É um projeto didático e cultural que visa integrar alunos de ensino fundamental com músicos profissionais em um ambiente de gravação em estúdio para que os jovens saibam como são produzidos seus CDs preferidos.

Nessa etapa de 2008, os talentos estão trabalhando em músicas pop e rock, sobretudo do universo teen internacional. Estão presentes canções de High School Musical, Hannah Montana, temas de filmes dentre outros. O projeto foi desenvolvido para que várias fases diferentes fossem executadas, com a supervisão dos pais e produção do Estúdio Trilha Sonora.

As selecionadas para essa coletânea foram Julia Leibovitz, Lola Barbano, Sofia Reynoso, Sylvia Figueras, Marcela de Vuono, Rafaella Ruette e Alexandra Ruette. A equipe técnica é composta por Alexandre Moraes nos violões e guitarras, André Carreiro no contrabaixo, Hélio Cunha na bateria e programações de loops e Denis Talasso nos teclados e synths.

No começo de setembro finalizamos os ensaios e as captações das tracks de bateria. Em breve os jovens talentos registrarão seus vocais e o material será encaminhado para a mix final. Mais novidades a qualquer momento!

Starting with our "Welcome" table which we set our fund raiser on, and guest book. 

I'll go around the room, the next thing that a guest would see is the table and wall that all of the Crewel embroidery was set up on.

[caption id="attachment_76" align="alignnone" width="300" caption="Halifax Public Gardens band stand "][/caption]

Next was the cross stitch, petit point wall and our EAC table.

The Rose of Sharon and Morning Song were stitched by me.

Our EAC table underneath the cross stitch consists of many of the correspondance courses that the Embrodierers' Association of Canada offers.  (Casalguidi, Schwalm, Deerfield, Blackwork, Crewel, pulled work, drawn thread, Richelieu and hardanger - I might be missing one or two).

Next is the display case which houses several unframed pieces, some smaller items that have been finished into ornaments, or purses, stuff like that:

The last portion of the room was the canvas work wall and the table with the items that have been finished into pillows.  I was most distracted ;) by the canvas work wall since I have been planning on tackeling this type of needlework in the fall.

It's not a close up picture, and you don't get the full effect because everything was so sparkly. 

This is the third year the TCS have hosted an exhibit at Scott Manor House and it is a great way for members and guests to see all kinds of different work.  Members bring in their WIPs and smaller framed pieces to meetings for show and tell, but its not the same as seeing so many things in one place (I think there were about 130 pieces in the exhibit).

Like just the other day, when she was comment surfing and ended up at a blog called What I Really Think, which spectacularly fails to live up to the verb in its name, although the URL seems entirely appropriate. I swear, I keep expecting to look at the screen and see that it's written in crayon.

Funnies, though - the writer doesn't seem to realise that she has a pride flag in her header.

Anyway, the post which Lottie directed me to is called Atheists Are Fools. And see, it's this kind of thing that makes me suspect that there's some kind of conspiracy of Atheists going around whispering ideas in Christians' ears in order to make them look terribly dumb.

The Bible says that “The Fool says in his heart ‘there is no God.’” (Psalm 53:1)

The Bible also says a talking snake told a woman not to eat a fruit which would give her knowledge of good and evil. A talking snake. A. Talking. Snake.

I am trying to decide what to do about debating with Atheists.

Stop trying because you suck at it? If this is the best you've got, you need to start thinking about getting a new hobby.

I want to reach out, but I have found that Atheists are pretty dogmatically committed to their positions.

Yeah, see... You can't be dogmatic without dogma. Most Atheists are pretty committed – mainly because we have the tendency to actually think about this stuff before we start telling all and sundry that it's a good idea. Another reason is being surrounded on all sides by people telling you that something which you've examined very carefully and come to reasonably is wrong, despite all evidence; that tends to put people's backs up a little.

That's ignoring the fact that you immediately lost the argument right there.

Ironically, if they had humility, they would be Agnostic and admit that they do not know.

