You know that problem with getting socks to fit that I blogged about yesterday? The one where the socks come out too long. Well, I thought I had it worked out yesterday, and the gold socks do indeed fit.

Well, I decided to put that understanding into practice and knit another pair of socks, in the type of yarn I use the most (Regia 4-ply). I wanted to have a formula I could just use, instead of figuring out what to do each time.



I did a lot of knitting yesterday and today, and am probably 90% done with the first sock. It fits pretty well, but there's still a bit of excess fabric right at the back of the heel.



It's not bad enough for me to want to rip back, but it's not a perfect fit by any means. I was contemplating using these formulas and pretending my foot is about 1/2" shorter than it is; that would work.

Then I went and looked at the book again. The numbers that I plugged into my spreadsheet came from the part where the book said "You usually wrap one third of the total sole stitches". So, I'd dutifully calculated N/6 (where N, for various reasons is twice the number of sole stitches). But, that's not what the book says. Right there on page 116, it says "You usually wrap a few less than a third of the total sole stitches". See that? A few less. A few less. A few less.

I'm going to have to change the spreadsheet to N/8 or N/9. That will give me a much better fit.

I don't normally get worked up about things that sports figures do; after all, they're entertainers of a sort. But this makes me angry. Let me get this straight. Kwan was injured and couldn't compete in the qualifying tournament for the Olympics. But, she had a special workout designed to prove to US Olympic officials that she was over the injury. She did well enough that she was put on the three-woman team, at the expense of third-place finisher Emily Hughes, younger sister of Salt Lake City golden girl Sarah. Michelle got her Opening Ceremonies and now she's still injured enough that she might have to withdraw from competition. It looks like EH would get her chance, but who knows if she's kept up her training and all the rest.

I've been in aggressive consumer mode lately, with decidedly mixed results. I'm not sure what order to address these experiences in, so I'll start with the bad.

About six weeks ago, I decided that the time had come for me to upgrade to broadband internet service at home. It's not that I do a lot of streaming audio or video, but, more and more, web pages are designed on the assumption that you do have broadband. Ordinary on-line purchasing, with the exception of a few sites like Amazon, involves excruciating waits for unneeded graphics to load, and on-line banking was just out of the question. So, I signed up for Earthlink DSL, which, of course, is mediated by SBC, via Covad. Within a day or two, the Earthlink web site showed that my line was ready and that the DSL modem had shipped. Would that it were so easy. When the DSL modem finally arrived, almost 10 days later, and I set it up, there was no line sync. So I called tech support. It took three phone calls (with mysterious hangups after I'd been on hold) and an ungodly amount of bad music for me to get a tech who was able to determine that my line wasn't pingable. He put in a service call to SBC to check the line, the following Monday. The SBC guy came, on time, and did some fiddling. When I got home from work, I disconnected every single phone device, and connected a single line, in my study, to the DSL modem, with a direct ethernet connection to my iMac. Still no sync. So, another three phone calls to Earthlink resulted in a service call to Covad. The Covad guy decided to come buy a day early (good), so I wasn't home when he was exploring my demarc box (bad). But I did speak to him on the phone, and he claimed that he could sync from outside the house, at the demarc. But, I couldn't, when I got home. So I called Earthlink again, and expressed reservations about the line quality. Before they investigated that further, they wanted to send me a replacement DSL modem, with an RMA for the first one. That arrived the following Monday and (you've heard this song before), it still couldn't sync. So I called Earthlink support yet again, and they arranged for Covad to come by on Thursday. So I stayed home from work, all day. Covad didn't show up. Finally, about 5PM, I called Earthlink, and was told that Covad had determined that my phone line couldn't be provisioned for DSL.

So, fine. I cancelled the service, and was told I should receive an RMA for the DSL modem within about a week and that I wouldn't owe anything; after all, Earthlink had been unable to provide the agreed-upon service. About a week later, I still hadn't received the RMA, so I called yet again (are we sensing a pattern here?) to ask where it was. The CSR assured me that it would be sent. A week after that, I still hadn't received it, so I called again, and was assured that an RMA had been issued, but the date on it made clear that it had only been issued after the previous phone call, and not on the date when I cancelled the service. The CSR told me to be patient. A week later, and I still hadn't received it, so I called again, and a puzzled CSR told me that it should have arrived, but that he'd request a new one. Over the weekend, I got my credit card bill, including a $150+ charge from Earthlink, so I called yet again, and was told to be patient, that an RMA had been issued on August 14 (after the previous call; no indication was given about what had happened to the previous two RMAs). When I got off the phone, I composed two letters, which I haven't yet mailed, one to Earthlink asking why they couldn't get this right, and one to the credit card company indicating that I was disputing the charge.

Today, I received an RMA, postmarked the 14th. On my way to work tomorrow, I'll drop off the box with the RMA at Staples for UPS pickup.

So, I've probably spent 40 hours working on this, what with rearranging phone equipment and network interfaces at home, waiting on hold with Earthlink, staying home from work unnecessarily, and detouring to Staples twice to ship back DSL modems. On top of that, I've spent money. I'm assuming that I'll be credited the various charges to my credit card (but I'm dreading making more phone calls to take care of it!). But, I also had to buy additional DSL line filters, as the three in the Earthlink kit weren't enough. And I had to buy a new kitchen wall phone, because the one that I already had was physically incompatible with the DSL line filters.

So, if this is the bad, the ugly must be really, really, really bad. But the good's pretty good. Since the bad took so much space, I'll put the good and the ugly in separate entries.