Well Kim is out tonight so it seems a perfect time to start a new project :). Here is the yarn I bought when we were down in Plymouth visiting Kim's parents a few weeks ago; I'm excited to use the yarn the pattern actually calls for.

So at work we have a sort of cafeteria with free food and all of the drinks are served in paper cups. While I certainly don't object to free food it does seem that there are hundreds of paper cups thrown away every day when people could be using re-usable mugs. Only increasing the problem is the fact that most of the beverages people drink are hot and as I'm sure you are aware hot drinks make paper cups hot so many people take more than one cup to keep from burning themselves on the way to their desk. All unfortunate but hardly rant worthy.

Last week those little cardboard sleeve things appeared next to the cup dispenser and I thought "well that's nice at least people can stick to just one cup at a time". Only they don't fit! The sleeve only fits about 3/4 of the way onto the cup and then it sticks down past the cup about half an inch. What's the point of that? You can wedge the sleeve onto the cup enough for carrying it but then you can't put it down without risking an paper-cup-hot-coffee-instability accident.

It's rather obvious that I've updated the front end of cleverbit but I thought I would note a few changes that I've made on the back end. I had thought about re-writing some of my php code to be object oriented but that got a bit tedious (and seemed a bit pointless without proper typing) so I decided to give a php framework a try. I researched several frameworks and found that they were either too complicated or too lacking in documentation and I finally settled on symfony. Now that my site is mostly updated I can say that while I have been able to do most of the things I wanted to there have definitely been times when I felt that the symfony documentation was lacking. I would recommend symfony to anyone planning to do standard web/database sorts of things but I would hesitate to recommend it to anyone who wanted to do lots of odd customization especially in the auto-generated back end code because there is too much conflicting information about the different versions and not enough definitive reference documentation. Most of the documentation is in the form of tutorials which are great for getting going, especially when you are doing something parallel to the tutorial author but they can be frustrating to use as reference documents once you've gotten going and just want to look something up quickly.

Having said all of that I'm happily up to date with my MVC architecture and once I understood how to generate the back end application it was much faster than writing my own. I also updated my database a bit, mostly taking out things I never got around to using. I also took out the image tags in my posts (with a script) and replaced them with a custom tag so that I can change where the image links point to without having to modify all the posts.

Here are some tips I've gathered while learning to use symfony:

1. Spend time to properly describe your database tables in the schema.yml file especially foreign keys and join tables, it will make your life much easier when you get to the backend part of the application
2. If you get a routing error check the auto generated links in the templates - they may be trying to create a link to something you've disabled (like edit links in the front end off the app)
3. Name tables in the singular or the variable names will be a bit funny
4. Name the id field in the table "id"

It's done! I did the seaming and washed it and let it dry over night and I'm even wearing it right now. I plan to wear it to work tomorrow so I'll try to get Kim to take a photo of me when I'm not in my pajamas.

I think my guage was about 7 per inch but I don't remember exactly, I'll try to check when i get to the foot part

I cast on (casted on? that sounds wrong) 54 and worked a k1 p1 rib for about an inch and a half

The pattern for the fancy rib is as follows (6 row repeat) note that there are not the same number of stitches at the end of ever round:

1. (k3, p3) around
2. (k3, yo, p3) around
3. (k4, p3) around
4. (k1, k2tog, yo, k1, p3) around
5. (k2tog, k2, p3) around
6. (k1, yo, k2tog, p3) around

I'm making these socks two at a time with only one ball of yarn which can be a bit tricky at times, although I think it will be exciting when they are both done at once

here is a closeup of the rib - it has sort of a fuax-cable but its tough to tell because the yarn is so busy