Score one for the stupid. Agnosticism is an epistemological position; to save your having to look it up, that means it's a position related to knowledge. You know what else it is? It's a cop out. It's special pleading, which, again to save your looking it up, means giving a get out of jail free card to something. In other words, you say, "Ah, but this is different!" Agnosticism does that with gods; it says that god-belief should be treated with some kind of special reverence. Screw that. If you can't show any evidence for it and if in fact the evidence goes entirely against it, I'm calling it wrong.

I am capable of an intelligent conversation with just about anyone,

I was going to be really unpleasant about this one, but frankly, with a feed line that easy, the actual joke just becomes redundant.

But the Atheists that I have met are some of the most dogmatic people out there. They have come up with the ridiculous notion that not only does God not exist, but they know this. Know? How is it that they know?

They know because the “burden of proof is on the Theist.”

Tell you what, you find me someone dumb enough to have said exactly this, and I will personally kick him or her out of the non-existent Atheists' Club while eating the sap's membership card.

Interesting. They know that God does not exist because they do not feel that Theists have proven God’s existence.

That's part of it, for sure, but the real kicker is that your god is incoherent. It's like being told a shape is a square circle, or that something is green and at the same time pure white. If its attributes are completely incoherent and contradictory, we can call it a day on its existence.

Bizarre. Theists having not proven something doesn’t make it false. God either is or He isn’t, regardless of what any of us think.

So... Then what was the point of your little screed?

The Universe is huge. The knowledge out there is far beyond the capacity of any one human being. To say that one knows God doesn’t exist implies that one has all knowledge.

No, it doesn't, you idiot. Let's go over this again: if your god is said to have incompatible properties or be otherwise incoherent, its existence can be dismissed. For example, your god is claimed to have infinite power, knowledge of all time and space and definite prophecies while still allowing free will; this is incoherent, because free will cannot exist in that system. You claim objective morality for your god but Euthyphro took care of this problem centuries ago; you claim perfect goodness and power for it, yet the problem of evil still exists. This is just off the top of my head.

Your god is incoherent, illogical and makes no sense.

Atheists do not know God does not exist.

Sure we do! See the above paragraph.

God is not illogical.

Megadittoes!!!One!11

Teaching God to children is not child abuse (Sorry Mr. Dawkins).

Because consistently lying to children doesn't count as abuse? Consistently telling children that the smallest moral infractions will cause them to be punished in agonising pain for all eternity? That not believing in something which cannot be seen, touched, smelled or in fact at all factually attested to will get them the same punishment? Yeah, right. Nothing abusive there.

Atheism is foolish. Stay away from it.

Ahahaha. It is to laugh. Seriously, if we're fools, then I'm happy with foolishness. If being intelligent and reasonable is foolish, I am a big fool.

I assert that God’s existence is obvious.

I assert the opposite, and what's more, I have reality on my side.

We all actually know He is there. I don’t have to prove it because everyone already knows it to be true. All 6 billion of us. We may not understand God, we may struggle with feelings of doubt, but by design we crave Him and know that He is there.

Actually, you're feeling the FSM. He was just too shy and retiring to show his noodley goodness. Ahem. Your argument is simply a pile of toss. You're begging the question: you assume your god already exists, and so duck out of making a real argument. Weaker than airport coffee, your argument fails. You asserted something; you have to back it up, same as the rest of us.

Creation testifies about God.

Teleological bollocks. Bollocks with which, I might add, I have dealt before.

The yearning in our beings to Know God testifies about God.

The Holy Spirit testifies about God.

And once again...

Don’t cut yourself off from your destiny of Knowing God by Foolish Human Reasoning. My theory is that people choose Atheism either because they are bitter with and hate God for some reason or another, or they want to live in a way that contradicts God’s ways, and thus have to deny His existence.

Yeah. That might work if we were all slimy douchebags like you. As it is, Atheists are far and away statistically more educated and law-abiding than Christians.

God is real.

You can know Him.

