Reality Bites

 It 's easy to think you've got it all figured out. Then Reality Bites.

I really like the ruler at the bottom of my cutting table, but then, the other night, as I was actually doing some cutting, I realized that I had to stop my blade from running over the ruler. If I did, I would almost certainly dull my blade, but also cut through the ruler. Um. Not good. The benefit of the ruler did not outweigh the risk of cutting through it.  Oops. I will have to figure something else out.

The day after I attached my original 24" x 48" mat to my sewing table I noticed this. That brown edge. It's the top of the table, and it looks terrible. I should probably have painted the piece of MDF that sits on the worktable (to reduce the vibration of the sewing machine when it is running), but I didn't have any paint, and I was overeager. I do not like the way this looks. I am going to try to remove the cutting mat. The adhesive on the tape may bring up some of the tabletop with it, so I have two choices. One: do it now before the adhesive really bonds and can never come up, or wait until I get some paint and then, if needed, use the reverse of the MDF. Or 3, I suppose, buy a new piece of MDF and paint that and when it's ready, remove the mat from the MDF and use the new piece. Option 4, of course, is to live with it. Number 4 is looking pretty good right about now.

When I wrote about eQuilter the other night, I kinda figured they'd hear about it eventually, but never in my wildest expectations did I expect to receive an email from Luana Rubin herself thanking me for my "very kind post!" Luana and her husband Paul, own eQuilter. Apparently I should thank Paul for all the technology that makes shopping at eQuilter such a pleasure.

I've been experimenting with those darned long rectangles. I thought I had the size worked out, so I found some fugly fabric and cut them into rectangles, sliced them with curves and sewed them up, trimmed them and then threw them up on the design wall. It looked good, but...

If I wanted a long rectangle version of Waltzing Matilda, and I cut only one curve, then I was going to have to make RIGHT and LEFT blocks. Hmm. I'd have to think about that.

Then I wondered WHAT IF I made the blocks square because two of them together would give me the long rectangle shape I was looking for, and since I would make a curve on only one corner, I could arrange the blocks in any orientation...

This isn't quite what I had in mind, and there certainly isn't anything wrong with this. I will make more blocks (these are from leftover fabrics I've used as backings of quilts) to play with to figure it out.

THIS is the kind of place I told you about. A place were YOUR ORIGINAL IDEA and SOMETHING ELSE collide. I have to decide if I want to try to continue to pursue the long rectangle idea, or shift gears. Many quilters doggedly stick to their original idea even if it isn't working. I'm not convinced my original idea is a failure just yet, and besides, there's nothing wrong with pursuing THIS idea, seeing where it goes and then going BACK to the original idea later. It may be another quilt entirely.

Either way, it's no loss to me.

Reality Bites

Many of you know that I make my living as a Geek, watching over the computer network of a $11M privately held manufacturing company, and that I've been there over 27 years. While I no longer do all the "heavy lifting" I still oversee a lot.

Just before I visited Maryland in June, one of our network switches (which connected 24 users to the network) started working only intermittently. I placed an order for a new one and scheduled the installation. (Do you want to wait until after you get back from vacation, they asked me. HELL NO! I replied.) Alas, hardware works until it doesn't and it died for good two days after I left. It turned out to drag down other things with it, with the result that it was a holy hell week at the company. Bless them, they never called me and I never knew until I got back how bad it had been. Of course, there was nothing I could have done about it anyway...

I had been distracted by the virtual servers running out of memory. The servers (we have three physical servers) are set up so that if one dies, another can take over the tasks. Unfortunately if the servers are running at more than 50+ % capacity, it means another server CAN'T take over because you can't max out the memory without crashing.  So I had to make sure to replace the RAM on all three servers. RAM memory is cheap, but server RAM is not. If one server failed, and another couldn't fill the gap, then the company's computer network would be "dead in the water."  So I was focused on that.

About the same time we were looking at the age of all our equipment and realized our Firewall (the barrier of protection between our network and The Bad Guys) was beyond End Of Life. So we were working on getting quotes and ordering that. None of this is easy. It's not like buying a computer and just setting it up. There were hours of configuration our techs had to do to set it up before they brought it over for installation yesterday.

IN THEORY... it was a straightforward swap. Install the new firewall into the rack, disconnect the old one, connect the new one and test. Internet activity worked great. External email, not so much. After much tinkering it looked OK at 7 PM and I went home.

About an hour later, a text from the CEO arrived. "Can't get mail on my phone." Sigh.  So I tested and sure enough, that wasn't working. I called "the guys" and they worked on it. It took them till 11 PM to figure it out.  It's fine now.

Yet another thing to keep me away from the sewing studio, darn it.

I have a favorite quote about being a Geek:

"In Theory, theory and practice are the same. In Practice, they are not."

Sure do hope there are no other surprises lurking...