Author: Lisa

Self Healing Cutting Mat

I wanted a huge cutting mat for sewing projects. The ones I find at craft stores … well, large means like two feet. I want to be able to lay a yard of fabric across the thing. Then I found Rhino mats — anything from a 2’x4′ not-so-large mat to a 6’x12′ enormous self healing cutting mat. And they’ve got grid underlays!

Anya’s 1st Birthday Cake

I spent a lot of time picking out what to make for Anya’s first birthday cake — chocolate doesn’t seem like a good thing to feed a little kid. I wanted it to have flavor — not just eating sugar. I found an old fashioned gingerbread cake recipe that looked perfect — a lot of the sweetness comes from molasses. Anya likes pumpkin puree spiced with ginger and cinnamon, so it’s a familiar flavor. Plus it’s cake 🙂

 

Gingerbread Cake

Ingredients

  • 2 cups flour
  • 1 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt
  • 1/2 cup sugar
  • 1 teaspoon ginger
  • 1 teaspoon cinnamon
  • 1/2 cup softened butter
  • 3/4 cup dark molasses
  • 1 egg
  • 1 cup boiling water

Method

  1. Preheat oven to 350 F
  2. Grease and flour an 8” round cake pan
  3. Sift together dry ingredients in a large bowl.
  4. Add the butter, molasses and egg and beat by hand for two minutes.
  5. Add the boiling water.
  6. Beat for another two minutes and pour batter into prepared pan.
  7. Bake 50-55 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted into the thickest part comes out clean.

On Snowden and Sharepoint

I’ve seen a number of articles focus on how the NSA failed to properly secure data within SharePoint, thus allowing Snowden to take off with a huge amount of sensitive data. What I haven’t seen anyone discuss is some type of AI that would analyze the SharePoint audit records against organisational information and what others in the same position access. Maybe the access would have gotten flagged to management and someone would have said “Oh, he’s doing this data migration to the Hawaiian cluster so I guess it’s reasonable he’d be accessing the data”. Maybe. Or they would have dug deeper and seen that something malicious was happening. Or, hell, maybe just talking to the guy about his suspicious access would have scared him enough that he’d have stopped. Who knows. But asking humans to read through the audit logs on a SharePoint server (the remediation suggestions that I’ve seen) is ‘find this needle in a stack of needles’ silly. Algorithms, and especially learning algorithms, are much better suited for that type of analysis.

Star Blanket

(Continued from previous post) Here is the blanket I crochet for Anya before she was born — it took a very long time, and I had the hardest time finding the right yarn for ‘violet’. I think this is too dark, really, for the rest of the colors. But I was not going to use six divisions of the spectrum, and I certainly was not going to unravel enough to get rid of the orange!

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Of the purple yarns that I have, this is the color Scott preferred for the blanket. It’ll do. When she’s a little older, I’ll make a simpler rectangle blanket for her to use in the car seat. For now, she is so small that we’re using a tiny little rectangular ripple blanket that I made.

Valley Yarn’s Stockbridge yarn felts beautifully – I washed and dried the finished blanket several times and have a warm, thick blanket that retained the star shape perfectly. The stitches are not as well defined as the examples on the pattern’s page, but it is exactly what I wanted.

Anya’s First Blanket

I wanted to make a blanket for Anya before she was born. I never managed to knit well (slowly and poorly, but not well). I didn’t have a sewing machine at the time, so a quilt was out. I do, however, crochet well (and fairly quickly). After a lot of searching, I decided on a star-shaped pattern with rainbow stripes. Then I tried to find a series of yarn that had each color of the rainbow … never did manage that! Everything except the orange are Valley Yarn’s Stockbridge yarn.

The pattern is easy to work – pretty much just double crochet stitches. There are “shells” that expand the points of the star, and skips to form the V in the star. The biggest challenge I had was keeping track of how many stitches between the shell and the V for each row. I ended up with an Excel spreadsheet with a line for each ring.

The first couple of rows (which ended up being the ‘red’ section for me) looks like a slightly malformed circle. I was concerned the finished blanket wouldn’t look anything like the examples on the Ravelry page; but as the orange section finished up, I could see the spikes of the star.

By the time the green ring was finished, the blanket looked awesome.

Finishing up the blue rings:

 

I used a purple-blue color for the ‘indigo’ rings.

At this point, we attended a baby/toddler CPR course. The instructor offhandedly mentioned that she hates to waste everyone’s time since we’ve all heard a hundred times now that babies aren’t supposed to have anything in their cribs. No pillows, no bumpers, no blankets, no toys … wait, no blankets?? So the blanket I’m making for Anya before she’s born cannot be used until she’s a year old?!? I did mention to the course instructor that, no she wasn’t wasting peoples time. I’d never heard such a thing.

Now that Anya is five months old … there are lots of places to use blankets other than baby beds. This blanket gets snuggled around her in the car-seat whenever we leave the house.

Finished blanket is in the next post.