Don’t be a fool

We should follow your example and be morons instead? You have nothing to offer. Your ideas are bankrupt, inelegant, ridiculous, incoherent, useless and more to the point, spectacularly unnecessary. Je n'avais pas besoin de cette hypothèse-là!

That, laydeez and gennelmun, was the blog What I Really Think - not endorsed by Mensa.

Conclusion. Human β-defensin-1 (hBD-1) and human β-defensin-2 (hBD-2) antimicrobial peptides present in the cerumen, which is composed of exfoliated epithelial keratin and gland secretion, might provide the first line of defense against microbes in external auditory canal (EAC) skin. Objectives. Cerumen (earwax) plays a primary role in protecting the EAC skin and tympanic membrane. Even though the protection by antimicrobial peptides present in the skin secretion has been well established, little is known about the intrinsic role of the peptides in the EAC skin and cerumen. The aim of this study was to examine the presence of important antimicrobial peptides, hBD-1 and hBD-2, in the cerumen and EAC skin. Materials and methods. Cerumen was collected from 20 healthy adults, and the EAC skins were obtained from 12 patients who underwent middle ear surgery with canaloplasty. The presence of hBD-1 and hBD-2 was analyzed using immunohistochemistry and Western blotting. Results. In the immunohistochemical study of the EAC skin, expression of hBD-1 and hBD-2 was observed in both the epithelium and the glands. The presence of hBD-1 and hBD-2 peptides in the cerumen was confirmed by Western blotting.

Women from the guild volunteer to be present during Scott Manor House hours to answer any questions that guests have and hopefully get some stitching done.  I have volunteered for either of the last two days (Saturday and Sunday) of the exhibit. 

I will be moving in three weeks, from a one bedroom to a two bedroom with a view of the harbour.  There is so much to do between now and then, but rather than get stressed about it I just remind myself that it will be over in less than a month and I'll be on vacation shortly thereafter.  I will take a couple of hours when I get home from work to clean and purge my current apartment and then sit down and relax (stitch) until bedtime.  I'm sure time will fly.  I only have two full weekends before the move rather than three because I'll be attending a wedding in PEI next weekend.

Currently I am working on my mother's 60th birthday present.  Fairy Grandmother by Marilyn Leavitt-Imblum.  Mom's birthday is in November so I have to stick to it.

The good news is that, for an aspiring audiophile, EAC runs under WINE in Linux Mint (rel. 5) with no trouble. You can read a pretty concise formulation of the procedure required to make it happen here. That's the first route I went. It wasn't particularly easy from there.

See, I'm one of those wierdos who regularly keeps digital music in more than one format. I prefer "lossless" files, but the portable music players available to me (and my car CD player, that reads MP3) won't play those. Not to mention that they're bigger than lossy files. For this reason, I must have at least two formats available. My practice up to the present has been to keep FLAC on hand for home listening, MP3 for comparatively high-quality listening with devices that read no other format, and ogg for maximum compression with devices that can use it. (I do prefer to use free software and open standards whenever possible.) Properly speaking, then, I have three music libraries to manage. And I have a lot of music.

After some experimentation, I discovered that the familiar batch conversion tools that I intended to use in order to keep all these libraries straight (especially tagging in all those formats) would have to run through EAC. Those tools (WinXP versions) were a lot fussier in WINE. It's important to understand that I was trying to avoid, at all costs, the need to write a bunch of file- and filename-conversion scripts. Originally I began ripping the discs in EAC and pulling the raw .wavs over into Sound Converter. I quickly realized that Sound Converter didn't give me the flexiblity over the command-line encoding options that I needed, so that plan was out. I further realized that no tagging was being preserved in the EAC -> Sound Converter process, so I implemented a third step and a third piece of software, EasyTag, to (hopefully) pull info from CDDB. By this time, managing the directory structure and file info in just one format was a hassle. What's more, I could see I'd need to add another software step or two before it was a working chain. I dropped back to punt.

