The blog had spoken. I was going to Crazy Aunt Purl’s signing.

I left the office in Mount Vernon at 5PM. At first, there was no traffic, and it was quite nice to be out on the road.

Then there was quite a lot of traffic, and it sucked wholeheartedly. I shifted in and out of first gear about 900 times between Northgate and the Union Street exit.

I drove down, down, down into the very bowels of the Pacific Place parking garage until I found a suitable parking spot for the Dadmobile.

I arrived about ten minutes late for the reading. 71 miles in 2 hours 10 minutes after work. Oy.

The place was packed! All the seats were taken, and at least 30 people were standing around the fringes. From here I could see the tippy tippy top of her head, but I couldn’t hear a word.

I slunk through the coffee shop and around to the other side, where I stood by the SAT and large print books. I couldn’t see her from there, but I could hear pretty well.

Her talk was pretty awesome. She read from the first chapter of her book, then took questions from the audience. I was most interested by her answers on writing and blogging, and how you have to draw a line somewhere to protect yourself from the (totally well-meaning and yet overwhelming and sometimes critical) advice of others.

It turned out that I had accidentally camped out at the start of the signing line. I was only about five people back from the head of the line. This was great, because it didn’t give me very much time to get nervous. I get nervous.

I tried to focus on the beautiful Lady Eleanor Scarf being worn by the woman at the front of the line. (Here’s one.) I have coveted that scarf ever since I saw it in “Scarf Style.” I must say, it looked wonderful on her. I must also say, she was quite tall. I made a mental note that if I ever get around to knitting a Lady Eleanor, I should make it shorter. A lot shorter.

When it was my turn to get the book signed, I did my usual routine of mumbling something stupid and sweating too much. Let’s pretend this picture is crooked for artistic reasons.

Laurie Perry is thinking “Why won’t this crazy lady get in the picture with me?” She tried to convince me to have our picture taken together, but I was all like “Why thank you, kind author/blogger, but I am feeling less-than-presentable today, as I had originally planned to go straight home from work. I appreciate the offer, though!”

Actually, I think I said “No way, ponytail!” and pointed to how my hair was up in a ponytail. As if that made sense.

It’s still amazing to me that one minute you can be in downtown Seattle, in the heart of the poshest poshy posh posh shopping district, listening to a famous blogger and author read from her book. And a mere 90 minutes later you can be in downtown La Conner, where you can stop in at the public restroom (which is always clean, well-lit, and stocked with toilet paper, soap, and paper towels).

Then you can stand in the middle of the main street taking pictures at 11PM, without a soul in sight in either direction.

Nothing but the sound of the wind blowing through the trees, a flag, and a nearby hanging sign.

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Title: The Knitter’s Handy Book of Patterns
Author: Ann Budd
Publisher: Interweave Press

If I was shipping out to the middle of nowhere and I could only take one knitting book, I’d take this one. Wouldn’t even have to think twice.

This book provides basic template patterns for common knit items - sweaters, socks, gloves,hats, vests, and so forth. These are meta-patterns, written in multiple gauges, for a variety of sizes. For example, the sock pattern has instructions for sizes from 2-4 years through man’s L, and gauge from 5 to 9 stitches per inch. The sweater meta-pattern churns out a sweater from 2 years through 54″ bust/chest circumference, for gauge between 3 and 7 stitches per inch.

The patterns are plain, but that’s the point. Nothing flashy, here - just blank-slate items, which you can customize or not, as you wish.

Say you want to knit a plain pair of mittens for a five year-old. You have a mitten pattern, but it only covers adult sizes. You spend HOURS online searching for “free child’s mitten knitting pattern.” You find dozens of patterns written for yarns you don’t have, several patterns with some kind of weird feature you don’t want to fiddle with, and one pattern that’s exactly what you want, except that it’s at the wrong gauge for the yarn that you want to use.

Buy this book, and you’ll never go through that experience again. Instead, you will turn to the Mittens pattern, choose the row that represents your gauge, cross-reference it against the column that represents the size you want, and start knitting.

Gauge down the side, size left to right.

I knew that this was the book for me when I flipped it open and saw that the grids feature alternate-row shading. I consider alternate-row shading to be one of those indicators of competency. I suspect that anyone who doesn’t bother to shade every other row a different color either doesn’t understand what it’s like to try and work with a grid of any complexity, or doesn’t care. Authors take note: alternate-row shading tells me that you understand, and - more to the point - you care.

The binding is sturdy, and the pages are spiral-bound so that they lay flat. As a nice touch, the spiral binding is nestled inside the hardcover, so that the spirals don’t catch on stuff, and you can see the title on your bookshelf (instead of just seeing a bunch of spirals). Additionally, an elastic strip is built into the back cover, to mark your page, and hold it open. In other words, the physical book itself was designed by someone who understands and cares.

Each separate section (mittens, gloves, tams, etc) is marked by staggered, color-coded thumb tags on both sids of the page, so that you can flip through in either direction and see which section you’re looking at. The introduction to each section gives some information about the pattern (”This sweater pattern features a loose lower edge, crew neck, and a hip length”) and a walk-through of your knitting workflow (”Stitches are cast on for the leg, joined into a circle, and worked in the round to the beginning of the heel shaping…”) The page layout is crisp and easy to decipher. And on top of all this? There’s an index.

