Not only are my tunes working, but I spent a couple of hours tonight and got my new Wacom Bamboo Fun tablet working.  Now THAT was a non-trivial task.  All the necessary steps of downloading modules, building them, getting files into the right directories, editing system files to recognize the hardware, and so on were documented out there on the Web, but there was no one place where it was spelled out completely and step by step.  So I put all the pieces together with much trial and error and a bit of gnashing of teeth, but in the end worked out the puzzle and got it working.

Next comes the REAL challenge — learning to use it, along with The Gimp!!

Best lampworking-related blog entries for the week ending 1/6/2008:

• Charlene Anderson’s New Year’s Resolutions, received from a friend, are worth considering.
• Luann Udell does some year-end musing about organization, plans, and goals.
• Joanna Mueller reminds us we can find “pure elegance in the simplest details.”
• Kendra Sanders describes how color changes her life and her beadmaking for Collective Creatives.
• Etsy’s The Storque newsletter shares a downloadable inventory worksheet for artists.
• Lori Greenberg blogs about bead designs as personal expression for Watch Me Create.
• Also on Watch Me Create, AngelinaBeadalina’s rusty goodies have returned.
• Finally, if you feel like you just aren’t making a dent in the glass stash, Cindy Gimbrone’s inventory report will tell you that you’re not alone.

No posts for the past three days because I finally got totally fed up with Livehost.net.  Apparently they have been subject to a number of virus attacks, and sites hosted by them have been hacked more frequently than the norm.  Combine that with the email problems (my emails from GlassHaven being rejected by Comcast, Bellsouth, and Clearwire for abuse by other users of the mail server) and enough was enough.  Time to move!!!

I set up a new hosting package through Crucial Web Host on Monday; once the account information came through yesterday I set things up and started moving files over.  Art of the Firebird first, because that was just moving files; then this blog and my mailing lists, which meant moving databases.  Once they were pretty much okay and I was pretty sure I knew what I was doing, I moved the GlassHaven.  That was the real tricky job — a database setup and software install from scratch, followed by replacing the default database with the old one from the old host, plus making sure all the other files got transferred over.  Do this without losing data, and with minimal downtime — quite a goal, but I think I hit it pretty well.  TGH was down for less than an hour, in the middle of the night, so Anastasia was pretty much the only one who noticed!

It’s taken the site location changes most of the day to propagate through the DNS system, but they finally seem to be getting themselves corrected.  I was able to set up redirects at the old location to get people to the new one, so there wasn’t any screaming paranoia from the board going down.  Really — I think this whole move was a pretty nicely handled little technical challenge if I do say so myself!

This week’s Flaming Hot Blog-It!:

Being self employed has it’s rewards and challenges. How do you manage to get your work done? Blog it.

I’m not altogether self-employed — I do have that “day job” teaching computer science. The lampworking is very much a side business.  It is very hard some days to come home, switch gears, and work on the side business.   If it’s an evening when I need to make something, usually that’s not so tough.  I find that melting glass is relaxing and stress-relieving, and I look forward to doing that unless I’m just too tired to have any business sitting at the torch.

Other things — photography, bookkeeping, advertising — I have a lot more trouble with.  They aren’t stress-relieving; they are stress-inducing.  I tend to avoid them in favor of fiddling around with the computer or something.  I know I’m doing this, though, and one of my goals for the next few months is to get myself into the habit of keeping up with photography so that I can list things for sale online.  I still haven’t figured out the “carrot” for that one, though.

Maybe it’s a matter of comfort zones — things like computing and lampworking itself are part of my personal comfort zone so it’s not hard to convince myself to do them.  The other things are outside that realm, though, which makes it harder to convince myself to tackle them.

Tonight I decided to try out my other new press, the Zoozii XL Straight-Sided Lentil.  The blurb says it takes a fair bit of glass and they are not kidding, not for a bead 1.5 inches in diameter and 18 mm. thick!  It took close to a rod and a half to just make the base bead, and then I added frit and then a thin layer of encasing on top.  So all told it was at LEAST two full rods of glass.  The little bugger took a nice little while to melt into its basic shape, a while to melt in the frit, and as for the encasing, well, let’s just say that I was being extremely careful as I striped on the encasing, hoping that I wouldn’t let one part get too cool and break while I finished up.

It’s not a real complex bead, not for the first one I’ve ever done that large, with that press.  Vetrofond odd lot slate blue base, Spiral Dance Electric Blue frit, and Moretti pale lavender for the encasing.  Yep, soft glass — did you really think I’d try something that large in boro right off?  It looked good going into the kiln, so fingers are crossed for tomorrow morning.