I thought, "Surely there's an easier way." There is. But it doesn't involve EAC at all, and that kept me from using it for a while. When I finally gave in it was a good day. The piece of sofware that will do it all for you (with most of the tweaks you want) is called grip. Grip works, and I'm glad. It uses cdparanoia to rip discs, unless you tell it to use another program, and that's fine with me. As far as I can tell, comparing rip-for-rip with EAC, cdparanoia makes a really accurate copy (provided your drive doesn't cache). In fact, you can tell cdparanoia to be stupidly accurate if you want. Grip encodes to FLAC, mp3, ogg, aac, and more, and it gives you full control over the encoding options. I just realized that I'm sounding like an ad for grip, which isn't intentional, but it's really so much better and easier - even easier than what I was doing in Windows. At least, it's easier while managing one format library at a time, which is what most sensible people do. With grip, once your "config" tabs are set up, you can reduce the whole process to a few clicks per CD (or less) and a sanity check on the autotagging. Grip creates linux-friendly filenames for your tracks and automatically puts audio files into a reasonable directory structure, which you have control over through tag editing prior to ripping. What a great idea.

Now I've arrived at the final juncture of library organization #1 much faster than I had hoped as a result of both grip and amaroK, a fully-featured and functional software jukebox (that's the fastest description I could concoct). But I'm still going to have to do at least one of the things I was originally trying to avoid: write a script to convert the FLAC library I have been recording to both MP3 and ogg, keeping the directory structure intact. Oh well. Some things can't be avoided. Unless there's an approach out there that hasn't turned up under any of my query strings. In any case, at least I can listen to a shuffled version of my entire lossless music collection while I write the script...

[ Note: if you didn't do a good job with your directory structure, amaroK will fix it all up for you (that's putting it lightly) with the "Manage Files..." --> "Organize Files..." command in the right-click menu. But beware running that command on your whole collection. It blows your CPU to bits. (Yes, intended.) ]

Das I-Tüpfelchen dieser ganzen Sache war der Fingerabdruck, welcher nun zum Glück optional bleibt.  Wie man aber sieht werden wir Stufe für Stufe zum gläsernen Bürger. Die erste Frage, die ich mir Stelle, ist - "Liebe Union warum sollen wir für nichts Geld ausgeben?" -

Nur weil ihr etwas mehr Hightech in unseren Alltag einführen wollt??

Nein danke!

Der brave Bürger muss sich ja unbedingt im Internet mit seinem ePerso authentisieren können. Das ist ein Muss! (wenn man den Bürger auch im Internet ausspionieren will)

Die Regierung wird nächstes Jahr sehr wahrscheinlich die Firma NXP beauftragen um diese unnötigen Ausweise zu produzieren. Ich schätze mal, dass pro Ausweis ein recht hoher Betrag von ca. 60 - 100 Euro auf uns kommen wird. Kann sicherlich auch mehr werden, da noch keine offizielle Kostenabschätzung veröffentlicht wurde. Man muss berücksichtigen, dass zu den Ausweisen noch zusätzliche Hardware wie z.B. die Lesegeräte dazu kommen werden. Und wer zahlt das? richtichhh der brave Bürger.

Nun muss man das ganze von der Seite der Sicherheit betrachten. Die Sache mit e-Government wird man sicherlich schönreden um den Bürger doch zu ermutigen das System zu nutzen. Das System ist zwar noch nicht publik aber ich kann mir vorstellen, dass man im Internet Phishing-Attacken-Ähnliche Methoden einsetzen wird, womit man die Authentisierung missbrauchen könnte.

Es sollen Funkchips zum Einsatz kommen. Das würde heissen jeder der sich ein Lesegerät besorgen kann, hätte die Möglichkeit die Daten auszulesen. Jetzt werden sicherlich einige laut schreien "es gibt doch EAC".  Man hat bei der ersten Generation "BAC" eingesetzt und wir haben gesehen wie gut man die Daten ausspähen konnte, obwohl man davon ausging, dass kein unerlaubter Zugriff möglich sei. Dazu braucht man nun wirklich nicht mehr viel zu sagen. Es gibt nirgends 100% Sicherheit, deswegen will sicherlich keiner darauf warten, dass auch das neue System irgendwann ausgehebelt wird. Denn es wird sicherlich dazu kommen! Die Frage ist nur wann das ganze sein wird.