I could not possibly love this book any more. Highest marks all around!

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I have a lot - a LOT - of faith in science fiction’s potential* but I have to admit that I haven’t read very much of it in the last 15 years. Neither, apparently, has anyone else, judging by the publishing industry’s constant state of hand-wringing.

There are as many theories about why this may be so as there are science fiction fans. I’ve come up with my own theory, and in a nutshell, it boils down to Arthur C. Clarke’s third law:

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

This sums up the entire state of science fiction for me. Which is to say, it’s hopelessly naive and ill-informed, and it casts serious doubts on the author’s ability to observe and describe the world around him - much less an extrapolated fictional world.

Therefore, I propose Erika’s Law. Trust me, I know of what I am about to speak. I am bathed in technology. I’ve been a Linux and Unix administrator for nine years, and I work for a high-tech start-up in Seattle. I’m no elderly bumpkin, confused by the idea of a telephone you can put in your pocket. I can define terms like Moore’s Law, the network effect, TCP/IP protocol, and the long tail at the drop of a hat. (And often have. I’m a blast at parties.)

Erika’s Law

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a frustrating piece of crap.

This point was admirably brought home to me this afternoon, when I helped an elderly lady with her wheelchair. She was stuck in front of the front door of our building, unable to move either back or forth. Since the door opened towards her, the man inside the lobby was unable to either exit the building or help her inside.

She was small - maybe 98 pounds - and had only one leg. Far too frail to push a manual wheelchair, in other words. She had been kitted out with a fantastically complicated electric wheelchair, which appeared (to my examining eye) to be fairly high-tech.

Unfortunately, it was battery-powered. And as you know if you have purchased any rechargeable item within the last ten years, it is in the nature of rechargeable batteries to stop recharging. This fate is inevitable, like the silent march of the seasons. As a recent flurry of articles has amply explained, the tech curve for batteries has remained fairly flat, while the curve of the items demanding their power has risen exponentially. Technologically, we’re still using 1992’s rechargeable battery.

It’s one thing when your cell phone battery stops recharging. Quite another when your wheelchair strands you right in front of a door, and you’re unable to get out of it - much less to push it. Because - being all fancificated - this wheelchair had no handles. I imagine the developers brashly waving aside the consideration of handles. Why would it need handles? It’s battery-operated!

I had to get practically on my hands and knees, and push her chair from the backs of her armrests. I kept my fingers crossed that I wouldn’t break her chair while I was doing this, because - being battery-operated - its transmission lacked a true neutral setting, and dang, that thing was heavy. I’m not kidding, it’s easier to push my Honda Accord in neutral than it was to push her dead wheelchair.

This process was awkward for me, and fairly mortifying for her. And yet, it’s simply an exaggeration of the sort of thing you see every day. Any single item which has more than one component is guaranteed to have a mis-match in the technology level somewhere along the way. This has always been true, back to the first time someone sharpened a rock, then realized he had no way to attach it to a stick, and had to hold the sharp rock in his hand.

It continued through the printing press, which was developed long before paper became a cheap and easy commodity. And it continues today with my own internet connection, which uses Cingular’s infrastructure to deliver connectivity to my remote Pacific Northwest cabin. This is absolutely fantastic, except for three problems endemic to the current state of cellular transmissions:

1. Since the signal is directional, and easily outfoxed by building materials, there is exactly one (1) place in my cabin where I can set up my laptop. Also, I have to elevate it so that the card’s antenna is above the windowsill. Currently my laptop sits atop a roasting pan, which is atop a cardboard box, which is atop a metal baking rack.

2. If it rains hard, I lose signal.

3. Another quirk of the wireless infrastructure is that each tower can only take a limited amount of traffic. At 12:15PM every day, when the ferry docks in Anacortes, everyone turns on their cellphones to call their loved ones and announce their arrival. Every day at quarter past noon, I get kicked off the tower and usually can’t get back online for at least half an hour.

I can absolutely guarantee that this state of affairs will continue into the future. And yet, everything in science fiction books works like a charm. Nothing ever breaks down or has confusing instructions. I’ve read books where the protagonist has an easier time figuring out how to use something made by goddamned aliens than I’ve had trying to figure out what a button on a toaster is for. (For the record, it said “bagel,” and when you pushed it, a blue light came on. Other than that, nothing happened. Eventually I decided that it was the electronic equivalent of those push-in divots on the lid of a soda cup that say (diet | root beer | other). In other words, that its sole purpose was to indicate that someone had pushed the “bagel” button.)

Any author who doesn’t get this, I have to wonder at their sanity. Actually though, I figure they don’t know a damned thing about technology, probably don’t even have an email account, constantly curse “those kids with their crazy text messagings,” and no doubt take pride in all this.

Ask yourself: is that really the person you want telling you a story about the future?

As if.

* In fact, I’ve staked the majority of my weekend time on it, since I’m working on a science fiction novel. Look upon the slow creep of word count in my sidebar, ye mighty, and despair!

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