other users, see what other users are reading, etc. This is social networking for book lovers, Read the rest of this entry »

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Warning: techie computer talk contained herein; if you are a non-techie type, feel free to skip it, since in the end, it’s just grousing anyway!

Hello, my name is Nadine, and I’m a Computer Killer. I don’t know what I do to these things, but I think I’ve been through three CPU’s in about four years. It’s become the family joke, at this point. The last one (actually a rebuild of the one before with a new motherboard, so it counts as a new one) lasted only 11 months, which is pretty scary. So here’s the recap: I got up Saturday morning planning to get in some serious quilting time, and I checked email and a few other things on the ‘Net as usual. Then I get a window that pops up and says that iTunes, QuickTime and Safari want to update, so I let it do it’s thing, and then restart. And then…nothing. Upon restart, the whole thing is stuck at the Bios screen. Can’t press F1, F8, Esc, nothing. I tried twice more to start it up, and got the same thing. The third time (after unplugging from the power, discharging residual power and plugging back in), I get something like this:

The overclocking or overvoltage has failed. Press F1 to enter Setup and change your configuration settings or F2 to continue.

Neither F1 nor F2 got me anywhere no matter how many times I pressed, so it was still stuck. I looked up this error on the Internet using the MacBook, and found something that indicated that it might be the Bios chip, or maybe it needed a Bios upgrade. Well, I had this Bios chip already here that the motherboard manufacturer sent the last time it all did something weird, but I’d never put it in (by the time it arrived in the mail, the weirdness was gone, so why fix it?). I decided to see if it would fix it now, since I’d definitely never seen this particular problem before, and at that point, I’d nothing to lose.

No joy though; putting the new Bios chip in got me exactly nowhere. It didn’t even get to the Bios screen then, it just sat there with a blank screen. The lights were on, but nobody was home. I put the original Bios chip back in, and it didn’t even do what it was doing before the switch, just gave me the black screen. ITMan had no sage advice, except to get in the car and go buy another at the PX. Sounds simple, right? No, not really, Read the rest of this entry »

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