I’m Riding a (Slightly Cantankerous) Ibex!

Despite driving all over two counties yesterday—and getting a later start than I’d wanted on my day—I got a fair amount accomplished yesterday. I’ve already hinted at the first ...

Yep, I got Kubuntu 8.10—Intrepid Ibex—installed on the snolf computer. It went fairly smoothly ... but I do have a couple of unresolved issues. First, it thinks this small monitor is a large one, so everything is rendering teeny-tiny. Trying to fix that through the GUI has proved problematic, so I’ll be researching command line approaches in a few minutes.

Equally bothersome, Firefox is not included with the distro, and was not in the default repositories available. I downloaded it from Mozilla, but now I’m not seeing how to install it from there. So far my researches on that issue reveal that it’s is a fairly common problem, but I’ve not found a solution ... just lots of griping.

I haven’t tried to get my printer working, nor have I downloaded GPG ... at this point I’m wondering if I should continue to tweak this version, or upgrade to 9.04. It’s also worth mentioning that, given how old and slow this machine is, I’m impressed that the new install has gone as well as it has.

In other happy news, I am officially finished knitting my vest! Doing the V-neck neckline was a real learning experience: two kinds of decrease stitches (one of which wasn’t very cooperative with lefty knitting, so I ended up needing to do some weird backwards version to get the decrease stitch to lie in the proper direction), only worked on the knit rows, plus using two different skeins of yarn (one for each shoulder). It looks pretty good, for the most part ... one small goof that I tried but failed to correct—I might be able to do something about that when we edge the neckline, though. All that’s left is the finishing: seaming, edging, and blocking the vest. I am very pleased with my work and am looking forward to taking on another project. I am 82.625% certain I’ll ask to learn how to do cables next ... or maybe knitting in the round so I can do socks. Here’s my dilemma: cables are so pretty—but socks would be so useful. (I’ve also read a bit about how it can be problematic for lefties to knit in the round properly—much of the terminology still sails over my head so I can’t say much more than that, except that is has me a little leery about trying it.)

Today I’ll be transplanting our tomato plants, in addition to starting on my next knitting project and working on computer issues some more. I hadn’t wanted to do that until it’s safe to set them outside—another couple of weeks or so—but they’re getting huge and a couple are already flowering, so they can’t stay in their small pots. And who knows what adventures the snolfs will want to undertake? Never a dull moment ...