Was kann man nun schönes machen, wenn man an die Fingerabdrücke der Person rangekommen ist. Stellen wir mal vor unser Opfer arbeitet irgendwo, wo man sich allein mit den Fingerkuppen authentisieren muss. Da würde doch jedem Kriminellen direkt so ein Leihfinger einfallen, womit man die geklauten Abdrücke einfach anbringen kann. Die Daten liegen zwar geschützt auf dem Chip, jedoch hat man Zeit um eine Brute-Force oder ähnliche Attacken durchzuführen.

Wie ich eben schon gesagt habe das ganze kommt Stufe für Stufe. Als nächstes kommt ELENA auch bekannt unter dem Namen Jobcard. Damit soll der elektronische Einkommensnachweis mögich werden. Spätestens 2012 soll ELENA so langsam zum Einsatz kommen. Die Frage ist nun bleibt das auch Optional und wenn ja wie lange?

Zuletzt stellen wir uns nochmal die Frage - "Wofür soll das ganze mit ePerso nochmal gut sein?" -

Achja stimmt die Terrorgefahr soll damit reduziert werden. Da will ich mal den ersten Terroristen sehen der sich so ein Ding mit Fingerabdruck beantragt. Man beachte dabei, dass der Fingerabdruck optional bleibt aber trotzdem die Technik in jedem Ausweis vorhanden ist. Da wir auch davon ausgehen, dass die bösen Terroristen fast alle die deutsche Staatsbürgerschaft haben sieht man wie klasse das ganze ist.

Kurz gesagt...kosten wird es viel...nutzen wird es der Sicherheit nicht.

Es lebe der gläserne Bürger!

This one was stitched by me.

Stitched by A (white on white)

Stitched by J (ecru on ecru)

Stitched by P (white on white)

The pieces were finished into Sachets.  Here is a picture of J's piece with the tassles.  The edges of the fabric were finished with Antique Hemstitching and joined by lacing Knotted Buttonhole Stitches.

I am soooo close to finishing Teresa Wentzler's Holly and Ivy Sampler.  I'm doing the back stitching of the gold coloured border and then will do the beads.

I was looking around Heaven and Earth Designs and found a category just for cats.  Cool.  So I was looking around and found one that I just had to have.  The artwork is done by Myrea Pettit and of course the pattern is produced by Michele Sayetta.  I love it.  I bought it right away and downloaded it. It's called 'Cat Anemones'.  I started it last night:)  Went through my DMC and found the colours that I have and will be getting the ones I am missing at lunch time. 

I also came across 'Gossamar Princess' storykeep.  Artwork by Selina Fenech.  I like it, and felt the need to add it to my stash.

Passeando por aí eu achei um site de um grupo de pessoas que reuniram, de graça, vários softwares de excelente qualidade em um CD, cuja imagem é baixável pela internet. Só isso já seria digno de comentário, mas além disso todos os softwares são OpenSource ou os fabricantes deram licensa para serem colocados no CD, o que faz com que todos os softs sejam totalmente funcionais.

Engraçado que o nome do projeto é Software for Starving Students, o que quer dizer Software para Estudantes Famintos. O que justifica o nome, porque não é fácil pra quem faz faculdade fora juntar dinheiro. A vida é dura, amigos. É por isso todos os softs serem gratuitos e preferencialmente OpenSource, é uma forma de valorizar o que é bom e 0800 ^^.

Dentre os softs estão:

Blender - que dá pra fazer imagens e animações 3D. Eu ainda não textei mas o CD vem com um vídeo que é do karaio! Parece muito bom mesmo.

a imagem de cima foi feita com o Blender. Tirei da galeria do site oficial.

Inkscape - Tipo um CorelDraw da vida, cria vetores.

