I feel so used

The GOP presidential debate is taking place right now at the 11,000+ seat Coors Events Center on the CU Boulder campus.  Only 1,000 of those seats will be filled.

Most of the tickets are going to GOP donors or potential donors.

The community of Boulder gets road closures of main arterials during peak commute hours in exchange for 0 seats for the event (and a 2-day! closure of a bicycle arterial).

The campus hosting the event?  At first, they got 50 tickets, then 100, then 150.

University officials told the Daily Camera this week that of the 150 CU tickets, 99 tickets are for students, 17 are for faculty and 34 are for event volunteers, the nine members of the Board of Regents, plus a guest each, Chancellor Phil DiStefano and a guest.

This event just gives the national press an excuse to run lazy and stupid stories like this.

The GOP gets to borrow the veneer of economic vitality of this STEM-heavy community while not mentioning how much of Boulder's high-tech economy is due to the THREE national labs and the only major research university in the Rocky Mountain time zone--all fueled by federal spending they want to cut.

Meanwhile, the residents and students are told to stay home and avoid the streets.  What's the GOP plan for the small businesses that will be empty tonight?

Speed Sewing 2

My first time in Boulder, I took a shirt-sewing class.   With practice, I got pretty good at it.

But, Bad Dad is so hard on his clothes and not discerning enough to warrant my precious sewing time.

He did ask for short-sleeved shirts that he can wear in lab, that don't require ironing, and look presentable enough to step into a meeting.

I purchased 5 shirts at Goodwill on Saturday for the princely sum of $14.  (The olive green solid shirt is a more expensive technical outdoor shirt, but a bargain at $4 instead of the > $100 they normally cost new.)

Three of the shirts mutated from long-sleeved to short-sleeved thusly:

Measure and mark off your desired length + 1.5".   (I cut mine 6.5" from the underarm seam for a ~5" sleeve length.)  Notice that the sleeves taper toward the cuff.  Stitching a smooth hem will not be easy.

If you turned up a hem the way short-sleeved sport shirts are normally hemmed, by turning under 1/4" and then another 1", you'd have a mess.  The sleeve circumference varies about 3/4" between two spots 2" apart along the length.

You need to turn under a smaller amount, about 5/8".  This way, the difference between the two circumferences is manageably small.  Turn under 5/8" once.  Make 4 snips near the underarm seam that extend just shy of the fold.   The snips won't show, but they will allow a little bit of extra girth.  Turn under 3/4".  Stretch, steam and press to help the hem lie flat.

The hem area will still a bit shorter than the sleeve once the fabric relaxes.  Use C = 2πr to your advantage.  Hem from the outside so that the smaller part is on the inside of the cylinder.

Give it a good press again with steam.

Three short-sleeved shirts for lab.

In other news, I finally finished DD's Halloween costume and mailed it off to her priority mail so she can wear it to school on Friday Oct 30.  I also altered the green mock-wrap top to reduce the front gape.  I just need to make her birthday outfit, stitch curtains for the guest room, finish the last pair of pillows and I can engage in some selfish sewing.

Speed Sewing 1

It was just one of those things...

It was just one of those weeks. Something that I thought should be straightforward, but tedious, turned out to be really hard. Several times, I couldn't believe what I was seeing. I thought I was going crazy because commands that used to work, generated screenfuls of error messages.

It got so bad at one point, I did the UNIX equivalent of "WhereTF am I?" and typed pwd (print working directory) and THAT generated errors. There was nothing left to do but to log out (of that interactive session on the supercomputer) and log back into a different node. I mentioned the odd behavior to a coworker, but neither of us connected that incident to the database migration that took place the day before.

I know, those of you more familiar with databases are probably laughing your head off right now.

Finally, after 4PM on a Friday afternoon, all but one interactive node and about half the (75,000) nodes lost contact with the disk system.  There was nothing I could do by hanging around the lab while the IT team worked to rescue the machine.

It was time to go out in the field for some riparian ecosystem research.

 I didn't use my car at all this weekend.

Boulder's bicycle network, and my condo's central location, let me do everything I needed to do by bike.  The trees are so glorious this time of year, I took the loooong way whenever I ran errands.

Oh, I bought the most expensive fabric I've ever bought this weekend.  I thought it was the Liberty Tana Lawn at $44/yard, but it was a heavier shirting at $66/yard.  I didn't check the price until after it was already cut and rung up.  But I love the print and the feel of the fabric; it is wide enough that 1.5 yards should yield a very luxurious shirt.  Think of all the money I saved on gas by not driving.  That can buy a lot of fabric.  ;-)

OOPS, I checked my receipt and Liberty's website.  It is a Tana Lawn after all, and I paid $66 for the 1.5 yard piece, not per yard.