A friend asked the other day what to use on wool, knowing my dislike of Woolite.

Simple answer: wool is hair. Use shampoo. Might as well use the same shampoo you use on your own hair: one fewer bottle to have hanging around the house.

I use a sulfate-free shampoo that’s designed for dyed hair, as I figure that’s about as ideal as one can get, but any shampoo that makes your hair look nice will work fine.

More complicated answer: sometimes wool garments say to dry clean because of sizing or dye. Most dyes these days are colorfast, but it’s worth trying a small handwash somewhere inconspicuous before dunking the whole thing in water. Garments lined in acetate are likely dry clean only due to the lining (or interfacings) rather than the wool per se.

Wash wool in warm water (about the same temp you’d shower in) and do not agitate it (because if you do, you’ll create felt and it’ll shrink).

Lay flat to dry.

Not so hard, really.

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Today is the tenth anniversary of my first husband’s death. Though I’ve been remarried more than half that time, there are certain days each year that don’t seem to get any easier.

This is one of them.

I woke up early, drank coffee, took vitamins, drank more coffee and soda with lunch, took more vitamins, and I’ve been yawning all day. The effects aren’t emotional so much as physical: the body remembers.

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If you’ve tried to install the postgres ruby gem like so:

sudo gem install postgres — –with-pgsql-include-dir=/usr/local/pgsql/include –with-pgsql-lib-dir=/usr/local/pgsql/lib

…and you get the error:

checking for PQsetdbLogin() in -lpq… no
Could not find PostgreSQL libraries: Makefile not created
* extconf.rb failed *

…then it’s possible you didn’t compile postgres with the –with-openssl option. Doing so made everything work perfectly.

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I’ve got a new Mac, a Mac Book Pro. As this came at the end of a very long, exhausting week, I’m glad it’s done.

Unfortunately, I bought it because I needed it. Saturday afternoon, after my mother was sprung from the hospital, I discovered that my Mac wasn’t charging. Fortunately, it ran off batteries fine (though it had no charge at the time). Several long visits to the Mac store and some plastic later, and I had a new Mac with everything migrated.

Now it’s time to send the old baby off to be repaired and enjoy the speed of the new baby.

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1. Delete all NBC channels, including Bravo, from the TiVos’ channel lineups.
2. Join NOW.
3. Subscribe to Ms. Magazine.
4. Dump all Tresemmé hair care products in the trash and write them a letter explaining why you’ve done it and why you’re not buying more.
5. Dump all L’Oreal Paris products in the trash and write them a letter explaining why you’ve done it and why you’re not buying more.
6. Write a letter to Macy’s.
7. Write a letter to Saturn, pointing out that 2/3 of the household cars are Saturns, but it’s oh so unfortunate that they decided to sponsor this show.
8. Write Corelle, saying you loved their incredibly funny runway ad, however….
9. Continue ad nauseum with each and every other sponsor.
10. Send copies of all letters to Bravo and NBC, with another set to the Magical Elves (PR’s production company). Point out that giving someone $100,000 after using the word “feminazi” to describe another contestant just doesn’t meet with some people’s reality.
11. Send apologetic letter to Tim Gunn about how the judges simply failed to “Make it Work” when it came to the final runway judging.

This wasn’t a fashion show, it was Jerry Springer. The show jumped the shark so hard it left orbit.

Or, as Marion Zimmer Bradley put it, “I want my disbelief to be suspended, not hung by the neck until dead.” Or words to that effect.

The only redemption edit Jeffrey could have gotten would have involved a hot poker, his tongue cut out with a knife, and a permanent vow of silence. Even that wouldn’t have been enough.

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So I’m taking a class in CSS to fill in holes and improve my understanding. A survey last night revealed:

• 75% of the class used Firefox as their primary browser.
• 50% worked primarily on a Macintosh.
• Of those surveyed, almost everyone said they liked either BBEdit or TextMate for editing HTML and CSS.
• Of those surveyed, none offered a good suggestion for editing same on Windows.

Thought that was interesting.

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Last year, when Kepler’s closed, they took the online ordering down, too. I’m glad to say that they now have online ordering again. I loved being able to look things up before going to the store.

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Or, “Migrating a blog is always more painful than you think.”

I hope you can see this. If all goes well, this blog has been migrated from WordPress to Typo, running Ruby on Rails over Lighttpd. I’ve seen a few feed hits coming through, but I’ll check when I wake up (yes, it’s almost 7 a.m. and I haven’t been to sleep yet…)

I’ve broken a lot of links, and I’m starting to go through them, so if there’s something you don’t see, realize that I am putting everything back together and it’ll take just a tidge of time, especially to get the redirects for the old permalinks up.

I’m changing the categories to be broader and instead going with more of a tag approach, as I think that offers finer granularity with less long-term hassle.

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Like Dick Morrell, I was also one of Rob Levin’s coworkers at Linuxcare.

How I’d best sum up Rob: he had an idea for what he wanted to do with his life — and he made his life work out so that he could do exactly that. The irc.freenode.org structure he created has been of immense help in getting communication working for numerous free software projects, including Ruby on Rails (though the core team has now moved to Campfire for obvious reasons).

Rob wanted to make open source happen by making communication about open source easier. He did that, and everyone who uses open source has benefited, albeit indirectly, from his work.

I talked to him not so very long ago about some of the changes he’d made in his life since we worked together, including moving from the expensive bay area to much-less-expensive Houston.

I’m sorry he didn’t have a longer life. I’m especially sorry Benjamin will have to go through the last ten years of his childhood without his father. And, of course, I’m sorry that Deb won’t have the husband she relied on. I didn’t get their relationship (they seemed so different), but then again, I didn’t have to.

I haven’t met many people in my life that had Rob’s single-mindedness of purpose. At times, I thought he was nuts. In the end, though, he made it work, and that’s not nuts at all.

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I don’t know why I hadn’t heard of Miss Snark before, but one of the coolest things a budding writer can read are the 110 reactions to cover letter and first page she’s posted.

One critique I particularly liked, where the story starts with the character asleep. So many new writers start with their character waking up (or asleep), forgetting that the beginning of their story needs to match the ending of the story, and there’s not a lot of time to waste. Don’t make it start the way the reader starts their day or it’ll be mundane. (And yes, I’m giving this critique almost exactly in Critters this week.

Look at each entry, and then her comments. You may not agree with her, but maybe you’ll learn something. I did.

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