POV Ray - Cria imagens muito realistas, parecem fotos mesmo...olha uma como exemplo que eu tirei do site do programa:

Audacity - editor de áudio. Suporta copiar, recortar e colar, mixagem, efeitos (mudar tempo, eco, removedor de ruído). Importa e exporta WAV, Ogg Vorbis, MP3 e AIFF.

Wink - criador de apresentações e de tutoriais.

EAC - o melhor ripador de cd de áudio do mundo. Exact Audio Copy.

OpenOffice - alternativa ao Microsoft Office. BrOffice - OO no Brasil.

KeePass - Guarda seus passwords todos em um lugar só. Seguro, pois quando precisar usar um Password é só copiar e colar, evitando os malditos keyloggers.

Geogebra - como eu queria estar no ano passado agora. Essa porcaria acha a derivada de funções! Além disso desenha o gráfico, aquelas coisas todas. Se eu ainda tivesse no primeiro ano nunca mais deixaria de fazer a tarefa de matemática (só na parte do logaritmo). Acho que esse programa é bom pra quem faz facul ou mexe na área de exatas, pq tem várias opções. O Drew D'Amelia deve usar ele.

______

esses softs foram os que mais me interessaram, principalmente de edição de imagem, coisa que eu amo. Com o tempo vou testar todos eles, menos o último, passei dessa fase da minha vida, hehehe.

Além desses o CD vem com vários outros programas, alguns joguinhos (acabei de zerar o SuperTux - final decepcionante, não tem chefão). Utilitários pra Internet como o Thunderbird, anti-virus (ClamWin) e anti-spy (SpyBot SD) estão inclusos. Também utilitários como o 7-Zip, melhor que o WinZip e o WinRAR juntos na minha opinião, InfraRecorder, um gravador de CD/DVD que você pode usar inclusive pra gravar esse CD, softs úteis pra desenvolvedores de sites tais como FileZilla, NotePad ++, PuTTy, Xampp, TortoiseSVN, et ceterum.

Espero que lhe seja útil. Para download é só entrar na página do projeto clicando na imagem aí em cima.

Gostou? Comente :]

You can see a bit of the light reflected off the blending filament.

I am close to finishing my EAC Casalguidi course.

It’s dangerous to the progression of this state. And it’s dangerous for our children to even know that your philosophy exists! 

The philosophy of totalitarianism is taught in almost every school in the Western world, the philosophies of Stalin, Mao and Hitler are taught in most schools, and children will most certainly come across them.  Children are - or should be - familiar with Hitler's odious "final solution". The philosophy of Islamic fundamentalism has, in recent years, been frequently on the front pages of newspapers, and headline news. But all this is small fry.

Atheism is dangerous. It is insidious. It will kill your wife, place porn on your computer and e-mail it to your neighbors. Its mere existence will cause a collapse in space-time and tune your television to hard-core porn. It will turn your cat in to a dog, and your dog in to a spitting cobra.  It will change you in to a lemming, and force you to jump off of a cliff - even though lemmings don't actually do this. It is also a strange shade of mauve.

It is so dangerous, that even knowing that it exists will destroy everything.  Even being aware of the existence of atheists will corrupt the youth, and destroy civilization.

You have been warned.

Yours, the Evil Atheist Conspiracy.

Wherever possible, I try to use a native Linux application, and even in the specialised field of pro audio, this is often possible. I use Ardour as my main DAW, Rosegarden for MIDI sequencing and JAMin for mastering. But there's one program for which there simply isn't a suitable open source replacement: Exact Audio Copy (EAC). Now before we go down the road of: "WTF are you talking about you jackass, there are loads of native Linux CD rippers", and "How can one ripper be better than another, when it's all digital anyway?", please accept the following facts:

• EAC IS better (see here for a plan English explanation from Martin Walker)
• CDDA Paranoia and Rubyripper are not usable for proper secure ripping (See comments below)
• This article is not meant to be about the science of ripping audio CDs, but the ability to run EAC under Wine
• I am always right ;)

