Learning curves

Several of them, in fact:

1. I registered for AIDS Lifecycle 9 today.  Apparently, when it comes to cycling, I don’t have one (a learning curve, that is).  I blame it all on the tutus.  The fumes from all that fabulousness are hard to overcome, it seems. 🙂

   Mind you, I am not yet convinced that I will actually ride in AIDS Lifecycle 9 – I think I may be too busy with Weavolution – but what the hell, I registered.  Perhaps I’ll ride.

2. Sectional beaming.  I am having one heck of a time getting the warp onto the sectional beam.  I’ve tried the trick of putting sections of bicycle tubing over the adjacent sectional hoops, and all that seems to happen is that the thread catches on the bicycle tubing instead.  I don’t seem to notice it in time.  After wasting one or two bouts of my “real” warp I gave up and am now practicing with “scratch” warp, a huge cone of acrylic yarn that a weaving neighbor gave me to play around with.  I’m slowly getting better, but it’s frustrating.
3. Drupal.  After much fiddling I’ve managed to get the basic prototype up and running, but not much beyond that.  I can see where most of the work is in the theming, customizing the UI to do what you want it to do.  Doing this would take me FOREVER.

   Fortunately, we have two volunteers who are pretty good software engineers and who can do the work that I can’t, and do the work that I can do faster than I could do it.  I think.  I hope.  The net of it is that I seem to be back to project management, and maybe writing functional specs, test plans, and doing testing once we reach that stage.  This is good news; it means there will be people more competent than me working on the site.  Hallelujah!

My plan for the next few days is to relax a bit, and work on learning to beam onto a sectional beam.  At this point I am waiting for the Weavolution specs to come in, and waiting for the rest of the dev team to get up to speed on Drupal, so there is not a great deal for me to do.  The prototype is basically built, and the rest of it requires trained professionals.  So I can take a bit of a breather.