Whew!

Slept 10 hours last night, although I woke up about once an hour with a coughing fit.  This cold is no joke!  I’d go see a doctor about it except that I know exactly what would happen: they’d test me for pneumonia, discover I didn’t have it, and send me home with a prescription for codeine cough syrup.  Which I can’t use because the stuff knocks me out for nearly 24 hours, so unless I want to sleep through the next three days I’m stuck with the cough.  If it gets any worse, I might consider it, though.  It’s really no fun.

Anyway, I got up at 5 am (I went to sleep at 7pm, so I still got 10 hours of sleep) and started work on configuring Mediawiki.  I’ve now imported the online help files, enabled file uploads, created a logo for the site, added a rich text editor (important since I suspect many of the contributors will be nontechnical folk), and added captcha support to prevent spam.  I’m currently reading through the administrator’s guide so I can figure out how to configure the home page.

All of which is a lot of work.  I’m guesstimating it will take me 2-3 weeks to get the wiki set up to my satisfaction (sans content), and another 2-3 weeks to “seed” it with enough content to make it useful.  I don’t know how long it will take to get the Joomla sections set up, but I suspect about as long.  So we’re talking about a 3 month effort to get the whole thing set up.  Possibly longer since there is a chance I will be working part-time for Balsam Hill even after I land a full-time job, and of course I have to train and sew costumes for AIDS Lifecycle.  Plus save some time for weaving and electronics.  Maybe six months for the full site.

Okay, it’ll be a bunch of work over the coming year.  But I think it’ll be worth it.

Meanwhile, I have read through twenty pages in The Art of Electronics (Horowitz and Hill) trying to get an understanding of basic electronics so B. and I can continue designing the gizmo to slow down the electric cone winder.  I’ve got forty more pages to go, but it’s pretty dense material – I’m having to go through it slowly and do the exercises to make sure I’ve “got” it, and even then I imagine it will take me some practice to really understand it.  I’m going to try to wade through another twenty pages today.

My final goal for today (yes, I know I’m being ambitious) is to weave another 3-4 feet of my warp.  That will get me halfway through the jacket yardage.  I had planned to wind and dye a warp for the next project (a painted-warp AIDS Ride costume) but got sidetracked with this technical project, so it’ll have to wait until later.

Finally, I ordered 4 lbs of 20/2 tencel at 8400 yards per pound for the painted-warp AIDS Ride costume.  This is probably overkill, but I know from experience that it takes about 2.25 lbs of yarn to weave off a 13-yard warp, and with the Webs discount the fourth pound is close to free, so I ordered four pounds.  Fortunately, I’ve been weaving quite a bit, so I have a place to store it.  This will go into the painted-warp AIDS Ride costume.