This is a Sponsored Post written by me on behalf of LeapFish Inc. All opinions are 100% mine.

This video makes me laugh.  It's not the visuals so much as the absurdly epic music they're set to.  I mean, yeah, I love the Internet too, but that music needs a catapult with flaming ammo or knights on charging horses or something, not a timeline of Net technology and shots of dynamic webpages.

That being said, it's an interesting set of thoughts. What is the Net turning into? It's going from being just a place to find information ("just" being a relative term here) to a central part of the lives of a lot of people--myself not excepted.  If you get most of your news and contact with the outside world on the Web, perhaps it's important that your searches and aggregators and such be as close to instant-update as you can get.  If the TV stations can do it, there's no reason the Net can't.  This company, called leapfish, seems to be trying to get in ahead of the crowd.  Which is great, if you're the kind of info junkie who needs to be up to the minute.  Me?  I'm happy with the tech I've got.  Not that I mean to discourage them; there are plenty of folks who'd love to be on the very cutting edge of even something as electronic as Websurfing.  It's kind of cool, really.

<a href="http://socialspark.com/metrics/click/post?slot_id=104392&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.leapfish.com" rel="nofollow">leapfish</a>

Just got an email from the designer of the current test knitting project that will require me to rip out a significant portion of the progress I've made.  Sigh.

It's fixing a significant problem, so it's not as if it's a bad change, but I am mildly discouraged nonetheless.  Still, given the usual amount of weekend knitting time, I should have no problem with my deadline.

I had a rose killed by an infestation of spider mites, so this time when I saw white powder forming on the leaves I was ready.  I smooshed anything that looked even vaugely bug-like, I wiped off the leaves every morning, everything.  But nothing was helping.

Reason?  It wasn't spider mites; it was powdery mildew.  Getting water on the leaves was in fact the Exact Wrong Thing to do, even.

Fortunately I wised up in time, so now I stop every few minutes to blow on the rose--one of the things that can discourage the mildew is air circulation.  And also watering less often, so the soil isn't damp.  So far, things are going well.

Apparently the pattern for my second fast test knitting project has arrived, so I can dig up needles and cast on when I get home.  This one's got to be done by, say, next Wednesday, so I can be sure it'll get back in time, so I'm going to have to put down my embroidery for a few days.

I've been embroidering blackwork patterns, for the beginnings of a sampler.  This is an amazing revelation for me, I must say--I can see all those pretty patterns I like without having to commit to a whole embroidery project.  Boreas?  What Boreas?

You know, I really like BlogCity.  There's one heck of a lot of control over the look and feel of my blog--and I could have more if I really felt like playing around with CSS--and no one bothers to disqualify it when they're naming platforms that can't take their money-making opportunities.  But there's one thing about it that pisses me off: it edits things.

When I type something in the HTML edit box, as I occasionally do, the editor will sometimes change things on me--sometimes it's a matter of where a particular tag sits in the link code, sometimes it's a complete butchering of whatever I tried to put in.  And as far as I can tell there's no way to stop it doing this.  Which is annoying when I'm trying to get something past, say, an automatic checker that doesn't recognize things as valid if the nofollow tag is before the href tag rather than after.  I do not get why this happens.  If the editor doesn't trust me to know how I want my HTML set up, why give me the option at all?

This is a Sponsored Post written by me on behalf of Popstation. All opinions are 100% mine.

Now this is an idea I can really get behind.

I mean, who says TV shows have to get all the glory?  Thanks to the web, all sorts of people can try out their chops--and even better, with songs that everyone in the world hasn't heard Kelly Clarkson sing¹.

The idea is, you go to PopStation and learn one (or more, I assume) of the songs they post--lyrics, backup tracks, all that sort of thing.  When you've got it down, you record it with the help of their custom app (unless you have your own recording software) and upload it.  Then it gets rated against others who are participating, though there's no clue whether it's only others who did the same song or the whole population of the site or what.  And every three months, they pick someone to go to New York and record an album in a professional studio.  Which is, you know, pretty cool.

I think I may be spending some time in the practice rooms. Not that I think I'm likely to win--I have a nice voice, but it's not the kind that wins web awards--but just for the fun of it.  What's the worst that happens?  I get some voice practice and have a little fun.

1: I do not object to Kelly Clarkson; in fact I rather like her.  But her songs are, well, hers.