Crystal Clear

Some time ago, I picked up a chair from the garbage. It was a little ratty, but in good shape. I started to remove all the old covering some time ago (two years at least!), but stopped because I didn’t have the right tools.

I finally found a tool to help me remove all the tacks. What a difference! The cat’s paw turned hours of work into 30 minutes or so, and with little frustration, swearing, or scraped skin.

Now, after buying material and new foam (thanks mom!), the chair is ready to be assembled. Assembly is the easiest part – simply pull tight and staple!

Here is the chair ‘naked’, but ready to begin.

The next step was to do the arms. It is important the order of assembly so that all the stapled edges are covered by other pieces.

The arms were the hardest part. In order to get them tight, I had to use clamps to hold the fabric in place while I stapled. I wish I had about two more hands!

(Click on any of the small images to open a new window with a larger image)

Arms, seat, back, sides, rear, skirt. That’s the order I followed.

One trick I’ve learned is to use lots of cardboard. By cutting thin strips of cardboard and then stapling the cardboard to the fabric, it holds better and doesn’t rip the fabric when pulled, and if that is a folded edge, it provides a straight line for the fabric to follow.

It’s finally done! Not perfect in every way, but I’m happy with it. It does look clean and the rows do line up for the most part. The only sewing was to finish the edges of the bottom flaps. Everything else was a staple gun – easy peasy!

Plus I have the joy of rescuing a piece of garbage. This chair will go in our bedroom as a place to sit and be quiet or to read.

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I like it when things work as they are intended. We rencently set up a Content Management System for a local church. Their system will allow them to have multiple people with access to make changes to their site. We then setup an email address that will forward any emails to it to all the editors’ personal email addresses (small mailing list). So on the web site there is one point of contact, but that goes to all those involved. Whoever decides first to respond to that contact, can then again email all the editors so that there will not be two people doing the same task.

So, I like it when systems work like this. When computers work in the background the facilitate communication. The computer gets used as a tool.

But notice that there are still people involved. The tool cannot do the job on its own. In our highly technical society, I think this is important to remember. People are integral for communication to be meaningful. A computer, a process, even words, only have the meaning given to them by people.

So use computers as tool to aid in communication, but make sure that communication is meaningful to others!

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This writer says it better than I can, so I’m simply copying his text verbatim. For more, read the full article.

…Desktop Linux has matured so well that you could deploy it in a greenfields scenario, i.e, one where there were no computers used previously, and the users would take to it as quickly as they would acclimatise to Windows.

That doesn’t mean that migrating to Linux is a quick or painless process, however. Unfortunately, Windows is an extremely difficult platform to move away from. This has nothing to do with the qualities or inherent capabilities of Linux mind you. Migrating from Windows to the Mac would be about as painful. And the Mac is considered to be the most polished and easiest to use of desktops.

…Due to the reality that Windows ships with so little functional software, you need to acquire an awful lot of software – office suites, graphics suites, calendaring, educational, development, technical, specialist business software and more. With few exceptions, most of that software you buy for your Windows PC is in reality only available on Windows. Certainly, almost all of the Microsoft-published software is only available for Windows. This is an example of Application Programming Interface (API) lock-in. That is, lock-in which occurs when software vendors don’t write portable code, but lock their application development to a single (or small cadre) of operating system platforms and programming libraries.

However, there is software available that is cross platform, most of it from the Open Source community.

OpenOffice.org was designed to be a drop-in replacement for Microsoft Office… Firefox is available on Windows, while Internet Explorer isn’t available on Linux. The Gimp is available on Windows, while none of Microsoft’s graphics apps are offered for Linux. Scribus, an excellent entry-level desktop publishing suite runs on Windows. MS Publisher doesn’t return the compliment for Linux. Apache? MySQL? PostreSQL? Sendmail? All run on Windows as well as on Linux. Microsoft’s IIS, MS SQL Server and Exchange, refuse to consider Linux. Programming languages? There are perhaps 50 open source interpreters and compilers which support Windows – not one of Microsoft’s supports Linux.

While Microsoft goes out of its way to curb your every opportunity to migrate away from Windows, the open source community makes every effort to be platform agnostic and ecumenical, once again, giving you as a user, control.

So now what? Try out some of the excellent open source cross platform programs. Once you are familiar with them, if you want to switch to Linux, you would have no problem using it, plus gaining advantages of security and stability!

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