The recipient of this baby hat isn’t born yet, so I didn’t have a model to show it off to best advantage. One two-colored hat, to wear 3 different ways.
I knitted it in the round, but used a sly trick to do intarsia color-changes halfway around each row. The top is grafted with kitchener stitch for a seamless look (I hate sewing seams) and I-cord “antenna” sprout from the corners.
It’s cold today! My Mac OS 10.4 Weather Widget says the city temp is 57�. That’s not even sixty! I’m wearing my earflap hat and drinking hot chocolate. I feel like it went from summer to winter in the space of about a week… I wonder if we’ll have any more 80� temps or if we are firmly entered into Fall.
I’m not ready for fall… I truly appreciated summer this year - sure, I had moments where I was uncomfortably hot but I never cursed the sun. I begged it to stay as long as possible - I know before very long I’ll be missing the sun. Yeah, it’s finally raining today and it’s nice and cozy. But the novelty is going to wear off very soon and THEN I’ll wish myself back in July.
Well, I’ve been busy with some real human interaction, so the electronic social life has been on hold. My sister MA came to visit from the Bay Area. We picked her up at PDX, it was her first solo flight. We drove into Portland for tacos and then headed home. A busy day!
MA is in the exact middle of our family. She has 2 older sisters (including me), 2 younger sisters, an older brother and a younger brother. She is about the same distance in age from me as she is from our youngest sibling. She’s almost 20, and spends a lot of time working and volunteering with preschool and elementary kids; knitting, and hanging out with her friends and fellow college group folks.
While she was here (5 days in all) we were fairly busy in a relaxed sort of way. We went to the ladies luncheon bible study, the Little Red Farm nursery, to church on Sunday, and out for ice cream with the L’s, all of which were good chances for me to show off my sister to various friends from the Chapel. We shopped all the craft/fabric/yarn stores, and did a fair amount of knitting. We went for walks in our hilly neighborhood, baked lemon bars, went out for lunch and coffee, and ate lots of good meals here at home, too.
It was really nice for me to have someone, in fact a special sisterly somone, to visit with during this time. BN is completely booked, studying for Quals, so I welcomed the diversion.
To my Middle Sister: come back soon!
To my other family members: she did it, so should you!
See, Powerpoint makes it really easy to set up a consistent look/theme for your presentation. There are standard slide layouts, themes, a color scheme, master slides, and so on. But, once you have your design all set up and you’re inputting content, it’s actually more difficult to keep your design/theme intact than it is to set it up in the first place.
If you paste text into a standard, auto-text box taken directly from a default layout and/or your slide master, PowerPoint assumes, “why would you want this text to match your presentation theme? You most certainly want that text to carry its font, size, style, and alignment from wherever you copied it from, don’t you? of course you do.” I JUST found the workaround for that this week and I’ve been working with PowerPoint for almost a decade now.
All this causes problems for designers (or anyone) who sets up a slide template with a “theme” or “brand” for use in multiple presentations. In my opinion, consistency is usually what you want in presentations - they’re usually for corporate, marketing, or educational purposes and you want each slide to look similar to the others in the same presentation, and you want the presentation you’re giving this week to match the one you gave last week. So, I design a template and send it along to my client and they very quickly lose all the value I gave them by designing a standard, consistent look for the presentation. They paste in their content, rearrange, add/delete stuff, and there goes the template.
PowerPoint’s Microsoft Office suite-mate, Word, has a system for setting up styles for your documents. If something needs to be brought into line, just select it and apply the appropriate style. (The whole thing is not simple, has a stiff learning curve. But at least the capability is there.) Another Office standard, Excel, has “paste special” where you can choose to keep the source formatting if desired, otherwise new content will adopt the formatting of the Excel spreadsheet.
So it’s not like Microsoft doesn’t know about this stuff. They just forgot to think through the user goals of a PowerPoint user. Joe Shmoe, VP of Marketing, is in a hurry. He needs to pull together a PPT, ASAP. Oh, sorry, Joe. You’re going to have to fiddle around for hours if you want your slides to look nice. He doesn’t have hours, so another crappy PowerPoint presentation goes public.
One caveat: I don’t have the most recent version. Maybe they’ve cleared up all the usability issues in the current release. But I kind of doubt it.