I was an EAC user under Windows for some years, and so was pleased to see it was nicely supported under Wine when I switched full time to Linux. Had it not been supported, I don't think I could have completely switched. However laziness and apathy got the better of me and it wasn't until the beginning of this year that I finally decided to take on the gargantuan task of securely ripping, converting to FLAC and comprehensively tagging my entire music collection (which is about 96% CD, 1% Vinyl and 3% SACD & DVD-Audio). At The time I was using Ubuntu 7.10, and I duly installed Wine 0.9.46 and the latest copy of EAC, and got to work.

It wasn't until my switch from Ubuntu to Fedora when the troubles began. Fedora is kept rather more up to date than Ubuntu and the current version of Wine in Fedora 8 is 0.9.56. Unfortunately, EAC does not work with Wine 0.9.56. It crashes consistently when accessing the CD drive. I have also tried Ubuntu 8.04 and Fedora 9, both of which have Wine 0.9.58 and the bug remains. Therefore I can deduce that somewhere between Wine 0.9.46 and 0.9.56, one or more things changed in the Wine code to completely screw EAC.

Regression is never a good thing in software, in fact it's unacceptable. It's even more unacceptable when the Wine project claims to be on course for a 1.0 release in June and entering a period of stabilisation. The wine release schedule is currently as follows:

• 0.9.59 - 4 April 2008
• 0.9.60 - 18 April 2008
• 0.9.61 (1.0.0rc1) - 2 May 2008
• 0.9.62 (1.0.0rc2) - 16 May 2008
• 0.9.63 (1.0.0rc3) / 1.0.0? - 30 May 2008
• 1.0.0 - 13 June 2008

I don't know if EAC will work again with Wine by version 1.0.0, somehow I doubt it. And yes I have reported this bug, and no this is not the only software to have become less compatible with Wine recently, and yes I realise this article doesn't really have much of a constructive point (except to warn people that EAC does not work with later versions of Wine) but it's rather disheartening to have to run Ubuntu 7.04 just to use EAC under Wine when the point of new software releases is to improve the application, not reverse any good work it's already done.

So that's why I'm annoyed at the Wine project and will not be sending them a Christmas card this year.

To date I've ripped with iTunes and encoded using iTunes-LAME, an iTunes script which calls the LAME encoder to compress the WAVs I rip. Now I think I'll have to start using EAC with LAME. Which makes me wonder if I shouldn't just start over? I've not heard any real problems with the earliest MP3s I encoded, but I'm hearing a bit of static (from the dying drives) in the most recent. I just don't want to mess around with trying to find out where the static starts showing up in the library. All the PC needs is a new case fan and a power supply (the existing PS is making a horrible whining sound). Guess it's time to take a trip to Fry's.

The guild members have gotten over half of our fundraising stitching completed.  We are doing two sets of "12 Days of Christmas" ornies and we now have one complete set done.  We'll be dedicating May and June stitch-ins to the finishing of the ornies.   We are ahead of ourselves this year and will probably manage to have both sets of ornies done in time to include them at our display at Scott Manor House in Bedford this summer.

In April our program committee is teaching us shadow work.  I am really looking forward to it.  I saw an example  at last year's Scott Manor house exhibit.  I don't really know how to explain it at this point, but I'll have a picture after the April meeting.

The patterns for our annual Christmas fund raiser were handed out at the meeting.  The theme is 12 Days of Christmas and we are stitching 2 sets.  I am going to stitch two (3 French Hens and 4 Calling Birds).  I've got #4 finished and will be done #3 in a couple of days.  Everyone pitches in on the fund raiser, either stitching or finishing.  I missed last year's finishing stitch-in and am looking forward learning how to finish an ornament. 

I've gotten a little more done on the Casalguidi. I've taken a little break to finish up the second ornament.

While following the pattern for the right hand petals I found that they aren't as close together as they appear in the course picture.  Oh well.  I might re-do the petals again, this time looser.