You'd have thought that after last year's Kindle eclat, Amazon would have learned their lesson, right? That it is just not smart to mess with books listed on the website by just taking them off (and taking them off reader's Kindles too, while you are at it)?

Well... it seems they haven't learned.
With the rise of e-books, a discussion has come up between publishers, agents, authors and (e-)booksellers about fair pricing of e-books and fair shares of profits. Then last week Macmillan (a not-so-small publishing group) wished to discuss a move to an agency model/commission sharing with their e-books on Amazon. The latter wasn't delighted (though actually they would not lose money with that model - on the contrary). And just because Amazon thought it would be good to throw a tantrum... they pulled Macmillan books off their website. All books, mind you, not just the e-books. Why on earth they thought that to be a good idea? I don't know. But it makes me a bit wary of them.

I do rely on Amazon for a stack of things - English books, mostly, and the (very) occasional non-book item. Their wishlist or direct links are a very convenient way to give other folks an idea of the things you like or to make sure that the presents you receive are really what you wished for. Their "express shipping" option has made me happy once and saved my butt one other time (though I do prefer buying in local brick-and-mortar stores for those goods normally). But actions like these make me think of looking for an alternative.

My book is being listed on Amazon by now, and I had originally planned to post about that today. I was pondering to post a link to the A.-site for it, but I was of two minds about that, because I still believe in supporting the local bookstore. I won't post a link to their site now.

There are more options than just the Big River Store: You can pre-order the book via every brick-and-mortar and every online bookshop. You can order directly from the publishing house. Or, if you don't want the book straight away and really soon, you can also buy a copy from me - I will be dragging copies of the book along to every market and event I will be going to in 2010, and I will be happy to sell them (so I don't have to drag them all back home).

This is where (and what) I'm currently at:

That is the Seriously Slouchy Spirally Hat (or does Slouchy Seriously Spirally Hat sound better? I can't decide...) all knitted, waiting for bind-off. In this picture, you are looking at the inside of the hem. The lower edge is folding up to give a nice, scalloped lower edge to the hem, and then it roughly looks like this before binding off:



It's made with a contrasting band and bind-off at the lower edge. The funny wobbly-crumply shape is the hat in its pre-blocking state - this pattern really needs some blocking after it is finished. It will look a lot better and much more impressive after bind-off and blocking, I promise. (And I also promise you a picture.)

This very hat, though, needs to be bound off first. Which is what I'm going to do now.

And then I only have to wait for the pattern testers to deliver their feedback to get the pattern ready for publishing. Hooray!

While blogging on Friday went off into the 'Net without any trouble, things quickly went pearshaped from there - with the wlan on and off again and on and off and finally off only. And then something in the innards of Windows, in the regions where the little drivers sit and make their thing, digested itself. And it was not possible to put that Humpty Dumpty back together again - so I finally had to reinstall Windows.

Let me tell you: That is quite an experience. I think it must have been a dozen times that the computer booted and did something (always stating "setup is preparing your computer for first use") and then re-booting. After a while of this continuous rebooting game with things done inbetween, it cried for the supplementary driver CD (which it got) and then had some more quality boot-and-reboot time. And then it actually finished.

On the down side, that now means that I have to re-install the ten or so programmes that I had already installed. On the up side, the pre-configured and pre-installed computer came with about 30 Gigabytes taken on the drive C. Thirty Freaking Gigabytes! For the operating system! I remember those times - that are not so very long gone - when a whole hard disk with 30 Gigabytes was a huge disk, and a very modern (and expensive) thing to have. Maybe I have lived under a rock the last years, but do operating systems really need to have so much disk space? I had very much planned to use the extra GBytes for storing more photos and documents, not more system. Well, after the re-installation, the new system takes up only (only! hah!) twenty gigabytes. That's ten more for me (once I figure out if some partition magic programme can shift partitions on Win7, that is).
Oh, and the connectivity problem, by the way, is not completely solved yet - though we now have a better idea what might cause the problem. So there will be some more configuring fun in the next days.

On the non-so-software-front, not too much got done (obviously) - a little bit of sewing on the tent and a little bit of knitting. I hope to get the hat testknit finished today or maybe, if I can't find much time for that, tomorrow.

...fruit flies like a banana.

It took me a good while to make it back into the internet - now on the new computer. I have a feeling that it will take me a few days to get used to the new kid on the desk, but I already had some good laughs (and some moments of severe d'oh).

You'd think that Microsoft Windows 7 would come from Microsoft, right? And the Office suite - Microsoft, right? So I got a good laugh when the brand-new system did get all agitated and warning when I tried to install my old Office suite... because "do you really want to allow that software from an unknown author to change something on your computer? Reallyreally?"

Well... actually... yes. That was the reason I put in the CD and clicked "install", you know?

Apart from that (and the fairly annoying getting-into-the-internet-problems) and the new keyboard that I need to get used to (and tweak with my custom keyboard settings), Win7 does look nice, and things all went quite smoothly. And I really love how easy it was to transplant my Firefox settings to their new home - copy the profile folder, mend the folder name in the profile.ini, and that was it!

Now, please excuse me while I spend most of this day with deinstalling stuff (Win7 comes with about 30 gigabyte of disk space already taken, and I'm still wondering by what) and installing stuff (I have a huge list of programmes on my old 'puter, and I actually do use quite a few of them).

After all the paperweight is off my back for a while ( it will be time for taxes soon - more paperwork), here are some things that are not really spectacular, but give me a nice feeling of something actually moving forwards.

First of all, these dropped-off stitch markers

  - and yes, I use bits of knotted silk thread and an old, single earring - these dropped-off markers mean that I have progressed on my second slouchy hat (with better maths for the hem this time),



and am now almost into the first round of ribbing. This means slipping half the stitches to a holder and knitting the other half. Just what happens here:


Then, there's that other idea that I have had. And now I am swatching - not spectacularly either:


But other things have happened, too. Non-knitting things. Like this:


This is where the seam on the tent is today. Which is almost one metre from where it was yesterday in the early evening, and that means actually almost two metres of stitching done, half by me and half by the most patient man that lives on Earth (I'm sure he must be the most patient man on earth, after all, he lives with me). Only a few metres to go on that first bit! And it looks as if there would be sewing time tonight as well. And tomorrow.

And finally... something spectacularly unspectacular.


They have been fired for a while and are now finally in my workspace. "They" are the ceramic disks that are supposed to go on an equally unspectacular stick and there to serve as a spinning whorl.
For those of you who are not recognising these whorls, originally they were made as the reference whorl of the Textilforum Experiment, and they got a lot of praise for running extremely well. However, the experiment whorls were not intended to be sold, and they were purely functional, including all rough edges and unsmoothed surfaces. These are made for actual use - with smooth edges and smooth surfaces. The whorls are made from modern clay, and with a modern technique - I'm using a specially-made little cookie-cutter-like implement. But that modern procedure is what makes them exactly alike and as close as humanly possible to the weight and MI of the original 12th century whorl, which is what we needed for the experiment. I will weigh them today to make sure they are all on a par, and then they are going into the Marketstall tomorrow.

It's time for me to clear away again that bunch of tabs that have accumulated (I keep tabs open with interesting things to blog about)...

First of all, phiala has started to collect museum databases on her blog and welcomes suggestions for more.

A new issue of dragtjournalen (a free e-journal) has come out - you can download the pdf file on the draktjournalen website.  The issue includes an article by Else Østergård about the history of linen; the whole journal is in Danish.

On other news, I'll be doing a much-looked-forward-to run to the post office today, to post... yes, the proof that has finally been finished! This feels like a huge load off my back. Hooray!

In a recent comment, I found a link to academia.edu, which seems to be something like Facebook for academics (with listing of papers). Another social platform, just what the Internet needs! Did any of you know about that platform before? Am I the only one who was in the darkness?

To blog in earnest about that, I think it is a brilliant idea to have some sort of academical network like that - you can list books and papers you have read, maybe discuss them with colleagues, follow other people's work, and so on. Just like Facebook is a brilliant idea, keeping track of old colleagues and friends, instant chatting to just drop a word or two, and so on. And like Xing and LinkedIn are brilliant ideas, building a network of business acquaintances and partners, getting recommendations and seeing who trusts whom in business things, and so on. And like Ravelry, where you can connect with knitters you know and new folks, see who knits what, find new pattern ideas, message around, hang out in groups and so on. But is having so many different network platforms still a brilliant idea?

The problem of all this, as I see it: There's too many of them platforms. And each and every platform presence of a person means you need to dedicate time and energy to your place in that network, keeping your status and your information up-to-date, keeping track of your network connections, dropping a comment here and an answer there. And more and more I get the feeling that all those social networks are a good idea, but a great big honking single one would be an even better idea - because the idea of each of these networking sites is to collect everybody into the site and database, and every single platform wants as many people as possible, but my time is limited, and my energy that I am willing to devote daily to my presence on the Net is limited too. And that is exactly why I am blogging, but not going online to check Facebook or Xing or LinkedIn or whatever often: because this blog is my main bit of internet presence, and all the other groups and networks have to take the back seat. With this blog, what I write is there to read for everybody with Internet access and sufficient knowledge of English, and there is no need to be in any of the social network sites - and no need to know in which of these many sites I can be found...